Agencies-Gaza post
The Israeli administration plans to resume a contentious initiative to plant trees near Palestinian communities in the Negev desert.
Broadcaster Kan, Minister of Housing and Construction, Zeev Elkin, a member of the New Hope party in the Knesset, claimed that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) forestation program would resume “soon.”
The Negev, Israel’s largest and southernmost area, is home to almost 300,000 Palestinian Israeli residents.
Hundreds of people demonstrated against the JNF forestation plan in December and January, claiming it was a pretext for evicting them from their farms to make way for new Jewish settlements. Following the predicted collapse of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s cabinet in January, the proposal was temporarily placed on hold.
Raam, an Islamist party that is part of the ruling coalition and has a strong electoral base in the Negev, has threatened to vote against Bennett’s government in any future votes on the project.
The Likud and the far-right Religious Israeli group, both pro-settlement parties in the Knesset, had backed the JNF’s idea. Elkin was a Likud member who defected in December 2020 to join New Hope, which was founded by Gideon Saar, another Likud defector. In December and January, Israeli police and JNF workers bulldozed fields belonging to Palestinian Israeli citizens in the region of al-Naqe and al-Atrash villages as part of the forestation plan.
Israel said last week that it planned to establish two new Jewish communities in the Negev desert as part of a settlement expansion plan near Palestinian settlements.
The settlement would be built on the boundaries of the Palestinian village of Kasifa and the Palestinian-majority town of Tel Arad, and would contain between 100,000 and 125,000 Israelis.
