Iris haynei – the national flower of Palestine
Benjamin Gready writes from Bethlehem, where collecting seeds, documenting species, and doing ecological fieldwork is an act of resistance for the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability. As the violence of Israeli settlements expands in the West Bank, Palestinians defy colonial erasure by building ecological knowledge.
A hot breeze brushes my face as I squint out towards the Bethlehem skyline. Stretching shadows begin to be cast against the waning mid-afternoon sun. We have just finished eating a lunch of leftover stuffed vine leaves and “Arab salad”, the clinking of wielded cutlery finally giving way to a momentary digestive hush.
But politics is never far from the surface, poised to puncture the contemplative silence. “Did you hear about my rousing speech?”, Professor Mazin asked, as we sit in the dappled shade of the slate-tiled courtyard, “at the staff meeting, a motivational talk, like a sports coach!” I had been too busy on the phone home to Australia and had missed the meeting. But word travels like lightning in a small organisation and I heard from others that he had delivered a stirring monologue to the staff at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS).
“What about?” I feigned ignorance. “Four times this week I was asked the same thing: What happens if the Israelis permanently lock us in here in Bethlehem, entirely confine us to a ghetto? Where we can’t move anywhere else in the West Bank, can’t do fieldwork. What do we do? What happens with the institute?” A pertinent, reverberating question that belies acute anxieties. A reflection of deep fears which extend far beyond the workplace, crashing into the fabric of everyday lives.
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PIBS is many things. A team of dedicated staff and volunteers. A sprawling park, arboretum, olive grove, community garden and ornithological menagerie. A repository of tools, books, biological specimens, data and knowledge. A travelling trailer of natural history that visits schools and communities across the West Bank. The main building is a four-story warren of offices, volunteer quarters, lavatories and laboratories. All contained on a rugged but productive Bethlehem limestone hillside totalling twelve dunams in the Ottoman measure (or 1.2 Hectares for the metric minded).
At the top of the block sits the as yet unopened Palestine Museum of Natural History. Its newly installed vertical grey windows and elevated balconies offering a view over Beit Sahour and beyond to Jordan on the horizon, at sunset lit in glorious hazy shades of pink and lavender. Inside, the museum is beginning to take shape. Touchscreens and tablets lie aside taxidermised fauna. Boxes of “pinned” insects next to fossils, photo boards and farm implements. There is method in the apparent chaos. As the arrangements of objects and narratives take shape something bigger emerges.
Once open the museum will tell the story of Palestine, of its plants and animals but also of the inextricable links between people and place. A site to spark both curiosity and defiance: about this place and its unique cultural and biogeographical features, and about settler colonialism, occupation and genocide too. At its heart the purpose of PIBS and the museum is fundamentally pedagogical: to generate knowledge and to share it, in turn helping to construct sustainable human and natural communities. It is a resource with which to teach the story of place, to explore and to facilitate joy and discovery despite the feeling that, literally and figuratively, the walls are closing in.
PIBS builds on an immovable foundation of scholarship and struggle. I sit in the top floor library, upskilling for one of my many volunteer tasks. Books, scrawled notes and pistachio shells strewn across the desk. As I scan the shelves, anglophone political writings by Edward Said, Ilan Pappe and the Institute’s own Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh lean to one side, Field Guide to the Soaring Birds of Lebanon among a raft of local and regional ecological publications to the right. A wall of Arabic language journals and monologues stand at my back and the “Disappearing Palestine” maps on the wall peer down to remind us what is at stake. The monumental tome, Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains catches the eye whenever my glance passes towards the kitchen door. Its heft a towering presence in the telling of the modern Palestinian story and the geography of the bookshelf.
Khalidi and his co-researchers’ 1992 book is an unparalleled piece of cultural memory, documenting in meticulous detail 418 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba in 1948. For each place there are sections to show important information about the village before 1948, as well as details of its depopulation, and settlement activity on the site. Much is drawn from archival deep diving but field research was key. Remarkably, for each place is an entry, “The Village Today”, with in-person site visits by researchers confirming and photographing the remains of the village: old fruit trees, new settlement constructions, appropriated buildings, parks and picnic areas amongst the ruins. The work is an archive that we can return to again and again and it situates today in the trajectory of past struggles. But unfortunately we need not only look in the rear-view mirror to see such expulsion, land theft, genocide. Here, it is not just a thing of history books.
Settler colonial expansion and displacement is still very concretely a going concern in this part of the world. It is an ever-present shifting reality, the constantly moving goalposts, the lines drawn and redrawn on a map becoming the lived geographies of loss and containment. Gates and walls appear, homes are demolished, settler violence makes farms unreachable. These places, like the villages of 1948, are unique and irreplaceable assemblages of people, culture, knowledge, and biodiversity which are still vanishing into the colonial void. Like everyone else here, the staff at PIBS understand this perfectly well. Their monologue-prompting questions to Professor Mazin about the future of the Institute, about the further containment of their work, makes clear the deep affront to normal life that Zionist settler colonialism entails.
For now, in the context of such asymmetrical domination as this occupation imposes, people struggle as they can with the tools they have at hand. Like the ground-truthing investigators who worked on All That Remains, field research is one such tool in the arsenal of PIBS. Fieldwork connects and reconnects, generating invaluable place-based knowledge whose threads, when shared, loop back out into the world, returning to weave together people and place.
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Over breakfast of bread, eggs, labneh, zaatar and yellow cantaloupe, I am told a plan is afoot. The botanist from Nablus is visiting and I detect a sense of urgency. In half an hour we are going for a drive to a nearby valley to photograph plants and collect some seeds and insect specimens. Though the breakfast table conversation is mostly in Arabic, I catch enough to understand that the feeling is this might be the last chance to visit the site. Perhaps ever. We cram into the old Ute, winding our way for three kilometres up the narrow hilly streets of Bayt Jala, cresting and then descending over the giant grey and black puncture wound that is the route 60 tunnel, Jerusalem to Hebron. We are now in area C, the 61 percent of the occupied West Bank under full Israeli administration and military control. An area which, according to the 1993 Oslo Accords was intended to be gradually transferred into Palestinian jurisdiction but never was.
A narrow road then takes us down through terraced olives and wild pear trees, buildings parting to reveal a green valley framing a vista of Jerusalem high-rise. We are in the Cremisan valley, a rare block of greenspace accessible to Palestinians of the greater Bethlehem area. It is a biodiversity hotspot, shady, inviting. A modest Catholic monastery and winery nestle mid slope, the only buildings on this aspect of the otherwise wooded hillside. It is a place to walk, to sit, to ponder, to breathe.
As I exit the car I catch a kestrel diving, its silhouette slicing the skyline and descending towards some unsuspecting prey in the valley floor. I trace its trajectory across a sundrenched background of blue, then green, then… then the pale oranges and off-whites of newly exposed soil and limestone? The raptor careens from view and my focus snaps to these fresh scars in the middle distance. Squinting through the foliage reveals tiers of terraforming, the outline of large yellow machinery and, probably, the reason for the urgency of our visit. I am looking at an expanding settlement edge, where farm and forest are making way for apartments in this unrestrained building bonanza.
This is the illegal settlement of Gilo which, despite sitting inside the West Bank functions as an outer suburb of Israeli controlled West Jerusalem. It is part of the so-called Jerusalem Envelope, a swathe of Palestinian territory now claimed by Israel for settlement, recreation and “security”. Most of it chopped and severed from the rest of the West Bank by checkpoints, locked gates and the wall, a twisting barrier of bitumen, cage and concrete. As I peer across the valley a machine gun like thwack of jackhammer on stone carries to my ears and I spot a bulldozer pushing rubble down the Cremisan slope. I awaken to the fact I am observing the material, geographic metastasising of displacement and settler colonialism in real time. I sense an existential weight descending from my shoulders and my hand begins to tremor. It is happening right there, and I suddenly feel utterly helpless.
I take a deep breath and begin to trudge up the slope. I am following the botanist who seems to know what he wants and where to find it. The others collect seed and foliage samples while I try to be useful by snapping away on the camera. Some frames are of botanical interest, some artistic. But most are simple happy snaps of ecologists being ecologists, grinning and getting their hands dirty in the field like this could be anywhere. As we walk and work, we talk, and soon enough politics intervenes. The source of the urgency becomes more apparent in these informal conversations.
Cremisan will any day now be off limits. The Israelis want it exclusively and so all Palestinians must go. This is circulating as a rumour, the source of information opaque yet universally understood. Tomorrow, next week, in a month. Nothing definitive except the trajectory within which the rumour exists, this tide of theft and annexation whereby the closure of the valley to Palestinians seems the foregone conclusion. People seem to just know what comes next. Apparently, that is new gates. They are popping up all over the West Bank, especially since the war. At a day-to-day level, many of them open and shut by some infuriatingly unpredictable and stifling logic.
For Palestinians, plans can never be set in stone, and the gates are an ever-present reminder of who is really in control. In the case of Cremisan it appears it will be a total lock-out. On good authority it seems to be known that the monastic Salesian priests who live and make wine in the valley have been told that soon they must deny entry to visitors and the Palestinian workers who service the monastery and winery. Effectively making them begrudging unpaid contractors in an outsourcing of the gate-logic. God’s servants in the nave and pulpit, but the Israeli Government’s servants at the gatehouse.
The people for whom the lockout is perhaps most acutely felt is the people from the village of al Walaja. The western side of the Cremisan valley transitions by loose green patchwork into the outskirts of the village, the valley making up part of their traditional lands. At least it did until the wall was built. This grating structure of steel mesh, beam and cable festooned with razor wire snakes along the village fringe.
An ancient olive tree, perhaps over one thousand years old sits at the foot of al Walaja, metres from the structure. It has seen the Ottoman Empire and British mandate come and go, and it lives on, defiantly fruiting in the shadow of current turmoil. Unlike its more familiar urban concrete-and-watchtower version, the wire mesh construction of the apartheid wall here allows the villagers to peer through to the valley beyond. Cremisan is right there, you can see it, hear its birds call, smell its breeze, watch the settlement grow on the opposing ridge. But what should be a minute’s stroll down to shady groves and thickets is now a circuitous drive up and around another fortified illegal hilltop settlement called Har Gilo. The looming closure rules even this route out, cementing their exclusion from the last substantial piece of the village lands.
Gut wrenchingly, this isn’t the first time the residents of al Walaja have been displaced. All That Remains tells us that the village originally sat on the next hillside, across the valley and up from the old olive tree. Depopulated in 1948, it is now a picnic area, a picture showing Israeli hikers relaxing in the village ruins.
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Back at PIBS I again ponder the staff’s concerns about the future of the Institute and thumb through the pages of Walid Khalidi’s book. Its meticulous and systematic archiving an anchoring force of reference points and collective memory. It is an accessible repository of history but importantly, it draws the reader back to conditions today. It is not a eulogy but a re-grounding. 33 years have passed since it was written and the occupation is worse than ever. Fears of displacement, depopulation and containment remain visceral as the PIBS staff well know. Genocide goes on unabated. Things are bleak. But if these acts of data collection, archiving and knowledge sharing can help form the solid ground on which future struggles are fought then the work of PIBS is itself an immovable slab of stone.
The documentation and defence of that which may disappear is still a pressing concern. Our field trips collecting photographs, plant seeds and insects are minor acts that can’t bring back what was, nor protect what may well yet be taken. But these gestures accumulate, helping take away from the coloniser the erasure that is so integral to their warped sense of place. It weakens the colonial foundation, playing a long game against seemingly overwhelming force. It reminds us of what remains. In the long run history often moves in swings and roundabouts and what remains can return if it is struggled for.
Amid the infuriatingly hollow wave of performative PR at Institutions in the Global North referencing “justice” and “decolonising the museum”, here the institution actually does anti-colonial work.
This is the pedagogical subtext of PIBS. Amid the infuriatingly hollow wave of performative PR at Institutions in the Global North referencing “justice” and “decolonising the museum”, here the institution actually does anti-colonial work. Connecting people to place in defiance of what has been stolen. Enriching people’s lives with knowledge, experiences and attachments that the coloniser wants to deny them. And sustainability. Not as the perpetual maintenance of an obviously untenable present but as anti-colonial action in the here and now: defying colonial systems of control and environmental destruction whilst giving coming generations the tools to know and to remember and to struggle and to live on, better.
In the short term things may get worse. Cremisan may be a memory, or a fragmented mirage seen only through the gridlock partition of the wire mesh. The growing matrix of gates and checkpoints may further ghettoise the West Bank, locking people into their immediate surrounds. So, what of the new Museum and PIBS in this case? I am drawn back to Professor Mazin’s meeting monologue addressing staff concerns about where the occupation is headed and what this means for PIBS. The various retellings I receive are clear: despite pessimism, resoluteness. There is a plan:
“We keep going! We work with the considerable amount of data we have already collected. More importantly, there are 100,000 people in the Bethlehem area, a large proportion of them children who won’t know the world out there, won’t get to experience these places and nature as we have. The Institute, this garden, this museum, the people can come to us. For them, this will be an oasis where they can learn and connect and experience the world”.
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Benjamin Gready is a Naarm-based writer and scholar-activist whose focus is on the messy intersections of the social and the ecological. He is currently collaborating with the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability in Bethlehem.
Feature image: Iris haynei – the national flower of Palestine, courtesy of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS).