Prominent Zionist nonprofits are pushing Israel green ad propaganda on Google, soliciting donations for projects at the Gaza border.
While it commits atrocities against Palestinians, Zionist organisations are asking members of the UK public to help Israel cement its annexation – by planting trees.
One of these is headed by a Zionist leader who has called for Israel to hit Gaza:
hard, without mercy and without worrying about world opinion
Meanwhile, a group central to Israel’s history of ethnic cleansing is pumping out more of these ads. Crucially then, it reveals these projects’ instrumental role in Israel’s ongoing annexation and occupation of Palestine.
Israel green ads on Google
In the midst of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Zionist organisations have been pushing out Israel green ad propaganda to UK web users.
In particular, these ask for donations to plant trees in Israel – even while the Zionist state continues its destruction of the Gaza strip. Some ads specifically solicit these donations to plant trees in Israeli settlements on the Gaza border.
The Canary identified at least 22 such ads from three notable Zionist organisations plugging tree-planting programmes. Crucially, these were all ads that the organisations have launched since Israel began its bombardment.
The Jewish National Fund UK (JNF UK), Holy Land Tree, and Israel Trees – otherwise known as Zo Artzeinu – are each running these ads. Many of these are still active at the time of publication.
In one ad on Google, accompanying an image depicting people holding saplings, the text reads:
We Will Plant NEW Trees & Life! Plant A Tree In Israel. Planting is Staring in Nachal Oz on the Gaza Border Next Week. Help us reach out goal.
Another displays a still from a video of multiple Israeli victims from the 7 October Hamas attacks and states:
12,000 Fruit Trees in memory of the 1,200 holy victims.
Google’s Ads Transparency Center shows that the search engine has promoted both these to UK web users within the last week.
Trees for a far-right group intent on Palestine’s destruction
The database shows that Seth Gilbert Sackett registered the ads for Israel Trees. Seth – who also goes by Shmuel – Sackett is co-founder of the Zo Artzeinu hard-right protest group from which the charity takes its name.
As PhD researcher Natasha Roth-Rowland has described, Zo Artzeinu cropped up as a “extra-paramilitary far-right settler group” in response to the Oslo Accords:
As the Oslo Accords progressed, the group—which had a disproportionate number of American members—organized mass civil disobedience actions, including blocking roads, an approach they saw as following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi.
Moreover, she underscored how:
Zo Artzeinu was emblematic of the “old radical right” in Israel giving way to the “new radical right” in response to the Oslo Accords, inasmuch as its politics were even more far right, its willingness to oppose the government even more pronounced, and its attitude toward ceding territory even more hardline
Little wonder then that Sackett has maintained his staunch hard-right ideologies as Israel carries out its onslaught. Notably, Sackett has posted numerous blogs on his personal website since Israel begun its genocide in Gaza. Of course, in these, he isn’t shy about his endorsement of Israel’s siege.
Alarmingly, but perhaps predictably, Sackett’s blog reads like a love letter to the total annihilation of Gaza and Palestine. In one, he calls readers to get behind the teachings of controversial Zionist Rabbis and:
smash the enemy and drive them from our land!!
Following a dissection of Japan’s “unconditional surrender” after the US dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another of his blogs states:
That is how to win a war – by doing whatever it takes to bring the enemy to its knees and having them beg you to stop. You do not win a war with tough talk, empty threats or ridiculous time-outs. You hit your enemy hard, without mercy and without worrying about world opinion… and then you hit them again… and again.
At the same time, his nonprofit has pumped out ads appealing for donations to plant trees on the occupied Palestinian lands bordering Israel’s current bombardment.
Greenwashing its crimes
Meanwhile, from its founding in 1901, the JNF has been a fundamental pillar of Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine. Not only did it play a central role in developing and executing the settler state’s ethnic cleansing agenda leading up to and during the Nakba, it has continued this complicity ever since.
As the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has highlighted:
The JNF-KKL continues to serve as a global fundraiser for Israel’s regime of ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid – with branches and offices around the world. Despite this, many JNF branches worldwide enjoy charitable status – including JNF UK.
Therefore, the organisation has particularly operated as a key cog in the wheel of Israel’s settler colonial project. You can read more on this here.
Significantly, the JNF has flaunted tree planting initiatives as a core part of this. On its website, the organisation boasts of planting 250 million trees across 250,000 acres since its founding.
Unsurprisingly then, JNF has also plastered Google with ads. For instance, in one Google has shown as recently as 10 June, it states:
Jnf UK plant a tree in Israel. Click Here To Find Out More About JNF UK Urban Forests.
Another ad Google last promoted in December is titled:
Plant a Tree in Israel – Put Down Roots in Israel
Environmental “erasure” of Israel’s crimes
As such, Israel has long used afforestation schemes to dispossess Palestinians of their lands and homes.
Ostensibly, these planting schemes also form a broader part of its project to conceal the history of Israel’s violent crimes. In particular, it’s a feature of its deliberate colonial amnesia over the Nakba.
The New Arab has described this process as “erasure through environmentalism” and detailed that:
the JNF initiated its forestation campaign to make Palestine resemble the European nations Zionist settlers arrived from. But after 1948, planting trees became a way to conceal Palestinian history.
What’s more, it explained how:
After the state of Israel was established in 1948, government agencies and non-profit organisations – like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) – began turning depopulated Palestinian villages into green spaces, under the Zionist myth that colonisation was “making the desert bloom”.
In other words, the tree-planting projects prop up the green image that Israel projects to the world stage.
Now, as Israel executes its latest step in its ongoing colonisation, these current tree-planting projects could abet their annexation of Gaza. Given its long past covering up its crimes from the Nakba, there’s also then the possibility that these will help Israel “plant over” its complicity in the events of 7 October.
It will do all of this while these environmental projects help Israel to maintain its steady drip of green propaganda. Naturally, Zionist organisations are turning to the colonial Western communities Israeli settlers originated from to make this happen.
Uprooting Palestinian lives
Ultimately, these tree-planting schemes act as a seemingly innocuous face of the Zionism. However, they are a key tool in its violent settler-colonial project of ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine. While Israel uproots trees, Palestinian lives, and massacres Gazans with impunity, they plant trees over their crimes – and as ever, its morally corrupt backers in the West are helping them do it.
Feature image via IsraelTrees – Youtube
