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In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
– Marwan Makhoul
2. Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
– Noor Hindi
Where is the place of “nature poetry” in times of war, massacre, genocide? Can one still write of birdsong, of flowers, or the beauty of the moon while facing tanks and warplanes? The words of Palestinian poets, Marwan Makhoul and Noor Hindi, drive home the impossibility of this, even as they express a longing for a time that would allow them such freedom to escape politics.
Yet, contested land, nature, and ecology have always been at the heart of the politics around Israel-Palestine. From very early on, Israeli-Zionist claims to the land have been closely tied to the ‘green colonial’ narrative of ‘making the desert bloom’ and so restoring the Palestinian landscape to a mythic original state of biblical splendour. An afforestation programme to plant various varieties of primarily non-native coniferous trees — often in areas that had previously been used by Palestinian pastoralists and farmers — was, in fact, a key function of the Jewish National Fund set up in 1901 to lay the foundations of Israel. In his book, Landscape and Memory, British Zionist historian, Simon Schama, describes the pine trees planted to transform the indigenous vegetation of Palestine as “proxy immigrants” for Jewish people in the nation-building project of Israel.
Palestinian resilience and resistance to Israeli occupation has also time and again been rooted in and expressed through their relationship and shared history with the land and its ecology. The olive tree holds deep cultural as well economic significance to Palestinians. Slow to grow and capable of living for a couple thousand years, some olive trees have been cared for and harvested by several generations of Palestinian families. It is also a recurring motif in Palestinian poetry and powerful symbol of their connection to the land. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), who is regarded as Palestine’s national poet, describes the uprooting of an olive tree by Israeli soldiers — a violence that continues to be common today — in his poem, The Second Olive Tree:
These soldiers, these modern soldiers
Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage
Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,
Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky
The pain of this loss is piercingly invoked by Darwish’s reference to the olive tree as “our grandmother”. He traces the lineage of his people and their rightful belonging to the land through this ancestral bond of kinship to the olive tree who is rooted in the earth. The pain of the tree’s uprooting is twofold; the uprooting and ecological displacement of the olive tree is also synonymous with and an extension of the collective experience of Palestinian communities displaced by Israeli occupation.
For Darwish, the olive tree was not only connected to the displacement, but also a symbol of Palestinian resilience and resistance. The second olive tree referred to in the title of the poem is a martyred Palestinian buried in “the grandmother’s cradle”, the pit of the uprooted olive. The poem ends with the lines “And that is why we were / Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive / Tree — a thorny olive tree — and green!” In another poem, titled The Earth is Closing on Us, Darwish writes “We will die here, here in the last passage. /Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.” In both poems, the deep connection between the body and the land is expressed, even in death, to seed renewing and persistent life. Mosab Abu Toha, a 32-year-old poet from Gaza who was forced to flee his home in November 2023, echoes this sentiment of Darwish in his 2022 poem called A Litany for “One Land” after Audre Lorde:
And when we die,
our bones will continue to grow,
to reach and intertwine with the roots of the olive
and orange trees, to bathe in the sweet Yaffa sea.
One day, we will be born again when you’re not there.
Because this land knows us. She is our mother.
Toha’s powerful image of bones intertwined with roots of Palestinian trees reiterates the inseparable relationship of Palestinians with the land that has sustained them for centuries. For Toha, the land also recognizes this kinship and shared resilience with the Palestinian people.
For Suheir Hammad, a poet born in 1973 to Palestinian refugee parents in Jordan and raised in the United States, the theme of connection to land is also refracted through the collective memory and longing of Palestinian refugee diaspora. In her poem dedication, from her 1996 collection Born, Palestinian, Born Black, she describes a Palestinian refugee overlooking the mountains and seas of Jordan to view from a distance, “the land of figs and olive trees / what should have been his phalasteen”.
his love for phalasteen so fierce
he could have swam there
so light so heavy with longing
he could have flown there
swore he could smell the ripe olives
Hammad poignantly evokes the anguish of separation and exile from Palestine, while also affirming the refugee’s continuing bond with the land through his fierce love for and painfully vivid sensual memory of the place.
In her poem, the givers, from the collection ZaatarDiva, Hammad searches for the history of Palestinian people in “neon light, billboards / splayed on chests”, but finds their stories embedded instead in the landscape of Palestine:
under every stone a myth
behind every branch a prophecy
trees here bear fruit as
sisters bear life
as duty and beauty both
giving and rooted
trees here stand, roots
apart, branches on trunks
necks turned to god
and say, girl where
you been what you
bring, drink some tea
we got stories to tell you
For Hammad, every stone, tree, and fruit in Palestine bear the stories and memories of her people, as the land continues to keep the living histories of the community. Hammad imagines a communion of sisterhood with nature, as the trees invite her to share their stories, share her stories, share the common stories of the people and trees of Palestine.
Israeli environmental narratives of reviving a ‘degraded’ Palestinian landscape to its past biblical glory, through plantation drives and the creation of enclosed national parks, have aimed to erase and delegitimise Palestinian presence on the land. According to Palestinian scholar Ghada Sasa, the majority of nature reserves established by Israel have been used as a tactical strategy for land grab in territories still inhabited by Palestinians. Through poetry and through the care of olive, fig, and orange orchards, Palestinian people have always fought back against this erasure to assert their indigenous identity and relationship with the living ecologies of the landscape.