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The developer of Rawabi, a new Palestinian city being built in the West Bank, said he will remove some 3,000 trees donated by the Jewish National Fund and replace them with indigenous olive trees, Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported Tuesday.
Bashar al-Masri said that the city's identity is meant to be Palestinian and that Israeli elements are trying "to manipulate the issue," according to the report.
desertdudeshj wrote:Is there any place left on the west bank to build a new city ? Or is it just another one of those, let the palestenians build a city and then just move in. Saves the land grabbers a whole lotta work.
The JNF has been criticized for planting non-native pine trees which are unsuited to the climate, rather than local species such as olive trees.[24] Others say that JNF deserves credit for this decision, and the forests would not have survived otherwise.[25] According to JNF statistics, six out of every 10 saplings planted at a JNF site in Jerusalem do not survive, although the survival rate for planting sites outside Jerusalem is much higher - close to 95 percent. The Israeli newspaper Maariv claimed that workers remove saplings daily to allow more tourists to plant the following day, but the JNF denied this and said it would sue the paper for libel.[26]
The problem is this: "Go Neutral" isn't neutral: many of the forests that Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (KKL-JNF in Israel) has planted are unsustainable single-species plantations, providing little habitat for native plants or animals, and no meaningful offset for your carbon footprint. Even in the best forest, one tree takes 70 years to absorb a ton of carbon according to JNF – but it only takes each of us a year to release 20 or more tons. In the monoculture forests that carbon goes back into the atmosphere much sooner, as other trees die off without reseeding themselves. And there's no way to make sure your money goes to the best forests for the earth: KKL has not yet responded to our request to find out which forests are sustainable and self-seeding.