A True Tree Story

Frankly, I have never given much thought to trees. My acquaintance with trees was no more developed than that of an educated teenager – roots, rings, foliage for some, evergreen for others, edible fruits in some… I know that they turn into furniture, tools, and paper of all kinds, how important they are for absorbing CO2 and other pollutants, and also something about their frightening, excessive extraction in the rain forests. I have always appreciated their presence in the hot seasons in the region where I grew up and lived most of my life. I preferred the evergreen hills of Judea or the Galilee mountains to the more yellowish plains and the dry, dusty deserts. I loved walking along Tel Aviv’s shadowed boulevards. In New England where I live today, I am still fascinated by the manifold of foliage colors in the fall. Trivial knowledge and common preferences.

Some years ago, I read that scientists study communication among trees. The research seemed fascinating. The possibility of trees – those models of standalone creatures – living some kind of communal lives, exchanging messages, collaborating, even caring for each other and for some other creatures felt like good news among so much doomsday prophecy coming from the students of nature. Some scientists who follow underground fungal networks even seem to abandon the entrenched, dominant reductionism of their field. They have started adopting certain forms of rhizomatic, or “assemblagist” thinking, and dared to learn from the wisdom and experience of indigenous peoples’ tree stories.

Even so, the excitement regarding the possibility of talking trees that ensued has not changed my lukewarm interest in trees. I have never believed in the uniqueness of the human mind and have come to appreciate – but also to suspect – the historicity and plasticity of our concepts of intelligence and communication, among others. Can deciphering chemical transmissions be equivalent to listening? Can the new approach to the forest give trees something that is even reminiscent of the intentionality that language ascribes to that which emits signs? I doubt it. We are probably doomed to understand their messages only in terms of their effects, without being able to assign their – i.e., the trees’ – intention or meaning to the signage, or to translate differences of temperature or chemicals’ doses and frequencies back into a tree-langue. Are these differences enough to distinguish between “be cautious, intoxicating invader” and “at long last, we have an upright walking visitor”? Trees, I have told myself in a kind of lazy precaution, communicate perhaps among themselves (and other creatures, like their cousins, the bushes, and organisms like fungi and bacteria), but humans will never be able to properly read or hear them.

I am no longer honest with you. Behind my caution hide delaying tactics. For I know that my mind must have a small drawer for tree memories, a memotrees section, and that sometimes, some real-life trees tell us, humans, real-life stories. They stand there, where one encounters them, upright, fallen or cut into pieces, but always like monuments, silent and talking at the same time, serving as traces and signposts, giving testimony to some bygone human presence, rhizomatic relations, labor, and care. This, you may say, is still our projection, we are interpreting signs, not tree language, and it may be the case wherever humans mingle with trees. But sometimes, I would like to insist, they speak, and we fail to listen. I learnt this in my own convoluted way.

My true-tree story took place in Tel Aviv. I was a child. A tree that was very special for me, generous to me, was anything but mute, but I was deaf in its presence. In fact, I failed to be aware of the storytelling itself, not just to understand the story’s meaning. It was only many years later that I began to grasp its speech act together with the meaning of the speech situation. I am struggling to understand it even now, as I am writing. I was first very fond of this tree, then obsessed with and ashamed by my failure to attend to its story. Ignorant about trees as I am, this obsession and that shameful failure are my only excuses for telling you my true tree story.

Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a new four-story building, which was located very close to the edge of the city’s built-up area at the time. The building stood in an off street and only a few steps away from a relatively large street, with buildings spanning its western side only. A no-man’s land stretched on its eastern side, with a few fenced lots where construction work had just begun. My school was not far away. I was in my third grade and could walk there, alone or with friends, through a zigzag of streets bordering that no-man’s land. I could always cross straight through the unbuilt area but, like the others, preferred not to. That piece of land was unwelcoming. Piles of debris were thrown there in no particular order, pieces of materials I did not recognize, which were too large to play with and unsafe to climb on, blocked anything that looked like a path. As far as I could see, no one crossed this wasteland. Further away to the east, the land was cleared of debris and covered with some grass, some flowers, and, in the summer, a lot of sharp, dry thorns. I was eight years old and did not dare to explore it, tempting as it was. When I did, a few months or years later, as more buildings grew along the main roads, I discovered a very large, round and empty square, at the intersection of two wide roads. This round square became a site for many afternoon adventures, especially after rainy winter days, when small swamps, populated with frogs and dragonflies were a big attraction. In the spring the square hosted the famous, as the adults said, Medrano Circus. The square’s name was The State Square, and properly so, people used to say, for just like the new state, it is half a year swamp, half the year circus.

That landscape, an assemblage of construction sites, rubble, and empty, very muddy, then very dry fields, was devoid of trees. In our neighborhood, the young trees in the buildings’ yards were indistinguishable from small shrubs, and much too short to count. But one day, on my way back from school, I dared to make a short shortcut through the no-man’s land close to our home. Behind the closest construction site, which was not entirely fenced yet, I discovered a few trees that seemed to grow not simply amid the rubble but out of it. They were relatively low and of different kinds. I clearly remember one of them, the one on which I climbed. I remember the risky climb, the wide branch on which I spent some time, and the wide, lush, green leaves. But most of all I remember the delicious sweetness of the fruits, sweeter than anything I had eaten. It was a mulberry tree, and the berries were black and ripe, and they were nobody’s. There was not a soul around, only me and the tree. I knew the tree and the fruits because I had seen a few similar trees when we had lived in Jerusalem, and my father used to bring the berries from the open market once or twice a year during their season. But “mine” were incomparably sweeter. I could not stop eating them. I was the happiest child in the world, not only for the divine taste but because I discovered it all by myself.

Then it occurred to me that my mother must be waiting for me at home. Right away I wanted to share with her my pride and joy – and my berries too. So, I went down, took out my empty lunch bag from my school satchel, climbed up again, and filled the lunch bag along with my stomach, and hurried back home. I think that it was the first time that a clear wish to give a gift to a dear person occurred to me. In school, and even in kindergarten, we used to prepare some artwork for Mother’s Day, but this had never been my idea. Those berries were my first gift giving, driven by my pride and joy, and my desire for sharing those with my mother. As much as I can remember today, she was happy, sincerely happy, and surprised, too. Besides my giving gesture and courageous climbing, she seemed surprised by what I had discovered. She, too, did not know about the small, secret orchard near our home, those few fruit trees that had been hidden behind a construction site and heaps of rubble. Or so it seemed. Encouraged, I returned there a few days later with my little sister, then with a few school friends. The tree was abundant with berries.

By the winter of that year, the construction site had started to swallow the rubble together with the little orchard. A new building started to grow in their place, and I grew with it. I experienced a sharp sense of loss. I really wished we could keep that orchard close to home. For years later, but while still a child, I had a fantasy of having a house one day in the countryside, and that house was always surrounded by green trees and an orchard of fruit trees like the one I had lost. The sense of loss was short lived, however, but the precious memory of that sweet moment lasted. I told it, a true-tree story, many times over, but only to my loved ones – my sister, some intimate friends, and later my children. It was a story of a childish adventure, of love between a child and his mother, and of a unique sweetness. It was also an urban memoire, the story of the eastward expansion of my young city, “the first modern Hebrew city,” as it called itself on many posters and pamphlets.

Then, one day, my story assumed a troubling new meaning. It happened decades later. I learnt that the small orchard had an owner. My awakening was late and slow. I first learnt that it was a Palestinian orchard. Later I understood that the owner probably lived in the village that before the war stood less than a mile away. By that time, I knew enough about the Palestinian Nakba and the revelations made perfect sense. It was an important piece of history of Tel Aviv pre-1948, feeding my growing interest in post-Zionist revisionist history, but it still did not have anything in particular to do with me, or even with my parents. I already knew enough about my father’s wrongdoing; it was only tangential to the war crimes he had witnessed, far from Tel Aviv. My family had moved to Tel Aviv nine years after the war; my parents could not have been complicit in any wrongdoing done in our backyard.

But my mother must have known something about the owner of the mulberry tree. Neither she nor my father ever mentioned those owners. They let me have my gift untainted. My mother’s silence muted “my” tree. Slowly it dawned on me that on that joyful day “my” tree tried to tell me its story, the story of a living survivor and witness to the disaster, which it still was. It must have first offered me its berries then told me it had never been mine, and probably pleaded with me to let its owners come back, all of which I totally missed. I buried it anew every time I told my tree story to my loved ones. Did it try to tell me that the small orchard had been much larger than I knew, and that my childhood home had not stood next to that orchard but already on its ruins? Or that the soil of our building’s yard had swallowed up the dead leaves and cut branches of that orchard’s trees, as well as the last remains from the walls and floors of the small shacks that had used to stand there before?

I was in my mid-forties when I first realized that that mulberry tree had not been planted in a wasteland and that it had not been planted just for me. Curious and critically minded as I thought I was, how could I fail to see this for four long decades? And why, even then, when my tree reappeared – in my mind – with its owner, did I not think about those who had planted it and picked its fruits before me? At the time, a Palestinian orchard in what had since become the heart of Tel Aviv was yet hard to configure, for me. No trace of the people who had tended to that orchard and lived nearby had ever infiltrated my childhood memories. Their erasure from my childhood’s landscape was complete.

The temporal gap between the discovery of the tree and the epiphany of its meaning is hard to measure and difficult to explain. The awakening was obstructed not only by the orchestrated, mainstream, Zionist narratives of 1948, instilled in us in school and at any place and time touched by the civic religion of Zionism. The obstruction started at home, with the legends and lies, which I, and numerous others of my generation, heard from our parents and their friends, the generation of the perpetrators. Born three years after the first waves of Palestinians’ expulsion, in a land that had already been emptied and re-populated, I was oblivious to the meaning of those ruins, let alone to the process. The adults around me were silent; the “Arabs” I met when I became aware of the existence of Palestinians in my world, were few and mostly far away, in the countryside, or in Haifa, where my grandparents lived. They too, who were truly innocent of all wrongdoing, had never told me how their Palestinian neighbors had left one day and never come back.

As a teenager, I lacked the words, mind and curiosity to explore the ruins on which I lived. My high school was a little further away from home, closer to the remains of a village that was clearly marked in old maps of the area, and where some new Mizrahi immigrants lived at the time. The place was known by its Hebraized Arabic name, Jamusin (originally Jamasin), but the Arabs, we all knew to tell, had “escaped” during “the War of Independence” in ’48, because they did not want to live alongside Jews in the young Jewish State, which they hoped to destroy soon. We heard this story repeatedly, almost like a Passover Haggadah. It was always told in general terms, in wide brush strokes. The people who left were mentioned not as part of history but as part of nature. Like the winter swamp that disappeared every spring, those people, who once planted fruit trees that I could have seen from my window, disappeared with the coming of the Jews. Spontaneously and naturally. And even when, during my military service, I came back home for vacations and was fully aware of the military rule in the occupied territories, the remains of a Palestinian world in pre-’48 Israel were carefully kept as belonging to a different realm, a piece of nature more than history, which could, at best, be relocated to the archaeology department.

My living memory of the generous mulberry tree did not belong there. My belated understanding of the Nakba was quite abstract at first. By the time I could grasp it more concretely and tried to reconcile what I had learnt with my childhood memories, my neighborhood’s landscape had long been reconfigured, and Tel Aviv of the early 1960s had already been transformed. Then, while the remains were slowly relocated from nature to history and the orchard near our house received a new meaning, I still failed to understand what “my mulberry” tried to tell me. It took more years to realize that “the white city,” as it is still often called, the city that “grew out of the sands,” as it is often described, is tainted with the blood and tears of those who had been uprooted to make way for the relatively peaceful upbringing of children like me.

Slow was also the process of ruination of pre-’48 Palestine, but incomparably more systematic and persistent than my slow awakening. Ruination had started during the war, a decade before my encounter with the mulberry tree, and was crawling from site to site across the country, from the sea to the river, and, in fact, has never ceased since. It had affected every Palestinian, those who had been forced to leave as well as those who had been spared and stayed. And it was systematically covered with trees. Millions of trees. Those pines and eucalyptuses were now planted to form a patchwork of small forests and state parks across the country. They all took part in a coverup project of forestation that was orchestrated and executed for decades after 1948 by the Jewish National Fund.1 They suffocated the natural habitat, after much of the built materials were reused in the construction of new Jewish settlements. The rest were buried under dry, thorny pine needles.

Weren’t these trees complicit in the coverup, then? Perhaps, but no more than those who planted them or funded their planting. And unlike the latter, till this day, in their thorny silence, they also tell the story of Palestine’s ruination. They testify by their very presence, by their location and dispersion, by the hidden paths that sneak and cut beneath and through their branches. If you are ready to listen, you may hear what they are telling us as they embrace a hill, redrawing its contours, kiss a ruined stone structure, make way for a winter stream, or let the evening breeze use their needles as strings to play its melancholic melody.