Undaunted, Sherman connects with Alon Rothschild, the Biodiversity Policy Manager at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. Pointing to a tract of land, Rothschild asks, "Should we have trees here? Why? These are the last grassland hills in the area. Why do you need another pine forest?"
Things get heated when a JNF employee comes along and enters the conversation. Sherman laments, "Maybe this could be my tree." The representative plays straight man to Sherman stating flatly, "I would not like to comment on it right now." (Another scheduled conversation was halted on the spot when the JNF spokesperson determined that Sherman was there to "politicize trees.") It feels like dialogue from the theatre of the absurd.
By the time Sherman visits his cousin, who has made Aliyah to Israel, the tenuousness of the situation rises to the surface. She talks about how the country has gone downhill, using the word apartheid.
This is a foreshadowing of Sherman's conversation with Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, founder of Zochrot and co-founder of the De-Colonizer. Aparicio wants to deconstruct Israeli mythology and bring attention to the Nakba, the Palestinian word for their "catastrophe" of 1948.
Aparicio tells Sherman about three decimated Arab villages: Beit Nuba, Yalu, and Imwas. "These villages were totally destroyed. People were expelled. It was bulldozed and dynamited." He adds, "An occupying army is not allowed to expel a population, destroy homes, or prevent people from return. All this are war crimes. Definitely, yes."
At one site, the signs in Hebrew label the area as Roman ruins. Aparicio shakes his head. "That's not a Roman bathhouse," he says, pointing to the structure. "It has a dome. That's not Roman. It's a Muslim style of architecture." He explains that an Israeli archeologist had excavated the Roman remains underneath the edifice they are seeing.
The archeologist bypassed the Palestinian narrative by focusing on the subterranean Roman artifacts. To document his point, Aparicio shows Sherman a 1958 photograph of the dwelling with the main road leading to Ramallah. Aparicio underscores, "This is the way to deny Palestinian history here."
Sherman is at a turning point. He questions, "What if my tree is sitting on the remains of a Palestinian village?" If it is, does the next step entail a question about the "morality" of the Jewish state's establishment?
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