Palestinian community activist Maha Qupty notes that in the first three years of the Green Patrol's operations, the number of black goats was slashed by 60 percent, from 220,000 to 80,000. The patrol's practices were so brutal that an official watchdog, the State Comptroller, censured the unit in his 1980 report.
The number of goats in Israel has fallen much further in recent years. A report in the Haaretz newspaper noted that by 2013 there were only 2,000 goats still grazing in and around the vast Carmel forest, next to Haifa, down from 15,000 before the Green Patrol's establishment.
And it was in that same Carmel Ridge that the danger posed by the goats' enforced disappearance first became apparent.
The extensive forest hugging the slopes of the Carmel Ridge was planted to enforce and conceal the expulsion of several Palestinian villages. But in 2010 the forest was engulfed in flames that ultimately claimed the lives of 44 people. The majority were warders travelling to Damun prison, where Palestinian political prisoners are held outside the occupied territories in violation of international law.
The fire, which raged for four days, required the evacuation of 17,000 people from their homes, including from sections of Haifa.
That blaze was a prelude to much more widespread fires a year ago, at the end of a long dry summer. Some 1,700 fires were reported across Israel and the West Bank, many of them in the forests Israel had planted over the destroyed villages. Haifa was again badly damaged.
Zionism's self-inflicted woundsIn both the 2010 and 2016 forest fire outbreaks, Palestinian citizens were accused by police and government officials of being responsible, despite a dearth of evidence -- and convictions -- to back up such claims.
Allegations of arson were a useful deflection from the reality: that the fires were a Zionist own goal. The danger posed by planting unsuitable European pine forests in the arid conditions of the Middle East had been aggravated by longer summers, as climate change kicked in, and by the destruction of the black goats. They had cleared the vegetation around the trees that prevented the fires from quickly spreading.
In fact, there had been warnings that these pine forests were a fire hazard long before the advent of significant climate change. Nearly 20 years ago, I visited a kibbutz on the edge of the Carmel Ridge where there had been a recent fire.
Nir Etzion sits on the agricultural lands of Ayn Hawd, which was a rare example of a Palestinian village that had escaped destruction -- in its case, to be reinvented as a Jewish artists' colony under a similar name, Ein Hod.
The staff at Nir Etzion told me a familiar and paranoid tale: that internal Palestinian refugees, living close by, had started the fire to drive them from their kibbutz. The kibbutzniks overlooked the fact that the refugees themselves were put in much graver danger by the fire.
As I recounted in my contribution to a book of essays, Catastrophe Remembered, experts were clear even then that the European pine forests on the Carmel Ridge were dangerous in the region's dry conditions.
"Repair historic injustice"But until this month, the dreams of the Zionist movement -- of disappearing all traces of a Palestine that existed before Israel's creation -- had proved far more potent than the danger of forest fires.
Paradoxically, it has taken Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, to pry his colleagues from their delusions and face up to the reality of climate change.
Zahalka is the moving force behind the effort to repeal the 1950 law, justifying its revocation on a study by a good Zionist institution -- the Technion, Israel's renowned technical university. Its research has confirmed a wisdom that was obvious to generations of Palestinian farmers: that the goats graze on dry bushes and shrubs, and thereby suppress the risk of fires.
Zahalka has stated that the repeal of the 1950 law will "restore the goat's lost honor" and "repair a historic injustice" for Palestinian farmers.
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