Exclusion Through Nature

Today the Jewish National Fund manages forested areas, and the INPA administers national parks and nature reserves – including those within East Jerusalem and the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.

“National parks are part of this whole philosophy to maximise the area of land to be confiscated from the Palestinians and prevent them from using it,” says Dr Rami Nasrallah, an honorary associate professor at the University College London’s Bartlett Development Planning Unit.

Once land is categorised as a protected reserve, local Palestinian communities are prohibited from building, grazing their sheep and any form of farming without special permissions.

“There is no relation between environmental value and declaring an area a nature reserve,” adds Nasrallah. “It’s a tool for annexation.”

The INPA classifies a nature reserve as “an area in which animals, vegetation, abiotic objects, soil, caves, water or landscape, which are of scientific or educational interest, are preserved without undesirable changes,” and a national park as “an area serving or designated to serve for the countryside recreation of the public or for the preservation of values that are of historical, archeological, architectural, natural or landscape importance and the like.”

A paper coauthored by Qumsiyeh found that over 22 nature reserves in the West Bank do not meet ecological criteria for protection, concluding their designation was due to political and ideological reasons. In other examples, areas are considered ecologically important by scientists, but restrictions are enforced unequally.

Qumsiyeh points to the example of Wadi Qana in the northern West Bank. The area was designated a nature reserve in 1983, preventing Palestinians in neighbouring villages from farming or planting citrus trees. An unauthorised Israeli settler outpost was later constructed within the national park – illegal under Israeli law – before the park’s boundaries were redrawn in 2014 to exclude the settlement’s lands, while its untreated sewage was dumped in Wadi Qana.

In 2022, INPA publicly stated, “According to Israeli law, declaration of any land as a National Park does not change its ownership status, as all private lands within a National Park remain in their owner’s possession.”

WIRED Middle East contacted INPA for comment on its criteria for declaring a national park or nature reserve, including the redrawing of the Wadi Qana boundaries, but did not receive a response.