In 1947, the British Government in Mandate Palestine planted the last area of forests in the country in the sand dunes of the Gaza District before their departure from the territory. The place was Khan Yunis, in the southern half of the district. The dunes had been formed over the millennium from sand drifts originating in Egypt and other parts of North Africa, carried and deposited by the prevailing winds and the powerful coastal Mediterranean currents.
At the time, there was much controversy about British sand-dune fixation schemes. In keeping with the ecological and conservationist concepts of the 1930s and 1940s, these forests were aimed primarily at stabilizing the dunes that encroached on towns, villages and farmland. The forests were also to help bring large areas under cultivation. This led to accusations against the British of preparing the land to transfer it to the Jewish sector. So as to inhibit the fixation schemes, the Arabs made a large number of land claims for the dune areas, and illegal plantings to establish land ownership became widespread. Disputes were often bitter and dragged on for years in the courts, sometimes accompanied by demonstrations, sabotage and violence.
Most of the forest plantations in Gaza did not survive the massive upheavals that followed the British departure and outbreak of the Israel War of Independence in 1948. The Egyptians captured the Gaza Strip during the war and set up the “All-Palestine Protectorate” under Egyptian control, which lasted until 1959. The Gaza Strip received 79,947 refugees in 1948 from the former mandated territory and quickly developed into a center for terrorist attacks on the nascent Jewish state. Traversed by the Egyptian Army and then during the Suez War of 1956 by the Israeli Army, the Gaza Strip was eventually placed under Egyptian military occupation in 1959.
After Israel’s capture of the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967, the territory underwent significant intensive agricultural development with the later introduction of technologically advanced greenhouses for the mass production of the highest quality fruits and vegetables, which were mainly grown for export. This was closely tied in with dune-stabilization schemes. In 2005, the Israelis completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The greenhouses, agricultural fields with networks of irrigation pipes and the dune plantings were deliberately left intact in the expectation that the sand dunes of Gaza would continue to flourish and the people with them.
However, the years following the Israeli withdrawal and rapid takeover of Gaza by Hamas witnessed the destruction of many of the greenhouses, while irrigation pipes were sawn up for rockets that were rained down on the Israelis. Fire balloons and fire kites were drifted across the border, terrorizing the population and setting fire to fields and forests in southern Israel.
The narrative had already been established of the Gaza Strip resembling an “open-air prison” and a “concentration camp.” This was a background montage of the 1990s Oslo peace talks and was eagerly subsumed by exponentially increasing numbers of academics in publications that were churned out, feeding and feeding off political, media and activist sectors that used the same terminology.
With the advent of social media, shameless online boasting by privileged Gaza residents indicated that a rich strata of life was booming in the Gaza Strip under Hamas. Men filmed their gold watches, gold-plated iPhones and other gold possessions. They posted videos of their luxury cars and of their properties, replete with gardens and swimming pools. Indeed, Airbnb regularly advertised well-decorated and spacious rooms and apartments to let in the Gaza Strip. In some ways, this crass display of wealth is in fact an echo of what Gaza could have been.
Instead, the concrete was sunk into the sand dunes of Gaza, and fire balloons and fire kites were sent into Israel, along with all the concomitant dangers of polluting the water and air of the Gaza Strip itself. The largest network of underground tunnels in the world was built in Gaza with entry shafts in homes, schools, mosques, clinics and hospitals, using thousands of people—many of them children—as underpaid, forced or slave labor. Millions of tons of sand and soil were excavated and placed elsewhere (where?); vast quantities of cement, water and electricity were used up to make concrete; and huge volumes of petrol, diesel and oil were provided for trucks, lorries, diggers, boreholers, drills and other equipment and materials needed to build the tunnels. However sophisticated or rudimentary they were, all requiring planning, capital and supervision.
The construction of the “terror tunnels” disrupted natural underground drainage and the pollution caused to the Coastal Aquifer that flows east-west from Israel into the Gaza Strip is yet to be properly investigated, now made worse by the war between Israel and Hamas. Debris, rubber, plastic, tarmac, iron, steel, sealant and waterproofing materials, tiling, plaster, paint and sanitation all had an effect on the environment in the Gaza Strip. And these will continue to have an effect, especially as many of the tunnels were built in haste and with very little concern for safety. Over time, mortar crumbles and cement degrades, and modern concrete can break down within 50 years. This can cause subsidence. Hezbollah has left a similar toxic concrete tunnel legacy in Lebanon.
Numerous NGOs have been involved in the Gaza Strip, most notably UNRWA, with its headquarters above Hamas’s main data-center tunnel, lined with computers. If this tunnel collapses, it makes no difference that it is in the uptown Rimal (Arabic for “sands”) neighborhood of Gaza City. The construction of the tunnels was well known and documented, yet there was no international outcry—neither against the impact on the environment nor, more importantly, against the impact on the health and well-being of the people who physically dug and built the tunnels. In 2015, a specific study was published on Gaza, titled “The Effect of Exposure to Cement Dust on Pulmonary Function among Cement Plants Workers in the Middle Governorate, Gaza, Palestine” in the academic journal Public Health Research. Its findings could be applied to the tunnel workers, and even more so due to the dank, dark and suffocating conditions under which they labored.
When the fields in Israel were burned by the fire-balloon and fire-kite arson attacks, and when tires were torched in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas in Judaea and Samaria—producing thick, black clouds of toxic smoke—there were no activist or U.N. outcries about the human or environmental impact of these activities. A fire kite with a swastika on it was flown into Israel from Gaza on Hitler’s birthday in 2018. Is this what the activists support? Is this antisemitism or anti-Zionism? Is this what the put-up climate change activist Greta Thunberg supports? Thirteen days after the Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, Thunberg posted a photograph of herself with a blue octopus near her shoulder in “solidarity” with the Palestinians, then apologized for using this anti-Jewish trope and deleted the photo. She now leads marches to the drumbeat of threaded antisemitic cell-phone slogans. All she has done is move the blue octopus to be near her other shoulder.
The spectacle of pro-Palestinian activists shouting slogans they have to read off their cell phones (evidencing their poor knowledge and lack of any real conviction) will be one of the lasting images of the worldwide antisemitic demonstrations against Israel following the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, against the only Jewish state. If these activists cared or even knew what they were shouting about, they would not need to be threaded the slogans.
And now that the coalescence of the pro-Palestinian and climate-change activists has revealed them for what they are, it is perhaps time for these activists to take heed of the Mary MacGregor Syndrome exhibited in the film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and consider why they didn’t raise their cell phones, voices and placards when the concrete tunnels were being built in Gaza; the fields were burning in Israel; and the torched tires were spewing thick, black, toxic clouds of smoke in Judaea and Samaria.
While she was stuck trying to use a dictionary and accusing Israel of having committed “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, ecocide” as the Jewish state fights an existential war (Sep. 16), the U.N. special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, could most especially have asked herself why she had not previously objected to the same list of “-cides” actually being perpetrated by the construction of the concrete tunnel dunes and fire balloons and kites of Gaza.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has overseen an ongoing “investigation” into Israel since 2015, and requests for arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders, which it equated with Hamas leaders, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity have been pending since May 20. Meanwhile, its stablemate at The Hague—the lamentable International Court of Justice—has a case of charges of genocide against Israel brought by South Africa. And yet, more than 500,000 people have been murdered in South Africa since 1994. It ranks first in the crime-rate index among African countries; suffers perpetual electricity blackouts and water shortages; and has as neighboring states four of the five countries that declared national disasters on Oct. 15 due to drought and famine, with an estimated 21 million children officially deemed “malnourished.”
The activists, NGOs and international institutions supporting the mindset of the tunnel constructions, as well as fire balloons and kites, and those who stood by and watched all let the Gaza Strip destroy its own foundations.
