Re-Root

Top seeds: artists capture global efforts to future-proof nature – in pictures

A 1520 botanical illustration of a <n>Palma Christi</n> from an Italian herbal manuscript.

The gardener of Gaza: sowing hope by growing vegetables amid the rubble

23 Vintage Photos of Egypt’s Golden Years

Sowing Memory: Collecting Art and Saving Seeds – Mn Artists

NO NIIN Magazine — Approaches to Palestinian Liberation: Magical Realism as Resistance Literature

<n>Botanical Collectibles</n>, a flat lay arrangement by artist <n>Jonas Frei</n>.

# **Outside literature, the othering of the black goat, an animal indigenous to Palestine for thousands of years, reflects this inversion of the eco-surrealistic relationship between people and the land. Extending the British Mandate’s laws, the Israeli state maintained the law prohibiting the possession and herding of the black goat. This law was based on alleged claims of the goat’s detrimental effect on the environment as it consumed many more plants than other animals. Accused of being “shrewd, rogue, ill-mannered and undisciplined”7, the black goat was constantly abducted and killed to prevent it from distorting the European landscape that Israel wished to create on the rubbles of the destroyed Palestinian one. In 1948, the year of the Nakba, Israel began importing a white Swiss goat to replace the black one8. The white European goat was described as “polite, beautiful, healthy”9 and even “civilized”10. This hatred expressed in portraying the Palestinian black goat as an “evil creature”11 masqueraded under ‘scientific proof’12 regarding its effect on the ‘Israeli’ environment really spurred from resentment regarding the black goat’s freedom and mobility. Unlike the Israeli settlers, the black goat possesses thousands of years of knowledge of Palestinian land and can, therefore, ‘trespass’ into ‘Israeli’ territories when seeking food13. The black goat, which was accused by Israeli writers, journalists, politicians, and the public of being anti-Zionist14, was allowed back into Palestine’s natural landscapes by the settler-colonial state following the eruption of wildfires as a result of the state planting pine trees15 that recalled its European origin. The black goat would trim the trees, prevent wildfires, and maintain the ecosystem. Such precipitous inversions of the relationship between colonial settlers and the land in ‘real’ spaces contrast deeply with the benign, intimate, and magic-infused eco-surrealism that connects Palestinians with their indigenous land.**