THE SCIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY OF EARLY JNF AFFORESTATION
When the JNF returned to its afforestation work at the Herzl Forest after the Great War, it no longer planted fruit trees. As it began a more system-atic forestry effort, cypress, tamarisk, acacia, casuarina (beefwood), and, ul-timately, pine replaced the eucalyptus. Chaim Blass, who began his long career in the JNF afforestation department during the Ussishkin period, explains the rationale behind that era's approach:
Foresting really began with the first kibbutzim that took on projects of a few hundred dunams with JNF money. There were two ideological goals to the initiative. First, to help the economies of the kibbutz. But there was also a practical element: holding the lands, so that they wouldn't revert to Arab hands. And tree planting was a good way to achieve it. First of all, British law protected trees, which provided us with some legitimacy. And there was no activity that could hold land as cheaply as forests. Just a year or two's work and the trees really didn't need any more help.[52]
For the Jewish settlers who actually did the planting, trees indeed meant steady paying jobs. Aesthetics, however, offered a motivational bonus, although not always enough to overcome the drudgery of the work. One of the kibbutz members who made a living planting JNF trees in 1921 was a recently arrived American immigrant named Golda Meirson,
The JNF afforestation policy prior to 1948 was devised by Akiva Ettinger, one of the JNF's first scientists. Ettinger had a Ph.D. in agronomy and had studied in Germany. He was sent by Baron Maurice de Hirsch to travel around the world to look for appropriate farmlands for Jewish set-tlement. He began work at the JNF after it relocated to The Hague during World War I. When he later moved to Palestine, he brought with him clear ideas about how forestry should be conducted there: “Planting many fast-growing trees that do not require long-term maintenance, and at the same time planting on lands that cannot be utilized for agriculture other than forestry, such as rocky lands, swamps, and moving sand dunes.”[54] No one played a greater role in implementing Ettinger's practical but ultimately controversial JNF strategy than his assistant and successor, Yosef Weitz.