By Titas biswas
Lecturer, Carlow College St Patrick’s
Researcher, UCC School of Applied Social Studies
A few months ago, I came across a photograph of a woman hugging an olive tree in Palestine on
a social media site. I later learned that the photograph had been taken in November, 2000 and Al
Jazeera had published the story of the woman who claimed to have “raised the tree like her
child”. As the genocide in Palestine worsened, a photograph of a ninety something Palestinian
farmer woman tilling her land caught my eye a few weeks later. Being a spectator to the first
genocide in the world being broadcast live, I was reminded of Deleuze’s understanding of the
Palestinian genocide as “the colonial erasure of history and geography of Palestine”, coupled
with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people (Medien, 2019:02). While the Israeli army
continued to plant Pine trees to dehistoricise, Europeanise and simply cover the impact of the
devastation of their military operations in Palestine (Sasa, 2022), the rhizomatic nature of the
persistence of memory that was being erased in the context highlighted how ecocide is so
intimately a part of genocide.
Milan Kundera had famously proclaimed that the struggle of man against power is the struggle
of memory against forgetting in ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ (1978). The fascist attack
on history and memory culture is almost always double pronged. Primarily, it devastates the
fabric of plural ways of remembering by quite literally “flattening” the discourse into a
monolithic form of deception. Secondly, it justifies the act of assassinating memory (as Henry
Giroux’s most recent book will shed light on) as a necessity in the process of whatever it deems
as progress in the given moment. In that, fascism itself is recurrently amnesiac, but also an
entity that imposes said amnesia on what/who it engulfs psychogeographically.
But as Walter Benjamin had remarked in his conceptualisation of jetztzeit (here and now), and
as scholars such as Michael Rothburg have explored in the recent past, memory is
multidirectional and as such, deserves to be perceived through non-positivistic lenses. Memory
cultures are arborescent, often as trees are. As Deleuze had observed in rhizomes and what he
then called rhizomatic thought, memoirs dialectically flourish in spaces that are ever liminal
and in constant development. In ‘Ici et Ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), a film essay about
the understanding of the struggle of the Palestinians against settler colonial terror, Jean-Luc
Godard, Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean-Pierre Gorin depict ‘l’espace’ and ‘le temps’ as ‘la guerre
prolongée’ (extended war). ‘Proloooooongée’, as Godard later emphasises upon. ‘Jusqu’à la
victoire! (Until victory)’, as it was initially supposed to have been named, the film boldly
captures what might be perceived as looking at history/memory from the bottom up – through
the eyes of the dying, of those living inside concentration camps, of Palestinian revolutionaries
situated in spaces governed by the rhizomatic olive trees – all placed in largely blank spaces
that Nilsson (2024) describes as “foetal” or “problem spaces”. Contrasting the ever changing
‘here’ with the consistent distance that the third world is looked at through from/in the West,
Godard makes a case for the erased and censored depictions of memory. Combining personal
memoir with a materialist understanding of affect, ‘Ici et Ailleurs’ embodies rhizomatic thought
as a method of cinema.
Afterwards while teaching a film studies class, I was drawn once again to Abbas Kiarostami’s
‘Through the Olive Trees’ (1995) and a film centered around the relationship shared between a
giraffe and a young boy in occupied Palestine in Rani Masallah’s ‘Giraffada’ (2013). The
landscaping in ‘Through the Olive Trees’, the last of the three films from the ‘Koker trilogy’ set in
the northern Iranian village of Koker further reminded me of Kiarostami’s first film called ‘Bread
and The Alley’ (1995). Towards the end of this eleven-minute short film, a young boy walks
through a softly illuminated road embroidered by a shadowed alley between cottages built of
mud. An eternally relevant landscape that serves as a common minimum to the third world,
brightened ever so gently through poetic oeuvre. Then when my mother called me that week to
speak of the olive tree that lightens up the backyard of her country house, I was reminded of the
Palestinian woman who had raised her olive tree like a child and hugged it when the Israeli army
was about to decimate it.
If there is one thing fascism and fascist memory culture completely fails at, it is in consolidating
artistic significance of any form, shape and manner. Even propagandist art could embody some
form of meaning as had been observed in early Soviet cinema, whereas fascist art usually is
tantamount to intellectually incoherent narrative compulsively stapled together passed off as a
malnourished form of common sense. There are two ways these underpinnings influence the
justification of historical erasure and selective remembering in fascist memory culture. Firstly,
fascisms flatten any anxiety associated with the grief of forceful displacement or erasure with a
neo-Kantian hangover and/or Eurocentric forms of reasoning that is imposed as a monolithic
way of discursive rationalisation. Secondly, as Simon Strick (2022) argues, it combines specific
forms of paranoia such as white, Hindu fascist or Zionist endangerment to give birth to a
limbless (Schmidt, 2025) form of fascism almost devoid of (any) rationality altogether. These
contradictions more often than not, strengthen neofascisms in terms of its shape shifting
volatility.
The Israeli propaganda machine is a particularly devious case where the attempt to “flatten”
and bulldoze anything that does not feed into its regurgitative, paranoid narrative of self
preservation is portrayed with vindictive animosity. Israel’s brand of neofascism is an umbrella
body of fascisms much as neoliberal capitalism is a body of different strands of capitalism.
Ecofascism is part of this neofascist repertoire which (re)inforces ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian people, while simultaneously committing ecocide by decimating ecological
balance, forest cover and wildlife in Palestine. The double pronged attack, as discussed above,
lies in how any attempt to challenge Israeli propagandist narrative is perceived as a “threat” that
must either be removed or flattened. As Chalecki (2024) argues, “eco-terrorists are pro
environment. For environmental terrorists, the tool or target is a critical natural resource, but the
motive is to force political and/or ideological change. Sites vulnerable to environmental
terrorism include water resources and infrastructures, agriculture and forest areas, mineral and
petroleum infrastructures, and wildlife and ecosystem sites.”
The olive trees came across as a “threat” to European settler colonialism, so they had to be
decimated, and the barren land needed to be covered up by what environmentalists are calling
‘pine deserts’. Over 800,000 olive trees have been ripped from the ground since 1967 (Javier,
2024), when Israel tightened its grip over Palestine in terms of colonial control and violence. By
this time, olive trees have become a signifier for Palestine psychogeographically. The trees that
continue to live have become signifier for trees that have been uprooted. For what lives in
arborescence between their decimation, and the displacement of the Palestinian people, may
the olive trees remind us of the liminal, the obscure, the material and banal life
histories…jusqu’à la victoire dans la résistance aux amnésies coloniales, jusqu’à la victoire
dans l’image. Jusqu’à la victoire.
References
Chalecki, E.L. (2024) Environmental Terrorism Twenty Years On. Global Environmental Politics
24(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00728
Javier, C. (2024) Ecocide Is Fertilizer For Occupation. Columbia Political Review.
https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2024/11/ecocide-is-fertilizer-for-occupation n
Medien, K. (2019) Palestine in Deleuze. Theory, Culture and Society 36(5), 49-70.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418816369
Nilsson, J. (2024) Cinecepts, Deleuze, and Godard-Miéville: Developing Philosophy through
Audiovisual Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Schmidt, J.M. (2025) Limbless Warriors and Foaming Liberals: The Allure of Post-Heroism in Far
Right Memes. Journal of Right-Wing Studies 2(2) https://doi.org/10.5070/RW3.1620
Sasa, G. (2022). Oppressive pines: Uprooting Israeli green colonialism and implanting
Palestinian A’wna. Politics, 43(2), 219-235. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221122366
Strick, S. (2022) Reflexive Fascism in the Age of History Memes. Journal of Modern European History 20(3), 335-351. https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221110451