#national parliament building

[travelandexplorebd]

Travel and Explore BD is one of the best tour operator in Bangladesh. We are dedicated to making travel easy, stress-free, and memorable for our clients. Discover two of the most beautiful buildings in Bangladesh that won the Aga Khan Prize for Architecture: the National Assembly building and the Bait-ur-Rouf mosque.

The National parliament building was built by the famous Louis Kahn and is one of the largest legislative complexes in the world. During our visit to and around the National Assembly building, including the crescent lake and the MP inn, you are invited to have lunch in the VIP cafeteria of the Bangladesh parliament building before heading out towards the Bait-ur-Rouf mosque.

[crabs-with-sticks]

Other countries state buildings: Capitol Hill, Palace of Westminster, Parliament Hill, The Hill, Parliament House, generally normal and dignified names Aotearoa New Zealand: Hehe bees

[craitzart]

Three Vintage Style Postage Stamps - Greetings From Kuwait - Landmark Parliament Building

(download high resolution vector illustration at the shutterstock link above)

[suetravelblog]

Exploring Kuching Malaysia

Darul Hana Bridge and Sarawak Parliament Building Kuching is one of the most exotic and beautiful places I’ve visited in my travels. The tropical weather requires considerable adjustment for those unaccustomed to heat and humidity, and a daily swim in the lap pool helps! Kuching Apt Lap Pool Daytrips I’ve been exploring the surrounding areas but have had difficulty booking daytrips. There aren’t…

[rabbitcruiser]

National Library Day

National Library Day is celebrated every year on 6 April. On this day, people come together to celebrate the crucial roles that libraries and librarians play in our society. It’s also the day to reflect on the importance of reading and how essential it is to make books accessible and affordable for every reader. A well-stocked library can introduce readers to many new worlds, and helps them become more informed citizens. Libraries are also great community spaces where people can gather to exchange ideas and learn together.

History of National Library Day

Libraries aren’t a new concept — it dates back millennia. The first systematically organized library was founded in the 7th century B.C. by Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, in contemporary Iraq. It contained approximately 30,000 cuneiform tablets sorted by subject.

Since their inception, almost every great civilization has built libraries. They became great repositories of knowledge, and a few ancient libraries live on even today. The goal of these libraries was to collect knowledge and distribute it for its use in everyday life. Special importance was given to books on agriculture, architecture, medicine, art, manufacturing, war, and topics concerning the betterment of life. As the years went by, people realized the benefits of having publicly accessible centers of knowledge, and libraries became an important feature in cities and towns across the world.

As the influence of the Internet grew, many believed that there would no longer be a need for libraries, but history has proved otherwise, as libraries continue to flourish and are now more popular than ever! Not everything can be found on the Internet, and a good amount of information is still available only on paper, and despite the convenience of the world wide web, people still like to physically visit a library and spend time among books and other readers.

National Library Day timeline

4th Century B.C.

Institutional Libraries

Libraries start to become an important part of educational institutions.

13th to 15th Century

Private Book Collections

The royals in Europe start to keep book collections for private use.

17th to 18th Century

National Libraries

Libraries in free countries of the world become government properties.

19th Century

Community Libraries

Community libraries are founded at public expense.

National Library Day FAQs

Is April National Library Month?

Yes, April is National School Library Month.

Why do we celebrate National Library Week?

National Library Week is an annual celebration highlighting the valuable role libraries, librarians, and library workers play in transforming lives and strengthening our communities.

What is a national library?

A national library is a library specifically established by the government of a country to serve as the preeminent repository of information for that country.

National Library Day Activities

Get a library membership: Celebrate National Library Day by getting a membership at your local library. Also encourage your friends, family, colleagues, and children to get their own memberships.

Donate books: You can also celebrate National Library Day by donating books to your local libraries. You can donate new books, give away old copies, or even purchase ebooks on behalf of your local libraries.

Thank a librarian: A library is nothing without its librarians. They keep stock of the books, help readers find the resources they need, and of course, always greet us with warm smiles. Remember to thank a librarian for everything that they do on National Library Day.

5 Interesting Facts About Libraries

Benjamin Franklin started a lending library: It was also one of the oldest libraries in America.

Andrew Carnegie was a great patron: He helped open 2,509 libraries across the world and 1,679 libraries in America.

Library fines add up to extraordinary amounts: In 2016, the San Jose Public Library reported $6.8 million in late fees.

Libraries also offer free music: They do so by having access to music streaming platforms.

They are big employers too: There are approximately 1,85,000 librarians in America.

Why We Love National Library Day

It keeps libraries thriving: Celebrations such as National Library Day ensure that our libraries continue to thrive despite the influence of the internet. These celebrations also bring thousands of new patrons to libraries every year.

For the love of reading: Anyone who loves reading also loves National Library Day. It’s the best way to ensure that everyone has access to good books and that future generations continue to buy and read books.

It builds communities: Libraries are also an important part of our community. People of all ages can visit their local library to read, work, find resources, and spend time with like-minded readers. National Library Day helps keep our communities alive.

Source

[batshit-auspol]

So a bit of background first for our international followers: Clive Palmer is one of Australia's many mining billionaires who like to meddle in our country's politics, and as such he is utterly despised by all of Australia.

Picture for context:

He is most commonly known online by the title "Fatty McFuckhead", (problematic as it may be) because he tried to sue a youtuber for $500,000 for calling him that - and he lost. So the name stuck.

Up until his most recent foray into parliament, the legally certified Fuckhead was best known for his batshit business ventures, such as attempting to build "The Titanic 2" (failed) and trying to build a dinosaur theme park (also failed, but at least nobody got eaten by a T-Rex in this one).

For a very long time Clive played the role of sugar daddy to Australia's largest conservative party, the ironically named Liberal Party, until they had a falling out in 2012 after Clive claimed there was too much money influencing politics (lol), at which point he started his own party, days after saying he totally quit and wasn't fired and he only left because he didn't want to be a distraction.

His initial run at parliament was actually kinda successful, with Palmer's group winning 4 seats, plus a member from the "Motoring Enthusiasts Party" joined them too after accidentally getting elected and not knowing what the fuck to do.

Despite this initial success however, Palmer's party (which ran on basically no platform other than "I'm rich") hit an iceberg (titanic 2 achieved) and seven elected state and federal politicians quit within the first year.

By the time the next federal election rolled around, only one Palmer party candidate was still running for re-election. The most successful of this group - Jaquie Lambie - quit to sit as an independant and is still in parliament today.

Here she is with a painting of herself strangling Clive (she sells signed copies of this)

And here the senator is posting about liking sausage:

Anyway, we're getting to the point: which is the yellow posters. By the 2016 election, just two years after forming, the party was in complete freefall. It won just 0.01% of the vote at their second election, and it was announced shortly after that Clive was quitting politics and the party was being shut down. Australia breathed a sigh of relief.

It was, of course, short lived.

Clive, in desperate need of attention, restarted the party for the 2019 election, fielding candidates in every seat and spending $60 million in advertising in an attempt to win votes.

Every single candidate lost.

It was in this campaign however that Australia really started to fall out of love with Palmer, because most of that $60 million went towards putting up the world's least compelling marketing billboards on almost every single free space in the country.

For a good six months this was basically the only thing you would see in Australia if you went outside:

Clearly Graphic design is his passion. And yes, the genius did just straight up try and copy Trump's homework while changing a few words, hoping nobody would notice.

Very quickly these all got vandalised and it seemed the ad companies didn't care enough to replace them.

We could go on posting examples, there are thousands, but the best is definitely the one Ikea put up shortly after Clive lost the election:

In 2022, Clive's party contested the election AGAIN, this time also opting to send millions on spam text messages to every person in Australia begging for people to vote for him, as well as buying almost every youtube ad for a year, at the cost of $100 million.

He won a whopping one seat.

During this election Clive ran on an anti-lockdown, anti-vax platform with the slogan "freedom, freedom, freedom". That message, however, was slightly undermined when his goons, dressed in 'Freedom!' shirts, made national news for trying to beat up a protester who turned up at a rally dressed as an annoying text message, shouting "pay your workers" at Clive.

As if that wasn't bad enough, at another rally Clive knocked himself unconscious while trying to jump up on stage, and then a few weeks later was rushed to hospital with covid, while his anti-vax ads were still in regular rotation on TV, at which point it was also leaked to the press that Palmer had been alledgedly trying to buy Hitler's car.

Utterly humiliated, the party deregistered again shortly after the election.

Can't wait until he runs again in 2025.

Anyway, on the other "Clive tweeting Miss Kobayashi's Dragon" thing, we have no idea what that means but here's a screencap:

[theodoreangelos]

Austrian Parliament Building, Dr. Karl Renner-Ring 3, 1017 Wien Österreichisches Parlamentsgebäude Здание австрийского парламента Bâtiment du Parlement autrichien ────────────────────── Glass dome: Transparency as a symbol For the first time, the new glass dome above the National Council Chamber allows a view of the sky and the quadriga on the roof. The light transmission can be controlled by the electrochromic – i. e. tintable – glass panels. The glass dome replaces the two glass ceilings that had previously covered the hall.

[pillarboxstudio]

[jewish-sideblog]

Clearly, y'all don't care about Jews, and the fact that Hamas is violently antisemitic doesn't seem matter to any of you. So let me go with a new approach, of equal truth and value. Hamas is violently anti-Palestinian.

This past week, Hamas attacked evacuation routes and prevented Gazan citizens from fleeing an active warzone. [1]

They did that because they routinely use Gazan civilians as human shields. Hamas intentionally builds military targets close to schools, hospitals, and mosques, putting soft targets in the way of both incoming and outgoing fire. Hamas encourages Gazan civilians and children to stand on the roofs of buildings they know the IDF is targeting. [2]

Hamas has refused to allow elections in Gaza since 2006. Not just Palestinian National Authority elections, mind you. No open elections for any office have been held in seventeen years. Palestinian rights to free elections and self-determination have been denied by Hamas. [3] (And good luck to anyone who tries to blame that on Israel, because elections were held by the PNA in the West Bank in 2012, 2017, 2021 and 2022. It's Hamas's intention alone to purge democracy.)

Hamas's track record on human rights is appalling. Palestinian prisoners in Gaza face unfair trials and death sentences after being tortured by police. Palestinian women are prevented from accessing the legal systems to escape domestic abuse situations. Political dissidents in Hamas, even ones who merely support the other half of the Palestinian government, have been summarily executed. [4] [5]

Peaceful organizers in Palestine protested Hamas's massive tax hikes in 2019. Hamas security forces responded by assaulting demonstrators, tracking them down, raiding their homes, and detaining them. And, as previously mentioned, prisoners in Gaza are not treated well by Hamas. [6]

Edit Nov.5, 10:30 PM: I forgot to add arguably the most important thing-- Hamas manipulates the humanitarian aid they receive away from helping Gazans and toward killing Jews. 5% of Hamas's budget actually gets used for humanitarian aid, while 55% goes to military use. Construction equipment intended to rebuild Gaza's crumbling infrastructure is used to build a complex series of underground tunnels. Those tunnels in turn are used to smuggle Iranian military equipment into the country. They were also used for human trafficking in the October 7th attacks. [7]

If you actually want Palestinians to be free, you can't just replace Israel with Hamas. But it's not like they're the only option for supporting Palestinian liberation. While Fatah doesn't have an immaculate historical track record, it now operates as a leftist, democratic socialist, secular Palestinian government that fights for a two-state solution. Similarly, Arab-Israeli political parties like the Hadash-Ta'al coalition support leftist, anti-Zionist, and two-state solutions from within the Israeli parliament.

You can and should support Palestinian liberation movements that abuse neither Jewish nor Arab human rights and dignities. Plenty of them exist out there. But if y'all continue to throw your weight behind an antisemitic and anti-democratic terrorist regime, Palestinians and Jews will both take note of exactly where you stand.

[opencommunion]

"The Congo’s strategic location in the middle of Africa and its fabulous natural endowment of minerals and other resources have since 1884 ensured that it would serve as a theatre for the playing out of the economic and strategic interests of outsiders: the colonial powers during the scramble for Africa; the superpowers during the Cold War; and neighbouring African states in the post-Cold War era. To prevent a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Security Council deployed from 1960 to 1964 what was then the largest and most ambitious operation ever undertaken by the UN, with nearly 20,000 troops at its peak strength plus a large contingent of civilian personnel for nation-building tasks.

This latter aspect of the Opération des Nations unies au Congo (ONUC) was a function of the fragile political revolution ... The Congo won its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. Patrice Lumumba’s MNC-L and its coalition of radical nationalist parties had captured a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament in the pre-independence elections in May. Lumumba became prime minister and head of government, while the Abako leader Joseph Kasa-Vubu became the ceremonial head of state. The victory of a militantly nationalist leader with a strong national constituency was viewed as a major impediment to the Belgian neocolonialist strategy and a threat to the global interests of the Western alliance.

Within two weeks of the proclamation of independence, Prime Minister Lumumba was faced with both a nationwide mutiny by the army and a secessionist movement in the province of Katanga bankrolled by Western mining interests. Both revolts were instigated by the Belgians, who also intervened militarily on 10 July, a day before the Katanga secession was announced. In the hopes of obtaining the evacuation of Belgian troops and white mercenaries, and thus ending the Katanga secession, Lumumba made a successful appeal to the UN Security Council to send a UN peacekeeping force to the Congo. However, the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, interpreted the UN mandate in accordance with Western neocolonialist interests and the US Cold War imperative of preventing Soviet expansion in the Third World. This led to a bitter dispute between Lumumba and Hammarskjöld, which resulted in the US- and Belgian-led initiative to assassinate the first and democratically elected prime minister of the Congo.

... Brussels’ failure to prevent a radical nationalist such as Lumumba from becoming prime minister created a crisis for the imperialist countries, which were determined to have a decolonization favourable to their economic and strategic interests with the help of more conservative African leaders. With Belgium’s failure to transfer power in an orderly fashion to a well-groomed moderate leadership group that could be expected to advance Western interests in Central and Southern Africa, the crisis of decolonization in the Congo required US and UN interventions. Working hand in hand, Washington, New York and Brussels succeeded in eliminating Lumumba and his radical followers from the political scene."

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, 2002

[m1male2]

It was built between 1884 and 1902, following the plans of Imre Steindl, who went blind a few months before the inauguration. It is the largest building in the country, the scene of meetings of the National Assembly of Hungary and the second largest parliament in the world behind that of Romania. It is neo-Gothic in style, although with some peculiarities.

[fatehbaz]

In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

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To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.

[intersectionalpraxis]

"Responding to ongoing unrest in the non-self-governing French territory of Kanaky New Caledonia after the French Parliament adopted a bill changing the territory’s voting rules, Amnesty International’s Pacific Researcher Kate Schuetze said:

“The state of emergency declared by the French government and the deployment of the French army, coupled with a ban on the social media app TikTok, must not be misused to restrict people’s human rights."

“The deeply worrying violence and the French authorities’ response must be understood through the lens of a stalled decolonisation process, racial inequality and the longstanding, peacefully expressed demands by the Indigenous Kanak people for self-determination."

Background:

"The French National Assembly this week adopted a bill which expands the right to vote for newer residents of Kanaky New Caledonia, mostly French nationals. The move is likely to further disenfranchise the Indigenous Kanak people, including at levels of local political representation and in future discussions on decolonisation. No representatives from Kanaky New Caledonia, either Kanak or European, currently sit on the French National Assembly."

"French president Emmanuel Macron declared a State of Emergency in the archipelago on Wednesday. The French government, which is the administering power in Kanaky New Caledonia, announced a ban on the social media app TikTok in the territory, as well as deploying hundreds of police reinforcements. The French army has also been deployed to “secure” the islands’ ports and airport."

I am learning more about the Indigenous Kanak People in New Caledonia (thank you to the person who alerted me to this happening), but for folks who want to start for context and a little history alongside some more updates about what happened/is happening (this is also not an extensive list of resources, since this "decolonization process" on France's part has been going on for a very long time. If anyone has links/more information that they would like to share about the Indigenous people in Kanaky, I would happily post them here!:

This declaration by the Kanak Indigenous people was translated from French into English back in 2002, and it is still very important to bear witness to/read:

[suetravelblog]

Tbilisi Georgia

[beguines]

Landscape helps capture the forms in which nations and movements literally and figuratively 'construct' or 'produce' nature, engineering its appearance and infusing it with significations—rendering landscape a 'cultural practice' rather than a given fact. Here landscape is both an object of investigation and a site of intervention; the very medium within which power and resistance are represented and conducted. Put differently, landscape is far from a neutral backdrop but is rather activated, serving as the medium of violence. Dispossession, deforestation, planting, land-grabbing, and acquisitions, privatization, re-modeling, clearance, or the destruction of infrastructures of life, including food sources, buildings, or supplies, all mobilize the landscape in their domination.

Representations of Middle Eastern and North African landscapes nearly invariably include desolate scenes of endless empty and parched deserts, decorated perhaps with an isolated string of camels, or a beach with large mounds of golden sand, a minaret, or an oil tower in the background. The temporality and general impression of these landscapes is slow, hazy, and dizzying, as if they are waiting for 'activation' by someone or something outside of it. Whether reproduced in academic scholarship, literature, film, tourist advertisements, or news media, these imagined colonial representations of the region's landscape place the environment centrally within them, projecting an understanding of the Middle East and North Africa as marginal, on the edge of ecological viability or as a degraded landscape facing imminent disaster due to human inaction. With this, an environmental imaginary enabled storytelling that pushed forward imperial interests in the name of 'development' and, later, of environmental 'sustainability' and 'protection.' In the case of the constructed 'Middle East,' as Diana K. Davis explains,

"Deforestation narratives have been particularly strong in the Levant region since the nineteenth century, where some of the most emotional accounts of forest destruction have hinged on the presumed widespread destruction of the Lebanese cedar forests illustrated in the cover image by Louis-François Cassas. Similar narratives of overgrazing and desertification were used during the British Mandate in Palestine to justify forestry policies as well as laws aimed at controlling nomads, such as the 1942 Bedouin control ordinance, in the name of curbing overgrazing. Such environmental imaginaries, once constructed, can be extremely tenacious and have surprisingly widespread effects."

In Palestine, the construction of an 'Israeli landscape' to redeem the purported damage done to the land by its indigenous population commenced with the first Zionist settlers in the nineteenth century and intensified with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Reflected in former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's 1951 public address to the newly formed Israeli Knesset (Parliament):

"We must wrap all the mountains of the country and their slopes in trees, all the hills and stony lands that will not succeed in agriculture, the dunes of the coastal valley, the dry lands of the Negev to the east and south of Baer Sheva, that is to say all of the land of Edom and the Arava until Eilat. We must also plant for security reasons, along all the borders, along all the roads, routes, and paths, around public and military buildings and facilities [ . . . ] We will not be faithful to one of the two central goals of the state—making the wilderness bloom—if we make do with only the needs of the hour [ . . . ] We are a state at the beginning of repairing the corruption of generations, corruption which was done to the nation and corruption which was done to the land."

This 'Israeli landscape' was largely cultivated through the multifaceted and by now well-documented eco-colonial practices of the quasi-governmental Israeli organization, Keren Kayemet L'Yisrael, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has since made striking efforts to position Israel as an environmental pioneer. Established in 1901, the JNF may very well be the first transnational environmental nationalist NGO, seeking to 'make the desert bloom' by planting forests, natural reserves, and recreational parks over the ruins of Palestinian villages, holy places, and historical sites. Distinguishing itself from other transnational Zionist organizations, such as the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, the JNF has since its inception portrayed itself as an environment-oriented nationalist organization, supporting the 'redemption' and 'reclamation' of the land through colonial policies presented in the language of preservation, maintenance, protection, and development of vital ecosystems and ecologically sound environments. Indeed, its public-facing promotional materials boast proudly that "Israel is the only country in the world that entered the twenty-first century with a net gain in the number of trees"—without context, of course, of the ways in which trees and the 'greened' landscape in the country are mobilized as weapons of erasure as part of a colonial imaginary that naturalizes non-Palestinian presence.

Shourideh C. Molavi, Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance