UC Berkeley

The Great Oak Forest (Arabic: al-ghaba) was one of the most prominent features of the landscape of the Sharon plain in the Ottoman period. Large swaths of woodland consisting mainly of Tabor oak trees (Quercus ithaburensis) covered the area between the Yarkon and Hadera rivers. Western travelers and scholars who witnessed the forest in the 19th century saw in it a testament to the region’s Christian past, such as the glorious victory of Richard the Lionheart in the Battle of Arsuf (1191). However, by the end of the 19th century the last remnants of the forest had been felled. Early Israeli scholars such as Ze'ev Vilnai and Yehuda Ziv, who did not witness the forest with their own eyes, regarded its existence as proof of the decline of habitation in the area, following the end of Jewish settlement and the Muslim conquests. In the Ariel Encyclopedia, Vilnai declared that "with the destruction of the land, the Sharon was also destroyed ...", while following the renewed Jewish settlement, "desolate areas were covered with fields and orchards." The article presents the forest as a natural resource distributed among the highland villages to meet the needs of their expanding population. Using local sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, and a reassessment of Western sources, it traces the diverse interactions that took place between the forest and the developing Arab settlement. The article makes use of visual sources, written evidence and oral history to describe and explain the ghābat system in the forest areas, which was the culmination of the spatial planning of the rural population in Jabal Nablus during the late Ottoman period. Furthermore, the article settles a long-standing controversy over the boundaries of the forest and its characteristics in the 1870s. An analysis of the field charts in the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine prepared using Spatial Geographic Information Systems (GIS) shows that the actual woodlands were, by then, restricted to the area between present-day Even Yehuda and Kefar Yona. Lastly, the article suggests that the clearing of the forest by the local population was a double-edged sword: it allowed for the expansion of agricultural cultivation, while also leading to severe ecological problems such as soil depletion and soil erosion, which were felt in full severity at the beginning of the Jewish colonization of the Sharon.