This paper considers the work of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to strategically plant forests over the ruins of Palestinian villages to cover over the traces of prior Palestinian inhabitation, and to hold and control land for exclusive Jewish use. The JNF is best known for its campaigns to rehabilitate “degraded” forests and plant new ones, and has planted over 250 million trees since its founding. While its stated goals are ecological, the JNF’s deeper motivations are cultural and colonial. Planting trees is “practically a Zionist commandment,” said Jay Shofet, of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. In the Israeli national narrative, the arid land of Palestine is imagined as a “dead area” which became a wasteland when Jews were exiled and now must be “revived.” The subtext of this narrative is that Palestinians lack the skill and technology to properly cultivate the land, and form the ecological basis for an ethnonationalist state. More than merely cultural, the planting of trees has become a strategy for expropriating and holding land for exclusive Jewish use. Prior to the declaration of Israeli statehood, the leaders of JNF saw afforestation as “a biological declaration of Jewish sovereignty” that could be used to set up “geopolitical facts.” The driving force behind that effort was Yosef Weitz, who led the forestry department for nearly half a century. Not coincidentally, he was also the originator of Israel’s Transfer Committee, which in 2948 expelled Palestinians from newly occupied land and prevented their return. This paper interrogates the JNF’s afforestation project, as seen through a visual studies-based analysis of its archive of over 50,000 images, to lay out an argument that afforestation has become a means towards an ethnonationalist project of colonization and control by the State of Israel. The paper details the author’s digital humanities project to scrape the 50,000 photographs from the JNF’s website and re-categorize images using machine learning recognition algorithms for image classification, which allows images to be tagged by their content using computer vision algorithms. In this way, the images can be searched via their visual basis instead of through their captions (which are described via a linguistic framework of Zionism). An image-based analysis of the JNF’s afforestation campaign is analyzed and presented in this paper to exhibit how not only trees--but indeed the images of tree plantings -- are used as tools of colonization and control in Israel-Palestine.