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Last update - 09:44 11/01/2006
It's not the olive trees
There
is something very human about these stumps of olive trees, hundreds
upon hundreds of them, their amputated branches reaching skyward as if
to ask for help. Last Friday, in Tawana in the southern Hebron hills,
120 trees; In Burin, south of Nablus, earlier this week, about 50
trees; another 100 or so in Burin on December 24; and 140 trees, again
in Burin, on December 14.
The police have counted 733 trees that
were uprooted in 2005. According to the (incomplete) list of 29
incidents of agricultural sabotage documented by the human rights
groups Yesh Din and B'Tselem from March to December, a total of 2,616
trees were sabotaged: uprooted, stolen, burned, chopped, sawed. In
Salem alone, 900 trees were uprooted four times. Even if those who
counted the damaged trees exaggerated, both sides agree that it is
Israelis who are damaging vineyards and plantations.
The
accumulation over the past few months of images of trees destroyed "by
unknown individuals" has been sufficiently shocking to lead the
attorney general to attack the helplessness of the authorities, and for
Minister Gideon Ezra to convene a special meeting during which it was
decided to focus law enforcement activities "on the settlements that
are recognized as problematic."
The shock, however, is
selective. The Israel Defense Forces has uprooted thousands of olive
and fruit trees, cultivated lands and greenhouses, and continues to do
so - in order to secure the roads it uses and to increase visibility
for soldiers; to build watchtowers, checkpoints and the separation
fence; and in order to pave more and more roads and construct security
fences around the settlements.
In the village of Qafeen alone,
for example, 12,600 olive trees were uprooted for the separation fence.
Thousands more trees - perhaps tens of thousands - and thousands more
acres of the West Bank are trapped behind the walls and fences and
buffer zones surrounding the settlements. In Qafeen alone, 100,000
trees are imprisoned behind the fence, and throughout most of the year
their owners are prevented from reaching them. All they can do is gaze
on the neglect from afar. The reason given is "security," of course,
but for some reason security always ends up with the effective
plundering of more Palestinian land for the benefit of the neighboring
settlement, or in order to widen and blur the Green Line and the
annexation of the land to Israel.
The people who are shocked
ignore the fact that the plantations in Salem and Tawana are next to
roads that are closed to Palestinian traffic, because they connect
between settlements. It is the IDF that closes and blocks these roads,
like hundreds of kilometers of excellent asphalt throughout the West
Bank that are closed to Palestinian traffic.
The uprooting of
100 trees sabotages the ability of an entire family to support itself.
Closing roads sabotages the economic vitality of the entire Palestinian
people. The IDF will of course talk about the need to protect Israeli
citizens. So why is anyone shocked when those same Israeli citizens
continue to stretch the logic of Israel's control over the occupied
territories?
According to that logic, Israel has the right to
institute a double legal standard in the occupied territories: one for
Jews, another for Palestinians. Unlimited rights for Jews in housing,
freedom of movement, livelihood, infrastructure, and land and water
use, versus an organized system of stripping the Palestinians of human
and civil rights. According to that logic, Palestinians must make do
with increasingly smaller "land cells" whose private ownership they can
prove. The broader expanses, whose ownership is not registered with the
Israel Lands Administration, automatically belongs to "Israel" and the
settlers' councils.
The settlers do not set policy, they are its
result. Everyone lives in peace and without prickings of conscience in
the face of hundreds of impoverished communities that have effectively
turned into prisons, in order to permit the IDF to continue to protect
the Israeli state enterprise: to control as much land as possible, to
drive out as many Palestinians as possible. A minority of Israelis are
not waiting for the IDF and the state to destroy; they destroy on their
own. It is easy to be shocked by a minority and to forget the
responsibility of the whole.
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