“Starvation siege.”
Olive trees and the covetousness of West Bank settlers.
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29 OCTOBER—Texts have arrived from Palestinian friends with increasing frequency these past weeks, each one documenting an upsurge in the destruction of olive trees by Jewish settlers and the Zionist Occupation Forces throughout the West Bank.
Attacks on Palestinians and olive groves routinely escalate during the harvest season which begins mid–October. But the current number and intensity of daily assaults represents an unprecedented and ominous escalation of violence—further evidence that the Zionist regime is escalating its ethnic cleansing in pursuit of informal annexation of the remaining land of Palestine.
Why, you might wonder, do Zionists attack olive trees? Why do they destroy a tree revered in the Old Testament and sacred in the Jewish tradition? What motivates this pathological fixation?
Olives are a critical and substantial source of food and income for Palestinians. Most simply and obviously: The Zionist regime is starving West Bank Palestinians, economically and in actuality. But the Zionist obsession with destroying olive trees has less evident and darker psychological imperatives—covetousness and envy among them.
I have come to understand that beneath the seething hatred Zionist Israelis feel for Palestinians is longing—at bottom a wish to be Palestinian. I take these questions up later; keep them in mind as you read.
For this Alert, I compiled reports and visual documentation from five communities spread across the governorates of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron: Nahalin, al–Minaya, Sahba, Umm al–Khair, and al–Mughayyir.
As you will see, the quality of the videos and photographs is sometimes poor. Few Palestinians can afford top-of-the-line cellphones, and the events being documented are dangerous, chaotic, and stressful—not easily captured. Because Palestinians are increasingly arrested or beaten for documenting the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers, violent interactions are often filmed and photographed surreptitiously.
What you read and see below is a fraction of the violence destroying Palestinian communities across the West Bank. Look at these images carefully. These are historical documents of the crime of ethnic cleansing. They record the human rights violations of a genocidal apartheid regime as it appropriates the land of Palestine.
However difficult it is to look at this evidence of Israel’s crimes, it is our responsibility to bear witness. Not least because our country, those of us who are U.S. citizens, has long enabled the criminality and brutality of the Zionist state.
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Nahalin.
Video documentation of an elderly man being beaten by a settler and three Israeli soldiers arrived Saturday afternoon, 25 October, in separate texts from different friends. The man and his wife were picking olives on their land in the village of Nahalin when they were attacked. Nahalin, 8 kilometers southwest of Bethlehem, is surrounded by the illegal settlements of Gvaot, Rosh Tzurim, Neve Daniel, and Betar Illit.
News circulates quickly through the West Bank via social media. This is a matter of survival. People need to know in real time whenever and wherever violence breaks out. They also need evidence of their innocence in case of arrest. Of necessity, Palestinians are forced to document their own victimization. All of these images form part of a collective digital archive, formal and informal, taken over years and decades—documentary evidence of Israel’s criminality. This effort is also for the sake of history and a future when this documentation may be presented in a court of law.
The following videos, taken from different angles, show the casual brutality of the attack. The man is hit on the head with an assault rifle and held down while a settler punches him. What you see here is entirely routine.
Palestinians are not allowed to protect or defend themselves from attack. Any form of self-defense is an impermissible act of resistance to Jewish domination—and grounds for arrest or worse.
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Al–Maniya.
Video of another brutal assault arrived by text two hours later on the same day, Saturday, 25 October. Settlers attacked people picking olives in al–Maniya, a small village 9 kilometers southeast of Bethlehem. A man in his forties, Mahmoud Adbel Fattah al–Jabarin, was brutally beaten with stones and a heavy wooden stick. He was repeatedly kicked in the face and groin. Settlers opened fire on villagers who tried to come to his defense.
When Israeli police showed up they, the police, prevented a Palestinian ambulance from transporting Mahmoud to a hospital. Instead, they arrested Mahmoud. He was held overnight and released on Sunday. His arm had been broken. Late Saturday night, settlers returned and destroyed approximately sixty of Mahmoud’s olive trees under the cover of darkness.
Perpetrators of this attack are from an illegal outpost located on land belonging to the Arab community of al–Rashaida, near the Ma`ale Amos settlement. These same Zionist thugs, many of whom belong to Hilltop Youth, routinely attack the nearby communities of Kisan, al–Maniya, and al–Rashaida. Hilltop Youth is a religious Zionist settler youth group that establishes illegal outposts throughout the West Bank and stages violent attacks against Palestinians.
In the first of the following videos you see Mahmoud being beaten. The second video shows the damage to his olive trees.
The video below shows settlers at the entrance to the village prior to the attack. Several of them are armed. There appears to by an Israeli soldier among them. Zionist military forces routinely guard settlers as they attack Palestinians. Some of the settlers seen here are members of Hilltop Youth and were involved in an attack on Sabha early in October, as reported below.
Avi Ashkenazi, military correspondent for Maariv, the Hebrew-language edition of The Jerusalem Post, reported on Sunday, 26 October, that the Israel Defense Forces, backed by senior political figures, has informal agreements with the Hilltop Youth.
According to reservist testimony,
[T]he IDF would provide the Hilltop Youth with means of subsistence in illegal outposts and in return they would refrain from acting against IDF forces. Instead, they would only act against the Palestinians.
If Zionist forces feared harassment and attack from members of Hilltop Youth enough to strike a deal with the organization, imagine the terror this criminal gang unleashes on Palestinians.
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Sahba.
On 15 October, settlers from Ma`ale Amos destroyed more than 70 trees on land located east of the settlement in an area known as the Sahba Escarpment. Sahba is part of the historic farming and grazing land belonging to the nearby village of Kisan, 11 kilometers southwest of Bethlehem.
A dozen mature trees were cut down while smaller trees were destroyed by sheep set loose to graze in the orchard. Compounding the tragedy, olives from an additional 160 trees that had yet to be picked were entirely destroyed. Settlers went through the grove beating trees with sticks and knocking olives to the ground. Only about 10 percent of the harvest remained unspoiled.
In the photo below, Zionist Occupation Forces talk with settlers responsible for the destruction. Shortly afterwards, Palestinian landowners were forced to leave while the settlers remained behind to do more damage.
The next day, 16 October, settlers returned and attacked villagers and landowners who were guarding the orchards. Both sides threw rocks, and settlers fired military-issue assault weapons at the Palestinians.
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Umm al–Khair.
Before sunrise on the morning of 7 October, Zionist forces entered the Bedouin village of Umm al–Khair, 16 kilometer southeast of Hebron, and destroyed an entire olive grove. The trees were adjacent to the community center on the outskirts of the village. Umm al–Khair is one of numerous villages and Bedouin communities located in an area known as Masafer Yatta, an area featured in the film No Other Land.
In the video below, a soldier—right of center—can be seen uprooting a tree. Other soldiers stand around. The lights in the background are from the nearby settlement of Carmel. These are strategically located to shine into the village throughout the night, flooding the village with light as a form of harassment. Umm al–Khair is entirely surrounded by Carmel and frequently attacked by settlers.
During the operation, soldiers focused blinding lights on villagers to prevent them from documenting the destruction, as seen in the video below.
In the light of day, nothing could hide the damage seen in the following video.
An estimated 80 percent of the olive trees upon which the village depends for food security and economic survival were uprooted or cut down. Occurring as it did in the early hours of 7 October, this was almost certainly an act of revenge and collective punishment for Hamas’s prison break two years earlier from the concentration camp known as Gaza—an event Norman Finkelstein likens to a “slave revolt” and which he, and many others, refuses to condemn.
Footnote: On 28 July, in an incident widely reported in Western media, Awdah Hathaleen, a math teacher and activist, was shot and killed by Yinon Levi, an Israeli settler. A resident of the village, Hathleen, was standing in the yard of the community center filming as a backhoe destroyed a road belonging to the village. He was highly regarded and loved among Israeli peace activists and visiting internationals. Levi, notorious for his violence against local Palestinians, was among those few settlers sanctioned during Biden’s presidency and remains under sanction in the U.K. and the E.U. I share this to emphasize the extremity of the violence endured by the Bedouins of Umm al–Khair.
Yesterday, Tuesday 28 October, I received news that Umm al–Khair was issued demolition orders for fourteen buildings: the community center, a community greenhouse, and twelve homes. It’s difficult to see how the small village will survive.
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Al–Mughayyir.
Some six weeks earlier, beginning on 21 August, Zionist Forces bulldozed farmland and uprooted an estimated 3,000 olive trees in the village of al–Mughayyir, 18 kilometers northeast of Ramallah, in an onslaught that last nearly a week. They were aided by settlers operating privately owned equipment. Soldiers occupied the village for four days, arrested and detained numerous residents, raided and ransacked homes, and destroyed vehicles. The entire village was locked down and roads were closed. Ambulances weren’t allowed in.
All of this occurred after a settler claimed he was shot near the illegal settlement of Adei Ad. The injury was reported to be minor and the allegation remains entirely unsubstantiated. But whether true or not the Z.O.F. seized the opportunity, as did the settlers, who participated in the destruction of land and trees.
A backhoe destroys olive trees in the video above. In the final seconds of the footage, the camera pans across the orchard revealing the scope of devastation. This was filmed in the first days of the assault.
In the screenshot below, backhoes in the distance cut a road into the hillside. In the foreground, bulldozers uproot olive trees.
The roar of bulldozers and backhoes could be heard day and night as Zionist fanatics worked around the clock destroying everything on the land: grape vineyards, almond and fruit trees, wheat fields, and of course olive trees, some of which were centuries old. They cut a road through the fertile farmland to a hilltop overlooking the village. A new settlement is already underway. Like every other Palestinian community throughout the West Bank, al–Mughayyir is now ringed by Jewish settlements in an ever tightening Zionist noose.
In the following video, a bored Israeli soldier, unaware he’s being filmed, can be seen damaging a parked car. I share this so you can see how casually Zionists engage in violence and the extent to which they are determined to make life unbearable and unlivable for Palestinians. Nothing is left undamaged.
Prior to 7 October 2023 the village of al–Mughayyir owned 42,000 dunams of farm and grazing land—the equivalent of 10,380 acres. Nearly all of it has since been stolen by settlers under the protection of Zionist forces.
Like most other rural communities, al–Mughayyir relies almost entirely on agricultural production and livestock as its main source of food and income. Families depend upon olive oil for their economic security and stability. Excess oil—beyond the amount a household needs for its own consumption—is sold each year from the annual olive harvest. This year there will be very little to harvest and, so, almost no oil production.
By any measure, the West Bank is under a starvation siege.
Footnote: It is in the village of al–Mughayyir that we raised money to build a kindergarten playground. The project is near completion and all that remains is to order the new playground equipment. The school’s two small classrooms were raided during the same prolonged attack at the end of August reported above. They were ransacked and school supplies were destroyed.
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What drives the Zionist impulse to destroy olive trees and attack people as they harvest olives? I now return to this question.
In answer, I turn to a conversation I had with a young man named Saed at a community center in Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. It was 5 November 2024. My interpreter, Sadeel, was with me, and Saed was giving us a tour and relating the history of the camp.
“What’s the greatest threat to Israelis?” Saed asked.
We stood on the roof of the center gazing over the apartheid wall onto land planted with hundreds upon hundreds of olive trees. A large illegal settlement sprawled across the hilltop overlooking the massive grove.
I couldn’t possibly answer Saed’s question: It was rhetorical. Boys throwing stones?
“The olive tree,” he replied.
Olive trees are evidence of our historic presence on the land and our connection to the land. They’re a symbol of our resistance and sumud—steadfastness. Their roots go deep into the land and they’re green in every season.
The olive tree is like a beautiful bride. But she has a groom. Olive trees don’t grow by themselves. They need people to care for them.
All of those olives trees belonged to Aida camp,” Saed said as he pointed to the land beyond the barrier. “They built the wall between the camp and our olive groves, cutting us off from our trees and land.”
I looked across the wall. The olive grove was vast. It extended from the base of the wall nearly to the hilltop. There must have been thousands of trees. Aid camp would be prosperous today if its residents had access to their land and trees—if settlers hadn’t stolen it.
The hatred Zionists feel for Palestinians, the brutality with which they treat Palestinians, is driven by envy and resentment. In short: the sin of covetousness.
Israeli Jews hate Palestinians for what they are and what they have: an indigenous identity and ancient connection to the land. Here, as so often, we find that hatred and love are strange siblings. Israelis hate Palestinians for one primary reason: They want to be Palestinian. The only way European Israeli Jews can claim an indigenous identity for themselves is to steal it and erase all evidence of Palestinian presence from the land.
This is the evil of covetousness, envy, jealousy, and greed.
Olive trees, many of which date to the Roman times, are evidence of Palestinian presence on the land for millennia. Families gather during the olive harvest, generations of people working, eating, laughing together—celebrating an ancient culture and tradition. The very existence of olive trees is an affront to Israel, evidence of the fundamental lie that the Jewish state was founded upon: A land without people.
Zionist have been destroying olive groves in Palestine since European Jews first arrived. More than two million trees have been uprooted in Occupied Palestine, according to Saed. It’s a number I cannot confirm. But Drop Site News reported last week, on 20 October—almost a year after my conversation with Saed—that one million olive trees have been destroyed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.