If I told you that some olive trees were damaged or tree limbs broken, trunks hacked or that olive trees were cut down, you most probably would think that those nasty ''settler'' youth were out again last night, operating their ''price tag'' policy.
And what if I told you that Arabs cut down trees and break the branches of saplings?
Would you believe me?
A fortnight ago, I published this picture
Photo credit: YMedad
Look carefully and you can several of about 120 olive trees planted and nutured by Moshe Tamir of Adei-Ad, an outpost community in the east Shiloh Bloc. They are broken, hacked and damaged. The land is state land, assigned and registered to Shiloh over 30 years ago by the government of Israel.
As the Edmund Levy Report clarifies, the land that is defined as "state" and "waste" in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was to become part of the Jewish national home by decision with the authority of international law and that, as the League of Nations decided in 1922, the Mandate power was to facilitate close Jewish settlement on those lands.
Did you read about that property damage in the mainstream media?
Yesterday, my neighbor here in Shiloh went out to his olive tree orchard on the east side of Highway 60 between Shiloh and Eli to the north
This is what he saw:
Photo credit: Miriam-Feyga Bunimovitch
Some 15 olive trees were totally damaged and another 30 had their branches broken. Some three years ago, the grove suffered similar violence.
Starting in October, we now have the annual "olive tree festival" in Samaria. In Ireland, you''ll read about the ''bitter harvest'' for the Arabs, as you will in our own local Haaretz. In Canada''s National Post, at least, you can learn that Jews and Arabs "trade accusations". But the central framing of this is that Jews attack Arab trees.
You may have seen the video clip shot near Elon Moreh in which, it was claimed, that Arabs were staging the occurence of damage to their own trees. Very quickly, B''tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights asserted that the story was all wrong.
Since I would hope that these Rabbis'' concerns for human rights extends to Jews, and since they have very close relationships with Arabs, perhaps they could find out what happened to almost 200 olive trees being grown by Jews in the Shiloh Bloc.
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