PHOTOS: Hundreds of olive trees destroyed near West Bank village

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://972mag.com/hundreds-of-olive-trees-destroyed-near-west-bank-village/81250/

Nearly 230 olive trees were destroyed earlier this week in the northern West Bank. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO that documents human rights violations in the occupied territories, the trees belonged to the Radwan family from the village Azzoun, and were planted no more than five years ago.

The family began harvesting the trees, which lie near the junction of Karnei Shomron and the village Kufr Latif, just yesterday, leading them to suspect that they were destroyed shortly thereafter or during the early hours of the morning.

The destruction comes at the height of the tense olive harvest season, which has seen a dramatic rise in settler attacks against Palestinians and their olive trees. According to Rabbis for Human Rights, nearly 2,000 Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed in recent months in areas the Israeli army knows to be flash points.

This is the ugly face of Israeli apartheid.

When you can't chase Palestinians off of their land, deny them permits to use the land.

When Palestinians are able to get permits to use their own lands make it hard for them to access the land.

When Palestinians are able to access their lands attack them them while they are present.

When Palestinians aren't present destroy what they have built.


If this was going on today against any ethnic group there would be a severe public outcry against it: both in the USA and abroad.

So why do we, the USA, allow it while funding the Israelis as they continue to do it?

[dipsydoodle]

1. That is absolutely disgusting.

I won't say what I wish for the ****s who did that.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

3. It is state sponsored terrorism against a locked down population.

[polly7]

8. That's exactly what it is. nt

[polly7]

2. This makes me sick. nt

[King_David]

4. So disgusting vandalism by disgusting people is Apartheid ?

Yep,

Everything that happens in The Jewish State is Apartheid by those with an "agenda" .

[polly7]

5. It doesn't take having an 'agenda' to see what's right in front of your face! nt

[King_David]

7. So tell me who were the perps

The Jewish State? Or the Jewish Settlers ?

Yep yep that's right in front of your face alright..

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

16. Don't you mean illegal Israeli settlers?

[King_David]

18. Exactly

What I mean.. Yes

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

19. And by extension who allows their illegality to flourish while hurting a capitve population?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

10. Hey all Duers, whever I post about these horrific events I am always amused

when I am met with the same lineup of deniers, wrong-headed detractors and screamers: intent on moving away from the message through distraction and belittlement.

There are some on DU that love nothing more to be one of the "It never happened" crowd when thousands of Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted, burned down: destroyed.

Strangely these soulless automatons care nothing for the lives of other people if they happen to be Palestinian while showing how cold blooded, callous and venomous they really are.

[King_David]

11. You replied to myself, and addressed me as 'Hey all Duers'.

Was that a mistake?


I will pass your message along.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

12. Everybody can read the subthread, dave, and understand what I am getting at.

Thanks for for proving my point by attempting to derail another thread though.

Now back to the OP.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113450267

[King_David]

6. Bad News from the Netherlands

http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.ca/


The 972Mag model.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

13. Bad news for dave. The truth hurts you doesn't it?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/113450267

[oberliner]

9. Karnei Shomron Mall suicide bombing

On Saturday night, 16 February 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber, who was wearing a 25-pound nail-studded explosive device strapped to his body, approached the popular crowded open mall in the Karnei Shomron settlement located in the West Bank.

The militant detonated the bomb at the entrance to a pizza parlor at about 7:45 p.m. The blast killed three teenagers (a 15-year-old girl, a 16-year-old girl, and a 15-year-old boy) and injured 27 people, six of them seriously. Two of the teenagers were killed instantly, while a third died of her wounds on February 27.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnei_Shomron_Mall_suicide_bombing

Your article mentioned Karnei Shomron, which is most likely where the people who destroyed the trees in Azzoun are from.

There is definitely a good deal of bad blood between those two communities.

I mean, 3 human beings were massacred just over ten years ago. One might expect the Palestinians to erect a monument to those victims or to honor the memory of those murdered. They were just children, after all.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

14. Thanks for trying to deflect away from the article.

Israeli terror and land theft must be glossed over whenever possible.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/113450267

[oberliner]

23. Quite the opposite

Trying to understand where the animosity between the communities comes from. Why would people go out of their way to destroy olive trees? What is the motivation? Are they just evil?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

25. Reverse the roles between Israeli and Palestinian

then tell me what it would mean.

The motive is what it has been for more than a generation: theft by any means possible.

[oberliner]

28. Theft by any means possible?

Why then did Israel completely withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula (which cut the land area of Israel by over 2/3rds) and withdraw all settlements from Gaza?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

30. The OP is about the West Bank, Oberliner.

Do you really feel the need to obfucate?

[oberliner]

31. I understand that

So you think Israel wants to steal land in the West Bank by any means possible?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

34. Israel controls 60% of the West Bank. 500k Illegal Israeli settlers live in the West Bank with

plans for an additional 500k to come.

[oberliner]

39. Let's work to end that together

Check this out:

http://www.geneva-accord.org/

[azurnoir]

15. so you feel a bombing over a decade ago justifies the actions of settlers today apparently

otherwise the tenuous link has no meaning

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

17. Ober just phones it in.

I will just move any distraction/diversion back to the OP from now on.

[oberliner]

29. Let's please talk about the OP

What do you think should be done about it?

[oberliner]

24. Not at all

But there is a relationship. Past events certainly do influence present behavior with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[azurnoir]

35. " Past events certainly do influence present behavior" certainly sounds like an attempt

to justify something

[oberliner]

38. OK

That's in your mind.

More knowledge is always better than less in my opinion.

[oberliner]

20. These people are an embarrassment to Israel

Despicable behavior. And the Israeli government too frequently turns a blind eye.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

21. This is a criminal enterprise, Oberliner, and the Israeli government is smack in the middle of it.

[oberliner]

22. Can't agree with you there

I think these individuals are criminals and the government should do more to halt this sort of behavior.

I also think there needs to be a peace agreement along the lines of the Geneva Accord. I wish more people would look seriously at that initiative.

http://www.geneva-accord.org/

[PDJane]

26. Israel does not want peace

That has been the case from the beginning. Even before Israel was granted a state, Zionists engaged in terrorism, some of it against their own people in the middle east.

It is state policy.

Until Israel has the whole of Palestine, and Palestinians are no longer considered a people by the majority of the world, Israel will continue state terrorism and a propaganda effort that has defied anything I've seen, including the rewriting of history in the U.S..

The Balfour Accord tried to protect the rights of Palestinians. That has been ignored. The Geneva accord did not grant Palestinian rights, and every accord since then has been scuttled by the Israeli insistence on their rights over Palestinians.

Israel was, and continues to be, the aggressor, using every tool at hand to 'prove' their rights. Those rights are illusory.

[oberliner]

27. Not true

Last edited Mon Nov 4, 2013, 04:39 PM - Edit history (1)

Most of what you've written here is simply not true.

It is sort of startling that you or anyone else thinks these things.

The Geneva Accord did not grant Palestinian rights? Do you even know what the Geneva Accord is?

[PDJane]

32. Yeah, I know what the Geneva Accord is.

Israel has been ignoring the Geneva accord since before the ink was dry on the document.

Nor will Israel withdraw to the 1967...or the 1948....borders.

One more time. Israel does not want peace. It wants, and is determined to have, all of Palestine, and the Palestinians bedamned.

They want...and so far, they have managed to get...the water table, the land, and the resources. They will starve the Palestinians, they have military superiority, and they will and do kill to get what they want and to keep the discord going. The bais of the turmoil in the middle east is Palestine, and it has been the issue for more than fifty years. It will continue to be the issue because Israel is determined to make it the issue.

[oberliner]

33. I think you are confused

The Geneva Accord/Initiative hasn't been accepted by anyone, yet. It is just a proposal that I think ought to be adopted. I believe I provided the link above, but here it is again:

http://www.geneva-accord.org/

I would encourage you to check it out. If you do, I'd be curious to know your thoughts.

I really disagree with your assessment with respect to Israel. I am fairly confident that they do in fact want peace and that they don't want all of Palestine. I believe there is evidence to support that, such as the peace proposals that, while not ideal, did include the creation of an independent Palestinian state living side by side at peace with Israel.

I do not believe there is evidence to support your description of Israel starving the Palestinians and killing them to get what they want and to keep the discord going to the extent that they are capable of given the military superiority that you make mention of. There is nothing even approximating starvation going on in either the West Bank or Gaza and the number of Palestinians killed has been relatively small over the last fifty years. It is certainly not true to state that "the basis of the turmoil in the middle east is Palestine" as you claim, since in just the last few years alone more than five times the number of people have been killed in the fighting in Syria than in all of the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians combined over the past sixty. To say nothing of the casualties of the Iran/Iraq war and other conflicts unrelated to this one.

[PDJane]

36. It's not going to be accepted either.

It's not going BE accepted, either. It's not going to get Israel what she wants, which is power....and land, and resources.

One more time. Decades of a brutal occupation, increasing religious zealotry and a constant barrage of propaganda....including that 'poor us, Palestinians want to push us into the sea,' business are the proof that Israel does not want peace. They have not, do not, and will not. Some of Israel's people might want peace, and may have wanted peace, but the state does not. Israel has been a sponsor of state terrorism since before there was an Israel: she was born in terror. The simple reason for that was that Israel wanted all of Palestine, without the Palestinians, as an Israeli state. The Zionists wanted Jewish people to move there, and therefore decided to move as many people as possible there, by any means possible. That included terror attacks on small Jewish communities in the middle east, in the hope that they could be driven to move to Israel.

Israel will continue to burn olive groves, beat Palestinians, deny Palestinians their own right to their own land, remove nomad villages, and keep the taxes, water and resources. (By the way, the water table is the reason that the wall goes around so much land that is NOT part of Israel proper; the water table was not part of the 1967 borders.) They will not consider giving the Palestinians whom they have displaced or murdered or imprisoned any kind of reparations. They will not stop, and the only reason that it seems that it has stopped is that you haven't been paying attention; the US media does not report Palestinian deaths, injuries, or incarceration.

"It is certainly not true to state that "the basis of the turmoil in the middle east is Palestine" as you claim, since in just the last few years alone more than five times the number of people have been killed in the fighting in Syria than in all of the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians combined over the past sixty. To say nothing of the casualties of the Iran/Iraq war and other conflicts unrelated to this one."

The Iran/Iraq war, the war between Iraq and Kuwait, and the 'Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people stuff is a red herring, too. The first Gulf war was a war of aggression; the US was the aggressor there, too. The second Gulf War is the same deal; another war of aggression. The fighting in Syria is that oxymoron, a civil war. However, that isn't entirely free of US meddling either!

The turmoil is part of the support of the United States for dictators and, yes, Israel. Palestinians and Palestine have been a victim of the support for Israel.

Israel is not an innocent; even the 1967 war was not the plucky little Israel against all those big, bad Arabs that has been the narrative. Israel was the aggressor. She was well-armed and determined to start that war. The Palestinians and Arab states were not; Egypt was engaged in her own little Imperial war, and had a few planes left over from WWII; spitfires, I think, and a couple of bombers.

And yes, there are Palestinians in refugee camps, a burden on other countries' economy, in an area where resources are already strained. Some of them have been there for more than 60 years. For them, the injustices of the Balfour declaration have never been forgotten, because they are living them.

(I'm not counting, by the way, the war in Afghanistan and the constant accusations of the US against Iran. Afghanistan and Iran are not, technically, the middle east. )

I once supported Israel. I do not now, and am unlikely to do so in the future.

Both Israel and the United States have ignored the stipulations laid down about the Palestinians in the Balfour Declaration. They have ignored the rights of the Palestinians that were written into the Geneva conventions. In fact, the US has been ignoring International law, including those that they helped write, for decades as well.

It's long past time for Israel to be confined to Israel, to stop her illegal settlements, and to cede a contiguous Palestine back to the Palestinians. It's also time for Israel to pay reparations to Palestine for confiscated territory.

[oberliner]

37. OK

I do appreciate your taking the time to respond, but I simply do not agree with a lot of what you have written.