On This Day

Israel's Defence Ministry is investigating reports that Palestinian olive trees uprooted to make way for a security fence are being sold illegally to rich Israelis and town councils, sometimes for thousands of pounds each. The illegal trade in olive trees has flourished as Israeli contractors, supported by armed guards, clear Palestinian agricultural land where an 80-mile electronic fence is being built to seal off the West Bank... The reporters found one enormous tree, said to be 600 years old, on sale at an Israeli plant nursery for £3,500. They said the trade was conducted with the complicity of an official in the civil administration, the Israeli military government in the occupied territories.

The Defence Ministry, which is in charge of the security fence, said it had launched an investigation. "The ministry pays contractors for uprooting and replanting and, in their contract, there is no clause that allows for trade in the trees. If there is such a trade, it is a criminal activity," it said. Some contracts require the olive trees to be relocated to areas suggested by their owners outside the Israeli-declared security zone. But Yael Stein, researcher for B'tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, said: "We have never seen any relocation. The contractors cannot just sell the trees. That is theft."

While the trees may be ornaments to Israelis, olives are the lifeblood of Palestinian agriculture, almost the only crop which grows on the stony hillsides of the West Bank without irrigation. Most Palestinians are unemployed after two years of violence and their staple diet is bread and olive oil. About 11,000 Palestinian farmers will lose all or some of their land holdings to the fence. Sharif Omar, from the village of Jayous, near the Israeli town of Kochav Yair, said: "I have lost almost everything. I have lost 2,700 fruit and olive trees. And 44 of 50 acres I own have been confiscated for the fence." His village lost seven wells, 15,000 olive trees and 50,000 citrus and other fruit trees. "This area is the agricultural store for the West Bank. They are destroying us," he said.

Israel is offering compensation for confiscated agricultural land but Palestinians are unlikely to apply, as they still hope to get their land back. The Palestinian Agriculture Ministry says 200,000 olive trees have been destroyed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the past two years to provide security for settlers.

Haaretz reported the phenomenon as if a single rogue contractor was law-breaking, which the military occupation authorities would deal with:

"The suspect allegedly stole hundreds of trees after loading them at night on trucks he rented and selling them at thousands of shekels apiece to nurseries across the country. Police say he allegedly made a profit of hundreds of thousands of shekels. Police suspect the official concealed the alleged theft by giving false reports on the amount of trees uprooted. Police said that the suspect was cooperating with investigators and admitted to some of the charges against him."

For liberal Zionists at Haaretz the crimes of the occupation must be carried out with scrupulous regard for the written rules of the Israeli military.

By 2015 the Israelis had already destroyed over a million Palestinian olive and fruit trees.

Destruction of Palestinian olive trees is a monstrous crime
Dr Cesar Chelala 7/11/15
Over the last 40 years, over a million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees have been destroyed in Palestinian lands...The uprooting of centuries-old olive trees has caused tremendous losses to farmers and their families. At the same time, restrictions to harvesting have come through curfews, security closures and attacks by settlers. One such attack in the South Hebron Hills was documented on The Ecologist.

The uprooting of olive trees by the Israel Defense Forces and by settlers are done to protect the settlers, since they are supposedly used to protect gunmen or stone throwers. "The tree removals are for the safety of settlers ... No one should tell me that an olive tree is more important than a human life", declared an IDF army commander, Colonel Eitan Abrahams.

2-minute video of settler/army destruction of Palestinian trees and crops. A search will turn up thousands of similar videos of these war crimes.