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WIELDING THE AX OF BITTERNESS
By Michael Browning, Larry Kaplow
Cox News Service
Israelis chop down Palestinians'
precious olive trees, insisting
it's retaliation for rocks being
hurled at settlers.
Hares, Israel - 28 November: The Palestinian villagers heard the power
saws at midnight, racketing up the stony terraces to the hill-perched
village of Hares. It is where Joshua, the Hebrew conqueror of Canaan
in the Old Testament, is buried in ancient Samaria, on the modern West
Bank, the "Timnath Heres" of Joshua 33:29.
When Ali Abed Daoud Jaber, 76, awoke the next morning, he found he was
ruined. More than 400 olive trees were cut down by the Israeli army
along the highway leading to three Jewish settlements. At least 110
were his. His entire olive orchard lay felled on the stone-strewn ground.
"Where is God?" the old man screamed, gesturing with his cane as villagers
tried to calm him. "They cut down trees my grandfather tended! Trees
hundreds of years old! I depend on my trees completely.. . . What will
I
eat now? What will I drink?"
"He is become without a brain since he saw this," said Nasfat Khufash,
who belongs to a rural development committee in the vicinity. "He was
sitting in the middle of the road, crying, this morning."
The twisted trunks of the massacred trees rose as branchless spikes
from the loamy brown earth. One, about 8 inches in diameter, revealed
more than 70 growth rings when the sawdust was brushed off its surface.
Lopped olive branches lay in heaps, their feathery silver-green leaves
rustling in the breeze, beneath a sky as blue as a gas flame.
The destroyed trees lent an air of Old Testament wrath to the 2- month-old
struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. So far, more than 280 have
been killed, all but 35 of them Palestinians. Even olive trees have become
targets in the cycle of provocation and reprisal. Some 4,495 olive trees had
been cut down as of Nov. 9, according to figures kept by the Palestinian
National Authority's Ministry of Environmental Affairs.
Hares is in the West Bank, which was captured by Israel in the 1967
Middle East war. Israel has established more than 150 Jewish settlements in
the occupied territory.
The village has been roadblocked by the Israeli army, preventing people from
taking olives to market or to oil presses outside the village, Khufash said.
Losses from destroyed, rotted or unpicked crops in Palestinian areas
amount to $ 120 million this year, according to the Palestinian Economic
Council for Development and Reconstruction.
Jewish settlers driving past the felled trees yelled insults at foreign
reporters.
"What are you doing here, you rubbish?" one shouted.
"Take pictures! Take pictures!" called another, sarcastically.
Interviewed later, the settlers complained angrily that Hares village
children were throwing stones at their cars as they passed by, using the
olive groves for cover. One settler showed a deep dent on his van just above
the windshield. Another came over, cursing, and tried to kick in the
car
window of the reporters' vehicle, just for talking to the aggrieved
Palestinians.
But the villagers were angry, too. They said the army's response was a
devastating blow, out of proportion to the situation and punishing adults
for
the actions of children.
They took reporters to a site 100 yards from the highway, where 20 trees
had been cut down, seemingly too far from the road to serve any security
purpose.
An olive tree in these parts is like an interest-bearing bank account,
yielding up to 35 pounds of fruit year after year. Olive harvesting is a time-
honored family ritual. The velvety-purple fruit is knocked off branches
with
sticks, or plucked from ladders onto underlying tarpaulins by stroking each
leafy branch gently.
One farmer, Abdullah Hamed Suleiman, 62, who lost 71 trees to Israeli
chain saws Thursday, said the destroyed trees represented $ 4,000 a year in
income, from olive oil he sells to Jordan.
"For us Palestinians, an olive tree is exactly like a son," Khufash said.
"It is not a matter of money. You do not sell your son for money."
Distraught at their loss --- the villagers said more than 1,000 olive trees
had
been cut down in recent months --- the settlers invited reporters, over coffee
and orange sodas, to hear them spin theories about the olive tree massacre
and vent their wrath against the Israeli settlers who live in neat,
barracks-like apartments on hilltops throughout the region. Three settlements,
Ariel, Revava and Burkan, are near Hares, and settlers must pass beneath the
village on their way to and from work.
"The olive trees gave us food. Now they are only fit for the fire," said
Nawaf Suf. "We believe they want to deprive us of our livelihood, drive us off
the land and make common laborers of us, so we have to go to the cities
and work for Israelis."
When old Jaber escorted reporters to his ruined grove, he collapsed in
a pile of lopped branches and moaned. At precisely this moment, Yona
Shay, a 31-year-old Jewish settler who sells plumbing fixtures for a living,
pulled over beside the road and began arguing with the Palestinians. The
odds --- eight of them, just one of him --- didn't seem to faze him.
"There are a minimum of 100 stones being thrown every day from beside
this highway. By now 200 cars have been hit with stones," Shay said. "Men,
women and children have been injured by these stones. . . . I didn't cut
down any trees myself, but I would have if I could have."
The old man clambered across the ditch and went chin-to-chin with Shay.
"It is as if you cut my throat!" he shouted.
"If someone gives you a punch, do you turn the other cheek?" Shay
answered calmly. "If we get hurt, we have damage, we have to do
something back."
In the nearby settlement of Revava, a 38-year-old computer repairman
named Yitzhak Hillel defended the army's destruction of the olive trees.
"We spoke to the army many times about the stone-throwing, and they did
nothing. My feeling is, every time I come back home from work, I feel like a
duck in a shooting gallery."
An hour before sunset, the rock-throwing resumed. The minarets of
Palestinian villages glimmered white at the summits of the brown hills,
which rolled into a wide wasteland of rocks, tufted here and there with olive
groves.
Two squads of Israeli soldiers took up positions along the highway and
began firing sporadically as rocks landed on the road. Just past the
stretch of lopped trees, a large white stone caromed defiantly off the asphalt
a few yards in front of the reporters' car.
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