Killing Trees and Lambs

Gideon Levy reports from the occupied West Bank:

Less than a month ago, in this space, we told the story of the beautiful vineyard belonging to the agri­cul­ture teacher Mohammed Abu Awad from the village of Mureir, whose 300 trees were felled by intruders — probably from the illegal outpost of Adei Ad — using buzz saws.

Here, clues left by the criminals suggest that they used handsaws and ripped out the crowns of the trees with their hands, one crown after another, one branch after another, rending and wounding the trees. In Mureir, the agri­cul­ture teacher wrapped the stumps in sacks, giving them the look of figures in shrouds. Here, in Burin, the stumps remain where they were hurled on the ground, stacks of dead wood, branches withering, until finally the farmer will use them as firewood to heat the village’s clay ovens, the tabuns.

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But the feeling is the same, the affront is the same and so is the grief. In October, the farmer Abu Awad said about the ruins of his vineyard in Mureir: “What must you feel if you plant and tend and then it’s all cut down? What must I feel? If I had been there, I’d have told them, cut off my hands, but don’t cut down my trees — What did the tree do to them, for them to treat it like this?” (Haaretz Magazine, October 16)

Readers of Jewbonics will be aware of my tendency to wax soppy when I read about trees being destroyed. That’s the legacy of coming to the left via a concern for the envi­ron­ment, I guess [Some Zionist reader will proclaim now that olive boughs are anti-Semitic, perhaps since you could carve a cudgel from them or something, cudgels have been used to hit Jews; fill in the syl­lo­gis­tic blank as you wish]. These are the settlers that occupy an increas­ingly large part of the Israeli officer corps, and the IDF too. They’re a bit wilder and more primitive than the people of Tel-Aviv, sure, and appar­ently quite handy, having used hand-saws to indi­vid­u­ally rip apart scores of living trees. I read stories like this in Ha’aretz, and think American liberal Zionists must simply refuse to read them. Otherwise they pretend that they’re aberrant, even though Levy is able to report on the metic­u­lous destruc­tion of Pales­tin­ian agro-forestry about once a month. Last time, it was trees over 35 years-old, reduced to stumps, treated with white lime and white shrouds to try to coax them back to life in six years’ time. As Levy writes, “The saws buzzed, and the grove was gone. The crop has gone, the money has gone, decades of work have gone, pride has gone, love has gone. In their place, fury has come, a sense of deep insult, and contempt for those who did this thing.” In the hills of Hebron, settlers attack flocks of sheep. On Friday, they killed a lamb. That’s crazy. That’s Zionism.

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Tech­no­rati Tags: ecocide, ecology, Gideon Levy, Israel-Palestine, olive trees, West Bank

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