What Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank may not be quite as bloody as what they’re doing to them in Gaza, but it is surely just as pernicious. From Cara Marianna at thefloutist.substack.com:
Olive trees and the covetousness of West Bank settlers.
A settler and three soldiers beat an elderly man as his wife escapes.Nahalin, Occupied Palestine.15 October 2025. (Screenshot. With permission.)
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3 NOVEMBER—Texts have arrived from Palestinian friends with increasing frequency these past weeks, each one documenting an upsurge in the destruction of olive trees by Jewish settlers and the Zionist Occupation Forces throughout the West Bank.
Attacks on Palestinians and olive groves routinely escalate during the harvest season which begins mid–October. But the current number and intensity of daily assaults represents an unprecedented and ominous escalation of violence—further evidence that the Zionist regime is escalating its ethnic cleansing in pursuit of informal annexation of the remaining land of Palestine.
Why, you might wonder, do Zionists attack olive trees? Why do they destroy a tree revered in the Old Testament and sacred in the Jewish tradition? What motivates this pathological fixation?
Olives are a critical and substantial source of food and income for Palestinians. Most simply and obviously: The Zionist regime is starving West Bank Palestinians, economically and in actuality. But the Zionist obsession with destroying olive trees has less evident and darker psychological imperatives—covetousness and envy among them.
They will go full Leningrad?
Don’t give them any ideas!