Israeli forces uproot 300 olive trees in Nablus

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://www.maannews.com/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=759794

NABLUS (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces uprooted 300 olive trees on private Palestinian land in the Nablus village of Salem on Monday, Palestinian liaison officials said.

Director of the Nablus District Civil Liaison Office Luay al-Saadi told Ma'an that Israeli bulldozers uprooted the trees 48 hours after his office requested that Palestinian farmers be given access to plow the land.

The fields are located near the illegal Israeli outpost of Havat Skali.

There were at least 329 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in 2014, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

[Igel]

1. That's one weirdly worded blip.

So the Israeli bulldozers went in before the Palestinian plows could do the deed?

I mean, that's what it says by any reasonable inferencing. There was land with olive trees on it. The Palestinians wanted to plow it. Hard to plow olive trees. The branches get stuck in the blades.

Presumably the Palestinians owned the land outright with a deed and it wasn't former state land squatted on by virtue of having worked it for so many years. That's been a frequent ploy, whether you like it or lump it. But either way, I don't see how the trees' destruction itself is a big deal. Either way, the trees get it in the roots.

If it really was private, deeded land, it remains private, deeded land and taking it for the settlement would be violation of their deed--rather a larger issue. Either way, no change. Except that now the Palestinians have an easier time plowing it. And the "Israeli bulldozers" part suddenly become fairly inexplicable under any semblance of a reasonable inference.

If they were Israeli--not by that, not just "Israeli owned, and rented by Palestinians" or some such dodge--then a plausible but by no means likely inference is that the land was deemed "privately owned" by the Palestinian side and not by the Israeli side. A state of affairs that has happened fairly often in the last decade. And I'd note that those trees don't look to be exactly ancient.