On Beyond Zionism

Jewish extremists uproot West Bank olive trees
AFP  20 hours ago
http://news.yahoo.com/jewish-extremists-uproot-west-bank-olive-trees-173456717.html

Jerusalem (AFP) - Suspected Jewish extremists have uprooted dozens of olive trees in a Palestinian-owned field in the West Bank, Israeli police said Saturday.

"Twenty-five olive trees were uprooted and sawn up in a field belonging to Palestinians near Bat Ayin" in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, police spokeswoman Louba Samri told AFP.

She said graffiti reading "price tag" and "Arab thieves" was found at the scene.

"Price tag" is a term used by Israeli extremists for attacks on Palestinians and their property, often in response to Israeli moves to dismantle settlements.

Similar graffiti was found Friday on a Muslim grave near the northern Israeli coastal city of Haifa.

The State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism included "price tag" attacks for the first time, citing UN figures of some "399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage."

Such attacks were "largely unprosecuted," it said.

On Saturday, a former chief of Israel's domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, condemned the refusal of security services to deal with Jewish fringe groups the same way as any terrorist cell.

"In the Shin Bet, the expression 'we can't' does not exist, it's more a case of 'we don't want to'," Carmi Gillon was quoted as saying by public radio.

And John Kerry took heat for suggesting that in the future Israel may become an apartheid state. Among some groups of Israelis, it already is. These attacks against Palestinians are their own Drang Nach Osten.

Zionism would have to be incredibly re-conceived to accommodate a State with Jews and Muslims together on an equal basis. If the two state solution cannot be implemented, we shall continue to see the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories... essentially, an apartheid solution:  we cannot live together, we cannot live side-by-side, so we shall live apart.

Meanwhile,

Suspected Jewish extremists vandalised a Muslim grave near the northern Israeli coastal city of Haifa, police said Friday, in the latest in a string of racist and religious attacks...

 http://news.yahoo.com/jewish-extremists-vandalise-muslim-grave-israel-163957037.html


We have allowed extremists to define the world for too long.

(However, there is a certain blog which seems to believe that destruction of trees is somewhat like crop circles, and really unimportant in the scheme of things... except for the lives of the olive farmers. There is even a suggestion that perhaps the Palestinian olive farmers are destroying their own trees, especially the ones hewed down on the Sabbath, for even Jewish extremists would observe Shabbas....

sort of  like:

Settler, settler, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough !
for the candles have been lit,
and we cannot hew it now.

type of sentiment, and referring to lighting the candles at the start of Shabbas.

I guess the defense of extremism in the name of extremism is not extreme.
http://israel-thrives.blogspot.com/2012/10/geoffff-moral-distinctions-101-first.html)

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