09Nov03-Uzi Benziman-Pure olive oil
By Uzi Benziman
On Friday afternoon, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
released a special statement in which he said that
he viewed "with the very gravest seriousness" the
reports of the uprooting of hundreds of olive
trees near the West Bank village of Inbus. Since
then, the country has been holding its breath:
What happens when the prime minister sees the
behavior of the settlers as gravely serious
vandalism? He even he instructed the security
forces "to take all possible steps to apprehend
those responsible and bring them to justice."
Sharon is a champ when it
comes to making statements.
His political behavior
navigates skillfully between
external gestures heavily
laced with declarations of
intent. In this he is
reminiscent of a chef who
quickly raises and lowers the
flames under his pots. The
trouble is that he continues to play with fire.
Thus, Sharon announces the removal of closures
in the territory when American anger boils over
the conditions of the Palestinians. He
announces his intent personally to see to the
problems of the Arab sector when foment there
reaches a new flash point. And thus he promises
the governor of the Bank of Israel that he will
keep a lid on the budget in order to stop the
governor from lowering the interest rate.
Sharon changes his opinions and his statements
with changing circumstances.
The special statement on Friday comes in the
wake of the public relations damage done to
Israel by reports (in Hebrew in Yediot Ahronot)
of the destruction of the Inbus olive groves by
settlers from the illegal outpost near Yizhar.
The picture is certainly terrible in its
cruelty: settlers prevented the villagers from
getting to their groves at harvest time, just
as they had done in previous years. When, a
week ago, some villagers dared to try to
approach their lands, protected by volunteers
and a handful of police, they found that
hundreds of trees, the source of their
livelihood, had been cut down.
Anyone who watches television knows those types
who live on the hills. Those peculiar bullies,
raging as they spit out their personal
manifestos, go wild in their confrontations
with soldiers and police. Ordinarily they do
not speak, but rather shout their expressions
with an air of superiority, waving clubs and
sowing terror around them. They are the cup of
venom of the settlement movement. In theory,
they are an exception, from which the Yesha
mainstream demurs; in practice, they are the
very embodiment of the entire settler idea.
These wild men from the Yizhar hills, like the
hysterical women of the Jewish enclave in
Hebron, and the aggressive young men from the
settlement of Tapuah, come in the name of the
right of the Jews to greater Israel. They
conquer hill after hill in the name of the
divine promise. The first settlers went to
Sebastia in the name of that promise, and in
its name they are still developing Jewish
settlement over the Green Line.
The brutality with which the settlers from the
Yizhar hills took over the lands of the Inbus
villagers is only one example of the violent
actions that the state of Israel has carried
out in the Palestinian territories since 1967.
In Palestinian eyes, the establishment of the
"legal" settlements is rape, and the growth of
"illegal" outposts is aggression, and so is the
invasion of the Inbus olives groves by
individual settlers.
That is true with regard to the individual cases
of destruction wrought by the settlers: they
are a reflection of the institutionalized
attack by the state on the rights of the
Palestinians. That is what the "denuding" of
the land, the fencing off, and the
expropriation is about. The violence of the
hilltop youth is an unavoidable growth in the
climate of Israel-Palestinian relations.
Back to Sharon's statement: What is more obvious
than to send a battalion, properly outfitted
for its mission, to the hills surrounding
Yizhar and to dismantle the illegal outposts?
Instead, the prime minister publishes a
statement, dripping with pure olive oil.
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