{Originally posted on author’s website, LIBERTY UNYIELDING}
Some of the basic things America is losing with the onset of the Obama administration are sanity and common sense in our diplomatic representation abroad.
An unfortunate example of this decline occurred on Friday, when some of our own “Jerusalem consulate personnel” were reportedly attacked by Israeli “settlers” throwing stones, during a visit by the Americans to the site of an alleged “settler attack” on the olive trees of a Palestinian Arab grower in the West Bank.
State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said no one was hurt and the American security team had not drawn their weapons. Earlier reports had indicated that American security staff had done so; settlers were quoted saying the security personnel had drawn an M-16 and a pistol.
“We can confirm a vehicle from the Consulate General was pelted with stones and confronted by a group of armed settlers today in the West Bank, near the Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya,” he said.
“Our personnel were in the area looking into reports that settlers had uprooted some 5,000 olive tree saplings in that area in recent days,” he said, adding that the visit had been cancelled after the attack.
Now, hold it right there. We can certainly question the wisdom of roaming foreign territory, making independent inquiries into criminal allegations about property damage. We can question what exactly gives us a charter to do that (especially without having coordinated the visit with the local authorities first. See more here).
But even before getting to that question, we have to question the wisdom of “investigating” one of these recurring, unsubstantiated allegations about settlers attacking Palestinian olive trees. Researching the matter reveals that the “information theme” about it is a big racket.
But we have more to go on than that. It turns out that the “damage” we see in the photos of olive trees “attacked by settlers” is identical to the effects of olive-tree husbandry as practiced by olive growers around the world.
Start with this University of California manual on pruning olive trees, published in 1966. The images alone convey the sometimes-startling visuals that go with maintaining producing olive trees. Not everything that needs to be done looks “kind” to the tree. Some of it looks pretty drastic, and may be done with big machines. If you’ve ever driven along California State Highway 99 during pruning season, you’ve seen the results with your own eyes. You could well be tempted to think, “Man, those Israeli settlers really get around.”
But it’s not all mere pruning, as we think of pruning; i.e., as a selective process that leaves the tree basically intact. Often, olive growers are preparing their trees for top-grafting: the process of grafting new-growth cuttings onto old-growth branches.
This is the process that requires cutting the main branches back to a state of dramatic-looking nudity. During preparation, the main branches receive clean perpendicular cross-cuts, right across the branch – exactly as seen in many of the images of Arab growers’ olive trees supposedly “attacked by settlers.”
Burned piles of branches? It’s an ordinary part of pruning. But when the big main branches are cut off for top-grafting, the wood can go to the thriving olive-wood industry, which has a long-celebrated artisan foothold in the West Bank, but also produces numerous wood products, from flooring to kitchen implements to paper, wherever olive trees are cultivated around the Mediterranean (e.g., Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain). A search on “olive wood industry” will verify this to your satisfaction.
Other bloggers have pointed out some of this in the last decade (see here and here, for example). In 2012, the Blaze provided a video taken by Israeli settlers, which the settlers say shows the Arabs themselves making the cuts on their olive trees that then yielded the photos of “damage.”
In terms of logic, this supposition is clearly more credible than the hypothesis that Israeli settlers can do silently and invisibly what the Israeli government has to do by deploying teams of workers to operate big machines in a noisy and detectable manner.
One final note. As discussed in the Blaze story (as well as here, more recently), anti-Israel activists – i.e., foreign NGO workers – reportedly take part in the false-flag “attacks” on the West Bank olive trees. These are the organizations that later spread the allegations about settler attacks.
This brings us full circle to the original story about the incident on Friday involving personnel from the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. What are our people doing, skulking around the West Bank as if the U.S. State Department is a radical-left NGO? Beyond the stupidity of the political theater, there is the sordid possibility that some questionable damage claims are made just to get monetary compensation. And the Obama State Department doesn’t even demand video evidence, at a minimum, before it goes off ambulance-chasing.
* The title invokes the theme “The Passion of the Toys” proposed (with sardonic intent) by blogger Slublog in August 2006. He compared a series of emotive images posted in the mainstream media, of seemingly unaffected children’s toys lying in the rubble of sites damaged by Israel’s 2006 operation against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.