{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).
Palestinian Arab woman, overcome by the pruning of olive trees.
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.
For one thing, there is never the slightest evidence that Israeli settlers did anything to the trees. It would take days of work to achieve the effects offered as “evidence” by the complaining Arabs: lopped-off old-growth branches, great piles of newer-growth branches, piles of burned branches, trunks cut back to a state of near-pristine nudity. The allegations about uprooted saplings – always “hundreds” or “thousands” of them – are not accompanied by affecting photos, as the allegations of attacks on more mature trees are. But uprooting thousands of saplings would also take days of work. Yet Israeli settlers are never caught on camera attacking olive trees. This is logically impossible. It’s impossible for settler posses to raid olive groves, wreaking havoc that would take them days of dedicated work to accomplish, and never be caught in the act.
Palestinian Arabs inspect piles of olive tree prunings left by vandals in Qaryut, Oct 2013.
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.”
(Pic#1) Normally pruned olive trees in the center. Image from a grower in Italy at http://notesfromatuscanolivegrove.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/pruning-the-olive-trees-before-and-after/(Pic#2) The pruning pile grows as the Italian grower takes us through the pruning process. (Notes from a Tuscan Olive Grove; see link at photo above.)(Pic 3) Another Tuscan grower’s image of a pruning pile and well-pruned trees. His caption for this photo reads: “things are starting to look good.”
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.
An Italian grower cuts off limbs to prepare an olive tree for top-grafting.
The Italian grower makes an incision for the graft.
A grower demonstrates a completed top-graft on an olive tree.
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.”
A Palestinian Arab poses with his olive tree, vandalized with remarkable precision to be ready for top-grafting
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.
A Tuscan grower photographs his pruning fire in a series of images demonstrating the process for pruning olive trees. Image from www.mapitout-tuscany.com/2013/03/olive-tree-pruning-in-italy-photo-guide.html
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.”
An Israeli bulldozer uproots olive trees in Beit Jala in Mar 2010.Another view of the Israeli bulldozers uprooting olive trees in Beit Jala in Mar 2010
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.
July 3, 2026 
