Israeli Rabbi Dov Lior, a prominent Zionist religious figure, issued a Jewish fatwa allowing settlers to pick and steal olives from Palestinian orchards in the occupied West Bank.
Afrasianet - On Friday, media outlets documented the participation of about 80 settlers in a coordinated attack in the West Bank village of Abu Falah. The attack included the burning of trees and the throwing of stones at Palestinians and journalists. One of those attacked was Washington Post photographer Heidi Levin, who was beaten by settlers while Israeli soldiers on the ground used tear gas against Palestinians trying to defend their land.
On the same day, extremist Israeli rabbi Dov Lior (one of the religious nationalist authorities and the religious leader of Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir) gave the Jewish "legitimate justification" for these attacks, including the legality of crop theft and land grabbing.
The operative part of this fatwa is that the Palestinians "did not buy the land from the Jews in the first place," and that their inability to harvest olives for security reasons (i.e., because the settlers themselves, or the army, prevented them from accessing them) means that they have lost hope of recovering the crops, and therefore allowed the settlers to harvest olives "even in areas far from the settlements", as an expression of Jewish ownership of the land and in implementation of what he described as the "obligation to occupy it"!
The rabbi's "fatwa", published by Hebrew media on Friday, was not just a religious permissibility to steal the Palestinian olive crop in the occupied West Bank, but also provided a stark example of the superstitious legislation of the settlement project: a Palestinian is denied access to his land, and then this prohibition is seen as evidence that he has abandoned its crop, allowing settlers (who could have been born in Poland, Yemen, the Falkland Islands, or New York) to seize it!
The fatwa tries to make acts of banditry, looting and organized crime a "religious act" for which the settler is sanctioned, and its rudeness and disregard for simple logic is based on turning the assault on the right of property into a source of a new right claimed by the aggressor, so that the forcibly imposed deprivation becomes evidence of "voluntary waiver", something that we find parallels on many levels in Israeli logic, including, for example, the phrase "voluntary emigration" that occurs as a result of ethnic cleansing.
This is inseparable from the transformations that the settlement project is taking place in the West Bank (with some settler organizations expressing a desire to expand it to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan), as agricultural and pastoral outposts, supported by Israeli budgets and roads, facilities, and means of guarding, have become tools to control large areas that go far beyond the boundaries of settlement buildings that do not proliferate.
This system coordinates the roles between the government, whose national-religious wing plays the role of planner, instigator, and financier, and the army and security apparatus, which guard the aggressors and intimidate the aggressors, and the armed settler organizations, which play the dynamic function.
The complex work of this system makes it clear that attacks on olive trees are not just a target of the symbol that unites Palestinian identity and memory, but also of the source of livelihood and the material relationship that binds man to his land. By making access to the tree fields risky, and by exposing crops to theft and trees to burning, economic ability to survive is eroded, and forced migration becomes an imposed consequence of the accumulation of violence, injustice, and terrorism.
By turning the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians into an argument to justify greater injustice, the rabbi's fatwa developed to illustrate a new logic that makes the occupation not only a source of rights for the occupier, but also a reason for taking them away from the owners of the land, an innovation that is confusing to think about what kind of incursion, arrogance, and madness can be categorized, and is it a form of black political comedy or an outright horror movie?
A Wide Wave of Terror Launched by Settlers in the West Bank
This andTerrorist settlers in the occupied West Bank on Friday launched large-scale attacks on Palestinians and olive pickers, including firing live bullets, beating them, burning vehicles and olive trees, seizing agricultural crops and forcing farmers to leave their lands.
They also assaulted foreign journalists, including an American photographer.
This came at a time when a UN official confirmed that settler attacks related to the olive harvest season exceeded the numbers recorded during the last season.
These attacks included shooting, beatings, and the burning of vehicles and olive trees, and resulted in injuries among Palestinians and Among them is an elderly man.
Settlers also stole olive fruits and seized agricultural equipment and crops in the Wadi Abwein area.
The settlers' attacks were accompanied by the firing of poison gas canisters intensively at the farmers by the occupation forces supporting the settlers in their aggression, which led to dozens of cases of suffocation.
American photojournalist Heidi Levine, who works for the Washington Post, was violently attacked by masked settlers in the village of Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, while documenting attacks on Palestinian farmers as the olive harvest season began.
The attackers pushed her to the ground and continued to kick her, and she said they kicked her about 50 times, before grabbing her press equipment and continuing to assault her, and she was taken by ambulance to a medical center in al-Bireh and then to the hospital for treatment.
In her statement after the attack, Levin said she saw about 50 masked settlers on a hill and could see their masks and slingshots through her lens, before they rushed towards her. She added that she was wearing a protective vest and helmet, which helped protect her from more serious injuries.
She also said that what she was subjected to in Abu Falah was not the first brutal assault on her during her journalistic work, and explained that she has been covering events in Palestine for more than three decades, and returned two days ago from Ukraine, where she spent three weeks covering the war.
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