With that and more, Israel has made itself a pariah state. The Zionists may carry on attacking farmers and their orchards for a while longer, but one thing is sure: Palestine and its olive trees will long outlive the decaying State of Israel. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/11/u... 9/9

Attempts to destroy Palestine’s olive culture are genocidal, right in sync with genocide-by-bullet, genocide-by-bomb, genocide-by-starvation, genocide-by-thirst, genocide-by-obliteration of health care, and genocide-by-destruction of schools and universities. 8/9

Palestinian history easily refutes all that. They’ve worked through 4,500 olive harvests on that land—enduring invasions by Assyrians Babylonians Persians Greeks Romans Ottomans Brits … and staying firmly rooted despite 8 decades of Zionist attempts to drive them off their land 7/9

This aligns with the racist Western stereotype of indigenous people lazily plucking their food from nature rather than laboriously wringing food from the soil by the sweat of their brow as civilized nations do. 6/9

Throughout Israel’s short history, its settlers have simultaneously romanticized the olive tree and looked down their noses at the Palestinians for cultivating it. 5/9

Their long-term, obsessive campaign to erase the Palestinians’ olive orchards from the landscape is also necessary to the myth of Israeli agricultural prowess and attachment to the land and the racist trope that Jewish immigrants to Palestine “made the desert bloom” 4/9

In trying to wipe out olive production in the West Bank, the occupation forces and their settler shock troops are united around one main goal: to drive Palestinians out of Palestine and absorb their lands into a Greater Israel. 3/9

In olive harvests going back to 1967, Israelis violently assaulted farmers, barred them from their land, and destroyed their olive groves. The Applied Research Institute reports that from 1976 to 2013, soldiers and settlers cut or uprooted an estimated 3.4 million olive trees 2/9

That must change for both issues. But the Palestinian people, whose clock is ticking faster and faster toward midnight, need us to stand up *right now* 7/7
www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/17/b...

With a government guilty of perpetrating and sustaining two of the most heinous injustices on this planet, still, only a small portion of our civil society is standing up or acting up against either the genocide or global warming. 6/7

The United States has generated more of the fossil carbon currently in the atmosphere than has any other. And we have provided the bulk of material, logistical, and political support that made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible. 5/7

… and the burning moral obligation to our fellow human beings in Gaza is so crystal clear, that for now, forcing Israel to stop the genocide must take priority over pushing for climate mitigation. 5/7

The odds are heavily stacked against any of those things happening, but Israeli leaders have dialed their torture of the Palestinian people up so high, the urgency to stop them is so extreme, the means of stopping them are so straightforward, … 4/7

Israel’s genocide, in contrast, could be broken at any time if we can stop Washington’s arms shipments to Israel and push for a hard crackdown that includes suffocating diplomatic and economic sanctions. 3/7

To slow global warming will require deep reductions in energy and material throughput over many years in this country and throughout the Global North. 2/7