Palestine has an area of 6,165 square kilometers (5,800 West Bank, 365 Gaza, plus East Jerusalem, La Rioja 5,003). Since October 7, and with the argument of eliminating the Hamas terrorists, Gaza has been destroyed. More than 35,000 dead, … almost half children. While all eyes are directed there, olive trees are being uprooted in the West Bank.
“The Government declares a number of hectares as state-owned without parallel since the 1990s, while the far-right Minister of Finance legalizes more than 60 colonies through the back door and 15 new ones appear in the hills” (El País, May 15, 2024) . Since 1967, Israeli authorities have uprooted one million olive trees in Palestine, where half of the cultivated land is planted with olive trees. In 2000 there were 93,643 hectares and 54,091 in 2022 (in La Rioja 5,756).
Why do the settlers and the Israeli army uproot the olive trees of the Palestinians? Security reasons, they say. I think there are other reasons.
First: occupy Palestinian lands because Israeli law allows the State to appropriate “abandoned” lands for more than three years or for security. With the olive trees, the legal protection of the land is also removed and if access to them is also limited, their theft and the settlement of settlers are justified.
Second: by uprooting the olive trees, a subsistence base is undermined. More than ten thousand families depend on its production, barely nine kilos per tree (two liters of oil which is little, but that is all where there is nothing) because these olive trees are in the harsh dry land. Irrigated lands have been occupied and Palestinians have restricted access to water. The occupation of lands, the destruction of olive trees and preventing humanitarian aid from arriving leads to shortages, increased prices… hunger. In July, half of Gaza’s population, 1.1 million people, will be in phase 5 of famine, “catastrophe” they call it, and 38% in level 4, “emergency.” When hunger and access to water are weapons against the population, there is no war, there is genocide.
Third: by burning the olive trees they want to erase the identity of the Palestinian people who have made this tree a symbol of their culture and their resistance. This is why they tear them off and play with words: not to say Palestine, Gaza, or the West Bank… they talk to us about Samaria, Judea… and they call the Palestinians “Arabs of the territories.”
Yasser Arafat said it in his speech at the United Nations on November 13, 1974, “their terrorism is fueled by hatred and that hatred was even directed against the olive tree in my country, which has been a symbol of pride (…) Today I have come carrying an olive branch in one hand and the weapon of a freedom fighter in the other. Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. “War breaks out in Palestine, but it is in Palestine where peace will be born.”
Planting an olive tree in “the forest of civilizations” is a symbol against this genocide, a small gesture, but necessary, like the sumud, the firm and patient roots of the Palestinians to their land, like the olive trees. As is the camping on the campus of the University of La Rioja carried out by students and professors.
Why don’t governments and institutions like the University make a gesture of support for the Palestinians? Something simple: arms embargo, economic sanctions, breaking diplomatic relations, recognition of the Palestinian State, preserving memory, food aid…
I was on campus and I will go to the Ateneo tomorrow also carrying an olive branch and a “weapon.”
When I was a child, one day, after leaving school, I went with my father to take garbage to the olive grove. We loaded the car in the garbage dump behind the church. While my father was throwing the garbage around the trunks (I still see pieces of china, jars, screw caps there…) I held the male cowbird by the branch or let him hobble ahead when my father told me to. There I found this L-shaped piece of root, I peeled it and made a fantasy gun with which to entertain the discharge.
Today, more than half a century later, where that garbage dump was there is a garden, a retirement home and a park where children play and this olive root, which has been with me since then, is now, in my imagination, more cachava what a gun
But I am still that child who dreams of a happy world while playing among olive trees in the olive grove of Alcanadre or Palestine and because of that dream I am where I now have to be to stop this genocide. How can you be with us and with the Palestinians tomorrow, Tuesday, June 4, in the afternoon at the Athenaeum because, as Yanis Varoufakis said at the Congress on Palestine suspended in Berlin on April 12, 2014, “Universal Human Rights or They are universal or they are nothing.
(On May 9, the Ateneo Riojano organized the planting of ‘an olive tree for Palestine’ in the Forest of Civilizations and the conference “Haughty Palestinians, tell me in your soul who, who uprooted the olive trees?” that some could not hear when the capacity is complete. This Tuesday, June 4, at seven thirty in the afternoon you will have another opportunity).
