Amy's Olive Tree Story Pickle

In an article, On the West Bank, an olive harvest battered by aggression, that appeared this week in FORTUNE/CNN Money, we learn

Not all settlers vandalize, of course, but the net effect of the assaults is far greater than their number. Such acts deepen distrust between neighbors who are challenged every day to share common ground.

Amy Kaslow writes that "Last year, they destroyed some 7,500 trees; this year, the damage seems even worse, given nature's own limitations: 2013 has so far yielded only a meager production."

Yes, but...

...olive trees produce only once every two years.  Really.

It's not "meager" but normal.

Ephraim Sneh, who has served as Israel's health minister, transportation minister, deputy defense minister, and, as Brigadier General in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) served as head of the Civil Administration for three years (when there was no "price tag" policy, is quoted.  And what unbelievable things does he say?  That settlers

"want to hit the symbol of Palestinian attachment to the land and their source of income." The message, he says, is, "'We will cut you out, uproot you, burn you out.' The settlers are doing to the trees what they want to do to the Palestinians."

We want to burn Arabs?  Cut them down?

Who wants to kick them out?  Arabs want to kick out Jews?  Do we want to kick Arabs out of Israel - as that would be the mirror image, that does not exist.

Israeli officials did not respond to her requests for comment.  So, her sources are "Yesh Din, an assertive legal rights group funded by the European Union", "Other legal advocates",  Meryl Justin Chertoff, director of The Justice and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, 28-year-old Nada Dajani, a western-dressed aid worker and a recent hire of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR).

No Jewish resident.

No Yesha Council official.

No Samaria Regional Council or Mateh Binyamin Council rep.  Nor was there a "no comment" note.

All left or pro-Pal.

Amy, your sources?  Your balance?  Your plurality?

Or this biased writing?  Or politically mobilized?

But let's deal with another quotation of Sneh: 

"the olive tree represents an attachment to the soil, to the land," says Sneh. "The roots, the old age of some of the trees, are living symbols of the profound link between the individual and his land."

We, too, have olive trees.  We, too, have had olive tress (and sheep herds) attacked, damaged, stolen, destroyed, uprooted.  Amy, there is a bigger picture here.

We, too, have a link with this land.  3,000 years.  We were in Judea and Samaria in the 20th century even but ethnically cleansed by Arabs and their terror.

There's a story there, Amy.

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