On Saturday morning, Salima Ewes, 73, and her family found 40 olive trees had been cut down in their field in the northern West Bank village of Al-Lubban Ash-Sharqiya, southwest of Nablus city.As is often the case, the Arabs are claiming that religious Jews cut down their trees during the Jewish Sabbath - something very unlikely.
Akram Jamil Uweis said his family headed to their field to harvest olives, and found their trees destroyed. He said the family believed residents of the nearby illegal settlements of Eli and Ma’ale Levona were responsible for the attack.
But beyond that, look at the pictures of the supposedly chopped down trees Ma'an show us:
Olive trees have much larger trunks than what is shown here. And for olives to grow best, trees have to be pruned relatively often - sometimes down to the trunk.
By any measure, these pictures show neither that the olive trees were "cut down" nor "destroyed." And in the past we have seen Palestinian Arabs claim that their normal prunings were actually "settlers" destroying the trees - or that they pay Arab kids to cut the trees - and they get compensation from Israel when they make those claims.
And while there may indeed be incidents where hotheaded West Bank Jews do damage trees, it is hardly a one-way street. Arabs have destroyed the trees belonging to Jews, something that gets next to no coverage in the media.
And Arabs have destroyed Jewish-owned trees and crops for a long, long time.
