Those Antisemitic Olive Trees! Israel’s Gaslighting Military Language Whitewashes Settler Violence
The gaslighting bombs showered on us by Israel's ruling right wing are a work of art. I don't know if they're the fruit of their creators' innate talent or a learned skill acquired through a designated curriculum.
Benjamin Netanyahu is considered a master in this field. Over the weekend, the prime minister sought to challenge the credibility of reports on Jewish riots in Yesha-land – the West Bank controlled by the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements. He wrote on X that the facts surrounding the attack on photojournalist Heidi Levine "remain unclear," later adding that the assault on European diplomats might actually have been a "coordinated campaign to smear Israel."
His skills seem rusty. He forgot that an American journalist and European diplomats aren't Palestinians, whose heads and knees Jewish rioters habitually smash with stones and clubs. Maybe he wanted to curry favor with the settlers, as his words echoed the false representation of reality in their media.
It is something along the lines of: The antisemitic olive trees just appeared next to our peaceful Jewish farms! Our olive harvest from their trees is a mitzvah from the Torah! Their olive harvest is a provocation! The anarchists are joining Arabs picking olives to force the holy Jews to carry out pogroms against them and stoke a campaign against the entire settlement enterprise!r than someone from the army to be considered an impartial expert? This week, three gaslighting bombs particularly caught my eye. Here they are.
The more successful gaslighting bombs are those disguised as experts' opinions and crafted in their special language. And who better than someone from the army to be considered an impartial expert? This week, three gaslighting bombs particularly caught my eye. Here they are.
The most sophisticated of the three is both an alarm and a reassuring signal: "The army is preparing for the olive harvest season." This combination of words triggers the Pavlovian conclusion that there is a problem and the army is dealing with it.
The phrasing is a cluster bomb of inverted meanings. The army doesn't promise that it's preparing to fulfill the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling requiring the army to enable Palestinians to cultivate their land. The phrasing fails to acknowledge that the problem lies with Jewish terrorists who sabotage vineyards and olive harvests.
In the army's phrasing, the problem is the harvest itself, or actually, the olive trees. We sang about them in kindergarten, but these trees are also an economic backbone for the Palestinians, as well as a national and cultural symbol. And in their sheer malice, these trees insist on bearing fruit once a year.
The second gaslighting bomb, delivered with feigned innocence, is encapsulated in the phrase "there was no coordination," offered as a logical explanation for why Jewish rioters attacked diplomats in a Palestinian Christian vineyard.
We first encountered the term "coordination" in its gaslighting sense in the early 2000s as evidence mounted of planned settler violence in agricultural areas across the West Bank. True to form, the army punished the victims; it issued a closed-military-zone order that applied to everyone but in practice only to Palestinian landowners and farmers, not to the Israelis who in the area were calmly building their own farms and outposts.
To prevent "friction," the Palestinians were required to coordinate their entry to their own land with the army and receive a military escort. For plowing. For sowing. For spraying. For pruning. For harvesting. For olive picking. Each "coordination" took days or even weeks. Attorney Quamar Mishirqi-Asa'ad has an entire tome documenting her coordination efforts for farmers in various areas of the West Bank.
But the army is busy and can't allot soldiers to every farmer. So the leaves wither. The grass reaches the treetops and catches fire in the summer. And the army hides behind its honeyed words: "Coordination" is for preventing friction, and it's only for the benefit of the Palestinians. But "coordination" normalizes the abnormal: Jewish settlers forbid Palestinians from living their lives.
The most cunning and dangerous of the three gaslighting tactics is the army's expression "turning the barrels." That is, now the Palestinian police are doing their job and aiming their rifles at their own people. But they can't be trusted. The day will come when they turn their barrels on us.
A little digging reveals that the people trying to instill this fear in Israelis are settlers. This includes the organization Regavim, a settler who once served as the chief military prosecutor in the West Bank, and the Arutz 7 religious-Zionist media network along with its various offshoots.
Israelis are addicted to every possible drug that prevents them from acknowledging reality or helps them invert the meaning of that reality. A daily average of six or seven attacks – damaging body, mind and property – by Jewish civilians against Palestinians is absent from the public's media diet. The same goes for the abundance of false arrests by our beloved children, the soldiers, and their terrifying raids and marches in the heart of Palestinian cities.
To this day, the Palestinian security apparatus continues to fail to protect its citizens. There is a cynical explanation for this: The Palestinian ruling elite wants to maintain the status quo that serves it in terms of money, prestige and freedom of movement around the world. There is another explanation: They know that an armed confrontation would only harm the Palestinians.
Both explanations are correct. But every Palestinian burns inside over their inability to defend their mother, brother and friends when they go out to pick olives and other crops, plow fields, tend to their livestock or just go for a walk. The settler phrasing nullifies systematic settler violence, entrenching itself behind learned prophecy.
But the settlers and the military that parrots them don't foresee the inevitable; rather, they bring it about (as Haaretz columnist B. Michael immortally dubbed this at the start of the second intifada). From their cunning phrasing, we learn what the settlers want: a "rise and kill first" war in the West Bank as a way to fulfill the "decisive plan" of their leader, Bezalel Smotrich.
This gaslighting is aimed at those Teflon Israelis for whom reality does not sink into their minds. They hear "turning the barrels" and think: What on earth do the Palestinians have against us?
[Amira Hass is a reporter and columnist for Ha’aretz Daily, a newspaper based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She has been a journalist for two decades.
Hass has written critically about both Israeli and Palestinian authorities. She has not allowed her gender, ethnicity or nationality – all hindrances in the region she reports from – to obstruct her from pursuing the truth in her reporting.
In 1989, Hass quit her studies in history at Tel Aviv University and began working as a copy editor for Ha’aretz Daily. At the same time, she volunteered for Workers Hotline, a human rights group dedicated to reaching out to vulnerable workers, many of whom were Palestinian. She became acquainted with life in Gaza and grew frustrated about how poorly Israel’s occupation of Gaza was represented in the Israeli press.
By 1991, Hass was writing weekly features for Ha’aretz Daily, and in 1993, she became a full-time writer for the paper. She moved to Gaza, which at the time was under direct and full Israeli occupation.
Hass, now based in Ramallah, has lived in the Occupied Palestinian territories for nearly 30 years. She has been reporting on the life of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and covering the major armed clashes and Israeli military attacks. Her goal has been to provide her readers with detailed information about Israeli policies, especially restrictions on the freedom of movement.
In the course of her work, Hass has been threatened, harassed and detained. In May 2009, she was detained by Israeli police on her return from a four-month stay in Gaza “for violating a military order” (which forbids entry into Gaza) and “for staying illegally in an enemy state.” She had also been detained in December 2008 by Israeli police on her return to Ramallah for violating the same military order.]