“We planted 5,000 trees last year,” Mahmood Ahmed, a Palestinian farmer near Sinjil told me. “Settlers cut them all down with shears or uprooted them.”

What security reason would make Israelis cut down olive trees? There is none. Pure hatred and paranoia.

[L]et’s be clear: The reason to oppose settlements is not just that they are bad for Israel and America, but also that this nibbling of Arab land is just plain wrong. It’s a land grab. The result is a “brutal occupation force,” in the words of the late Avraham Shalom, a former chief of the Israeli internal security force, Shin Bet.

* * *

They haven’t been able to set foot in the orchard for years, but I, as an outsider, was able to walk right into it. A settler confronted me, declined to be interviewed, and disappeared again — but the Palestinians who planted the trees cannot harvest their own olives.

Surprisingly, this less than favorable oped was published in the New York Times, a notoriously pro-zionist publication. Something is changing in the mainstream media. Not sure why. It seems Israel is falling from favor, perhaps to be discarded in favor of a stable one world government, free from the thorny issues that have plagued the world for over 60 years.