Burqa: settlers set olive trees alight, and the land burns with the means of making a living

According to Al Jazeera, Israeli settlers set fire to olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers in the village of Burqa, near Ramallah. The dispatch, brief as it is, gives neither the number of trees destroyed, nor the material toll, nor the response of the Israeli authorities. At this stage we also do not know how many families depend on this orchard. What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the source.

An olive tree is not like any other. It takes years to bear fruit, passes from generation to generation, and supports a family through the harvest, the oil and the sale. To burn it is to destroy capital built up over decades and, at the same stroke, the rootedness of a peasantry in its soil. One could call this an act of vandalism; we see it rather as a mechanism: in a colonial settler system, land is the central stake, and the person who cultivates it is an obstacle.

The anticolonial tradition helps us understand this. Settler colonialism does not merely extract wealth from a territory; it seeks to replace those who live there. The conceptual notes in Gazette on dependency remind us that whole economies are shaped to serve the centre. Here the logic is similar, but more brutal. One does not simply capture the product of peasant labour; one empties that labour of its foundation by rendering the land unusable, and then available. A peasantry deprived of its fields becomes a workforce with no recourse other than whatever wage it is offered, often on the other side of the line.

Fire has one advantage for whoever lights it: it looks like an incident. No decree, no expropriation order, no bulldozer caught on film. Each isolated blaze is presented as a local excess, when their repetition sketches out a de facto policy. The real question, which the dispatch does not allow us to settle, is one of protection: who prevents these acts, who pursues them, who answers for them? If the answer is "no one", then impunity is part of the apparatus, and not merely a flaw in it.

Finally, we must keep a sense of proportion: we are speaking of an orchard, of families, of a village, of people who watched their trees burn. What they have lost cannot be offset by an expression of concern from the capitals that finance, arm and trade with the occupier. Those diplomacies know very well how to count; they might also count the olive trees.

We will follow any further details on the extent of the damage and on what follow-up, if any, is given.