Stan Cox

Uprooting Olive Trees Can’t Uproot the Palestinians In November, the Jerusalem Post published an essay by Susannah Schild, the American-Israeli author of a book titled From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected

With that and more, Israel has made itself a pariah state. The Zionists may carry on attacking farmers and their orchards for a while longer, but one thing is sure: Palestine and its olive trees will long outlive the decaying State of Israel. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/11/u... 9/9

Attempts to destroy Palestine’s olive culture are genocidal, right in sync with genocide-by-bullet, genocide-by-bomb, genocide-by-starvation, genocide-by-thirst, genocide-by-obliteration of health care, and genocide-by-destruction of schools and universities. 8/9

Palestinian history easily refutes all that. They’ve worked through 4,500 olive harvests on that land—enduring invasions by Assyrians Babylonians Persians Greeks Romans Ottomans Brits … and staying firmly rooted despite 8 decades of Zionist attempts to drive them off their land 7/9

This aligns with the racist Western stereotype of indigenous people lazily plucking their food from nature rather than laboriously wringing food from the soil by the sweat of their brow as civilized nations do. 6/9

Throughout Israel’s short history, its settlers have simultaneously romanticized the olive tree and looked down their noses at the Palestinians for cultivating it. 5/9

Their long-term, obsessive campaign to erase the Palestinians’ olive orchards from the landscape is also necessary to the myth of Israeli agricultural prowess and attachment to the land and the racist trope that Jewish immigrants to Palestine “made the desert bloom” 4/9

In trying to wipe out olive production in the West Bank, the occupation forces and their settler shock troops are united around one main goal: to drive Palestinians out of Palestine and absorb their lands into a Greater Israel. 3/9

In olive harvests going back to 1967, Israelis violently assaulted farmers, barred them from their land, and destroyed their olive groves. The Applied Research Institute reports that from 1976 to 2013, soldiers and settlers cut or uprooted an estimated 3.4 million olive trees 2/9

Uprooting Olive Trees Can’t Uproot the Palestinians In November, the Jerusalem Post published an essay by Susannah Schild, the American-Israeli author of a book titled From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected

In October-November, West Bank Palestinians suffered through what Al Jazeera has labeled “The worst Palestinian olive harvest in collective memory,” thanks to Israeli attacks on harvesters and destruction of their olive groves. But this was nothing new. 1/9 www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/11/u...

Recognize Hamas Today's symbolic actions make no difference, but there are symbolic actions that could.

Here, Justin Podur says stop using empty gestures as thin cover for not ending Israel's genocide.
He says, "Begin negotiating the future of the region directly with the people that Israel wants to kill"
And that means to "Recognize Hamas"

Amen!

justinpodur.substack.com/p/recognize-...

Stopping the Genocide Requires Armed Intervention | Countercurrents Image: Priti Gulati Cox. See more such bookmarks at her resistance embroidery initiative, which supports The Sameer Project in Gaza. The Palestinian armed resistance has defended Gaza for almost two…

Needed: a multinational armed force to converge on Gaza by air, sea, and land & join the resistance fighters, protecting the population and putting an end to the genocide. The UN General Assembly can do that with a resolution this session countercurrents.org/2025/09/stop... @countercurrents

Stopping the Genocide Requires Armed Intervention | Countercurrents Image: Priti Gulati Cox. See more such bookmarks at her resistance embroidery initiative, which supports The Sameer Project in Gaza. The Palestinian armed resistance has defended Gaza for almost two…

"@CraigMokhiber concluded that civil society around the world must demand that the UN establish and deploy an armed protection force for Gaza. 'If we ask for it and they don’t do it,' he said, 'it’s their sin. If we don’t ask for it, it’s *our* sin'.”

www.laprogressive.com/foreign-poli...

Stopping the Genocide Requires an Armed Protective Force counterpunch.org/2025/09/17/s... @NatCounterPunch
image: @PritiGCox

Breaking Israel’s Genocide Must Take Priority Over Climate Change Unprecedented numbers of heat records have been broken in locations throughout the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and even more records will fall in coming years. Meanwhile, Israel’s mass slaughter ...

That must change for both issues. But the Palestinian people, whose clock is ticking faster and faster toward midnight, need us to stand up *right now* 7/7
www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/17/b...

With a government guilty of perpetrating and sustaining two of the most heinous injustices on this planet, still, only a small portion of our civil society is standing up or acting up against either the genocide or global warming. 6/7

The United States has generated more of the fossil carbon currently in the atmosphere than has any other. And we have provided the bulk of material, logistical, and political support that made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible. 5/7

… and the burning moral obligation to our fellow human beings in Gaza is so crystal clear, that for now, forcing Israel to stop the genocide must take priority over pushing for climate mitigation. 5/7

The odds are heavily stacked against any of those things happening, but Israeli leaders have dialed their torture of the Palestinian people up so high, the urgency to stop them is so extreme, the means of stopping them are so straightforward, … 4/7

Israel’s genocide, in contrast, could be broken at any time if we can stop Washington’s arms shipments to Israel and push for a hard crackdown that includes suffocating diplomatic and economic sanctions. 3/7

To slow global warming will require deep reductions in energy and material throughput over many years in this country and throughout the Global North. 2/7

CounterPunch (@counterpunchmedia.bsky.social) Tells the facts, names the names.

Breaking Israel’s Genocide Must Take Priority Over Climate Change
@counterpunchmedia.bsky.social
www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/17/b...
thread -- 1/7

Breaking Israel’s Genocide Must Take Priority Over Climate Change Unprecedented numbers of heat records have been broken in locations throughout the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and even more records will fall in coming years. Meanwhile, Israel’s mass slaughter ...

Breaking Israel’s Genocide Must Take Priority Over Climate Change
(It's me saying that @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social)

counterpunch.org/2025/08/17/b...
counterpunch.org

🚨Twice as Many Palestinians Now Killed Seeking Aid This Summer Than Israeli Civilians Killed on October 7th 1,838 killed, 13,409 injured—Israel and America are deliberately blocking aid and shooting civilians for food.

www.thenorthstar.com/p/twice-as-m...

ignore the neighbor's yard art

National liberation in Palestine is an indispensable step towards degrowth Writing from the encampment for Palestine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Charles Stevenson, Feroz Khan, and Inea Lehner argue that Palestinian liberation must be seen as central to a degro...

Ditto for @degrowthinfo.bsky.social‬ degrowth.info/en/blog/nati...
"We view Palestinian resistance, and its renewed demand for national liberation, as a profound threat to the status quo and an indispensable step towards our collective liberation."

As Gaza Starved, NPR’s Coverage Expanded but Didn’t Get Any Better Before the third week of July, when mass-starvation alarms finally started sounding, only a tiny minority of Americans were focused on the crimes against humanity that Israel was committing in Gaza.…

"This is no time for phony 'balance.'"

"If an occupying power is going all-out to obliterate the population whose land it is trying to steal, and a news outlet takes care not to take sides, then they are, in fact, taking a side, and it's the wrong one."
#Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Genocide

3 cheers for @r-degrowth.bsky.social's Palestine statement!
degrowth.org/blog/2025/07...
"We stand in unconditional solidarity with Palestine and with the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Because their freedom is bound up with the freedom and survival of all oppressed peoples"

Valor in the Face of Inhumanity Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta and her family were first displaced just four days into the war, on October 11, 2023. She told me, “They bombed our neighborhood in Khan Younis, so we evacuated to a nearby schoo...

Palestine's Valor in the Face of Israel's Inhumanity
With @DonyaInGaza

counterpunch.org/2025/07/03/v...

Every time I go to a U.S.-run ‘aid’ center in Gaza, I know I might not come back I have risked my life to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centers in Gaza, where Israel opens fire on aid seekers from every direction. I have an impossible choice: slow death from hunger,...

I have risked my life to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centers in Gaza, where Israel opens fire on aid seekers from every direction. I have an impossible choice: slow death from hunger, or gambling my life for a chance of survival.

mondoweiss.net/2025/07/ever...

#Palestine #Israel