Palestinian olive farmer Eid cuts a despondent figure as he sits in his living room in his home at the edge of the West Bank village of Burin, head bowed, wondering how he will pay the bills and support his family.
The reason for his dark mood when The Times of Israel visited him last Thursday was the latest in a series of blows he has suffered to his ability to earn a livelihood from his land: Fires, apparently started deliberately, had swept through olive groves belonging to him and others on land around Burin last Wednesday, damaging or destroying hundreds of trees.
Eid estimates that some 300 of his 900 olive trees were destroyed, although he has not been able to reach his land to check the extent of the damage, due to his fear of attack by extremist settlers and IDF restrictions on access.
In total, he believes around one thousand trees were destroyed or damaged in the incident in the northern West Bank village.
“Wednesday was a big loss. There won’t be any olives this year,” he laments. “We have lost a lot of olives and olive oil this year.”
Amid Israeli restrictions, exacerbated by the ongoing war in Gaza, Eid, like many other Palestinian farmers, has been unable to access his land to cultivate and harvest his olives for a year and a half. He says he has now almost completely run out of money.
“Where will I get money? What will I do, what will we eat?” he worries out loud.
The father of three daughters, Eid says he is despairing of finding the money to sign his eldest girl up for university, with the registration deadline imminent.
“I don’t have one shekel to pay for her university. Where will I get the money from,” he says, after proudly displaying his daughter’s 89 grade point average from high school.
Footage taken from the morning of the fires by a field operative of the Yesh Din organization, which tracks settler violence, showed five masked individuals, one of whom was carrying a chainsaw, leaving the olive groves as small fires burned among the trees.
Eid said he did not himself see the masked individuals start the fires, but said a neighbor of his from Burin saw them pouring out bottles of liquid in the grove and igniting it.
The fires started slowly but after several hours billowing walls of smoke were rising up out of the olive groves.
In a separate video, also taken by the Yesh Din field operative, the masked men can be seen making their way up the hill and entering what appears to be a building, likely the dormitories, of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva on the outskirts of Yitzhar.
Yitzhar is a settlement located just south-west of Burin, and has been the repeated source of violence targeting local Palestinians and their property. Od Yosef Hai is itself a radical institution whose dean, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, was investigated but ultimately not charged for incitement to racism in his controversial Torat Hamelech book on Jewish laws pertaining to war, in which he discussed the various scenarios in which it was ostensibly permissible for Jews to kill gentiles.
Eid says he called the Palestinian Authority’s liaison office with the IDF’s District Coordinator Liaison office, which is supposed to alert the Israel Police to Palestinian complaints of criminal activity in the West Bank, but that that office told him to call the Israel Police directly.
Eid speaks only rudimentary Hebrew and did not call the police over the incident, saying they rarely if ever come, even when someone does contact them about settler violence — a frequently voiced sentiment among Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel’s Fire Service says firefighting teams were dispatched to the scene of the fires just after noon, though Eid says he did not see any such forces at the scene until at least 3 p.m., and that it took till late evening for the fires to be brought under control.
Despite the video footage of the suspects apparently starting the fires, a spokesperson for the Fire Service said it had not launched an investigation into the incident. He declined to say why.
A spokesperson for the Israel Police’s Samaria District said an investigation had not been opened into the alleged arson since a formal complaint had not been filed. He said Eid could file a complaint at the Samaria District police station.
The police regulations updated in August 2020 permit, and even require, that an investigation be opened when the police become aware that a crime has been permitted.
Efforts to contact the management of Od Yosef Hai yeshiva to question them over the matter were unsuccessful.
Eid, and other farmers with lands around Burin, have been the subject of repeated attacks on their land, allegedly by settlers from the surrounding settlements and outposts, many of which are hotbeds for ultranationalist extremists.
Exacerbating Eid’s plight are the severe access restrictions imposed by the IDF on Palestinian landowners whose lands are close to settlements or illegal outposts.
Eid has olive groves both east of Burin, on the slopes below the radical illegal outpost of Givat Ronen, as well as to the west of Burin, below Yitzhar.
Even during normal times, Eid, like many Palestinians with land near settlements, is only able to access his land twice a year for one or two days each time: in the spring for cultivation and in the autumn for harvest.
The restrictions are ostensibly in place to protect Palestinian farmers and laborers from attacks by extremists, but make it extremely difficult for the farmers to properly cultivate their land.
But the war eliminated even that possibility. The IDF did not allow him and many others access for the 2023 harvest, and neither did it allow access for cultivation this past spring.
Finally, access is now expected to be given in the coming weeks for this year’s harvest. But the fire eliminated any optimism Eid and his family may have mustered. Even in trees that survived the flames, many of the fruits may have been destroyed.
“I just feel sad and depressed. These trees — this is what I do. I work with olives and olive oil,” said Eid.
Eid notes that he has suffered from settler attacks and intimidation for years. Any time he tried to visit his groves without IDF coordination, he would quickly be threatened by gun-wielding settlers.
He blames “religious settlers” for many of his problems, as well as the current Israeli government, under which he says his circumstances have become significantly worse.
“Bibi, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, they are sons of bitches, they want war the whole time… they want all of Palestine,” he says bitterly, in reference to Israel’s senior political leadership.
At the same time, he also condemns extremist Palestinian leaders, including Hamas leader and October 7 architect Yahya Sinwar and slain Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, blaming them too for the region’s problems.
“They are both religious on both sides. They should all get lost. We want peace,” he says. “A Jewish home here, a Palestinian home next to it.”
