About 100 residents of the Arab village Beit Ur a-Tachta intermittently blocked traffic Tuesday morning on Route 443, a major highway leading to Jerusalem from Lod and the coastal area.
Large police and IDF forces arrived on the scene of the disturbance, near Bet Horon, and dispersed the Arabs, making one arrest. PLO flags that were planted by the rioters would be removed by Public WorksCommission workers, officials said.
The Arabs claim that dozens of their olive trees have been uprooted recently, ahead of the olive harvest.
Arutz Sheva notes that similar Arab claims against Jews who supposedly uproot theirtrees surface regularly during harvest season. Investigators usually find that the Arabs are the ones who damaged their own trees in order to blame the Jews, in the knowledge that the media loves "anti-settler" stories.
On Monday, a similar plot was exposed when volunteers from the grassroots Samaria Residents' Council documented Arabs and a foreign anarchist cutting down olive trees near Elon Moreh in order to create a provocation.
"Caught red-handed" - Volunteers from the Shomron Settlers Council today (Monday) filmed Arabs and a foreign activist from the extreme Left cutting down trunks of olive trees and branches next to the settlement of Elon Moreh, to create a provocation.
As previously mentioned, just yesterday the Shomron Settlers Council and the Shomron Regional Council came out with a request to Shomron residents to put cameras in their vehicles in order to document provocations by Arabs and extreme Leftist activists during the olive harvest season.
Due to the increase during previous years in provocations organized by extremist Leftist activists from Israel and from abroad, as well as by Arabs of the area, in preparation for the olive harvest, the Shomron Settlers Council, together with the Shomron Regional Council, have organized a photography course for the residents and Council volunteers.
And indeed, this afternoon, already in the first days of the harvest season, two volunteers from the Shomron Settlers Council caught "red-handed", some Arabs and another man who joined them, likely a foreign Leftist activist, as they were cutting down trunks and branches of olive trees adjacent to the settlement of Elon Moreh, just a short distance from the town and close to homes.
The Arabs and the Leftist extremist were sawing through the trunks and branches and leaving them near the cut off trunks in an area near the settlement's homes, as well as in another location near the entrance to Elon Moreh.
Council volunteers photographed them in the act and called the police.
Chairman of the Shomron Settlers Council Benny Katzover said: "Just yesterday we called on the public to equip themselves with cameras in order to document provocations, and already today a provocation was filmed, the act of uprooting olive trees in real time. It's clear to everyone that if the alert volunteers had not recorded the provocation in real time, the whole world would have shouted and condemned the settlers and the State of Israel."
In the wake of the incident, Shomron Regional Council head Gershon Mesika called for acting agressively against the ones staging the uprooting of the olive trees and to distance the provocateurs of the extreme Left from the area during the olive harvest season:
"The olive harvest season in recent years has turned into the provocateur's season. In light of the extreme Left's provocations during the olive harvest in past years, the settlement enterprise has invested much effort, in coordination with the IDF, to prevent extreme Leftist organizations and the Palestinian Authority from taking advantage of the season to cause provocations and take other actions. I call on the Security services to be alert, to understand that these are sequences of events whereby most of them take place when activists from the extreme Left, both from Israel and from abroad, are in the area. I call on the Security services to distance from the area, the extreme Leftists planning these provocations and thus prevent these incidents from happening and to allow the harvest season to finish quietly."
The 'human rights' organizations are constantly blaming Israel for interfering with the 'Palestinian' olive harvest and chopping down trees.
