Lebanese Army Thwarts Israeli Landscaping Effort

Other Israeli landscaping techniques.

By Belen Fernandez

In the latest Israeli inversion of cause and effect relationships, the clash near the Lebanese border village of Adaisseh yesterday between Israeli and Lebanese soldiers—which resulted in the deaths of one of the former nationality and three of the latter—was characterized by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as a “planned provocation”, by Kadima MK Shaul Mofaz as a “planned terror attack”, and by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as something for which the Lebanese government was “directly responsible”. It is not clear how anyone in Lebanon is responsible for the Israeli decision to have its army uproot a tree lying outside the confines of Israel’s border fence in order to obtain a more unobstructed view of the area, especially given Israeli possession of numerous unmanned aerial vehicles for which single trees do not constitute an obstacle.

According to the Israeli Haaretz website, the tree uprooting was categorized by Israel as merely a “scheduled vegetation clearing activity”. The notion that Israeli soldier-gardeners should not be permitted to engage in heavily-armed tree-pruning wherever they see fit is thus presumably an extremist principle spawned by Iran and smuggled via Syria into Lebanon, where Hezbollah has used it to brainwash the Lebanese army—who were originally deemed less of a threat to Israeli vegetation clearing and whose debut south of the Litani River was insisted upon in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which ended the July War of 2006. Past Israeli landscaping projects have meanwhile included separating Palestinians from their yards with concrete walls, erecting forests atop destroyed Palestinian villages, saturating Lebanese olive fields with cluster bombs, and diverting regional water supplies. It has not yet been established whether the latest deadly air raid on Gaza also qualifies as routine vegetation clearing.

Read more