Kiriakou sets out the pattern as a matter of timing. In the weeks and months before Israeli settlers seize Palestinian land, he says, what they tend to do is go in and bulldoze the olive orchards, or set fire to the crops — “just so it makes it easier for you to just leave on your own.” [1]
If the family stays
If the family does not finally leave, Kiriakou says, the house is bulldozed. [1] In its place goes one of the prefabricated houses, and into that moves “some family from New Jersey or New York or wherever” — on land, he stresses, that has been in the Palestinian family’s hands for hundreds of years. [2]
His own reaction is stated without ornament: “it makes me sick to my stomach.” [1]
Why demolish a sound house
Asked why the houses are destroyed at all, given that many are perfectly serviceable structures, Kiriakou draws a distinction by location. In East Jerusalem, he says, they generally keep the houses and simply turn them over to a Jewish family. [2]
In the West Bank the answer is different, and it is about building standards rather than policy. The condition of many of these houses, in Kiriakou’s description, is so poor — “thrown together with scraps and concrete block and whatever” — that they arguably should not be habitable. The reason people live in them anyway is that they are poor and desperate and it is all they can do. [3]
He closes the point by returning to the trees: “and their olive trees have been stolen or destroyed.” [3]
The context
The discussion sat inside the approval of the E1 settlement project — 3,400 new units, which Kiriakou’s co-host calculated at ten thousand or more people, and whose significance both men located in geography rather than in numbers: it severs the West Bank proper from East Jerusalem, long intended as the capital of a future Palestinian state. [1]
Kiriakou also objects to the vocabulary. Told that “settler” implies nobody was living there before, he agrees at once — “That’s right” — and the term used through the segment is colonist. [1]
A viewer’s observation that some of the olive trees are four thousand years old drew Kiriakou’s confirmation, and led him to the oldest olive tree in Greece, at 3,200 years. [3]