Thirty-six arrests, nearly three hundred reported attacks and thefts against farmers, and a thirty-year-old promise of self-government that was signed but never completed.
Before dawn in the West Bank, the olive trees stand in the dark, older than every border drawn around them. On Friday, Palestinian sources reported that Israeli forces had arrested 36 people in raids across the territory. The harvest, meant to be a season of bread and oil, has become a contest over land, access and physical safety. How did a region that once put its name to a framework for negotiated self-government end up here, with raids, armed factions and farmers who cannot reach their own groves?
A harvest under siege
Start with what is known, and who is saying it. Citing the Palestinian news agency Wafa, the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society and the Palestinian Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, Al Jazeera reported arrests across several West Bank districts. The commission logged 17 incidents on Thursday alone in which Israeli forces and settlers allegedly targeted farmers or their land: assaults, stolen crops, damaged trees, blocked access to groves. These are Palestinian accounts, and the report carried no Israeli explanation for the individual arrests.
Nothing in the reporting shows that the 36 detained were Hamas or PLO operatives, or that the raids disrupted a terrorist plot, and this article makes neither claim. Attaching a label the evidence does not support is not security analysis.
The wider picture is harder to dismiss. Reuters reported that the Israeli rights group Yesh Din had recorded 125 physical attacks on Palestinian harvesters in 24 days, along with 168 incidents of crop theft, and that Israeli military personnel were present in at least a quarter of them. These are one organisation’s figures, not a verified total, but they come from an Israeli rights group and they demand an answer.
An Israeli military official told Reuters that the army takes violence, crime and attempts to undermine security very seriously. He did not address the reports of olives stolen with soldiers nearby. The military has also uprooted trees, citing the need to prevent Palestinian attacks. Israeli police, for their part, arrested eleven suspects after attacks on Palestinians, foreign diplomats and a photojournalist during this harvest.
The test is whether the institutions of the state can protect civilians and enforce the law, or whether another agricultural season will be surrendered to the strongest hand in the field.
The gamble called Oslo
In September 1993, on the White House lawn, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the first Oslo agreement after the two sides exchanged recognition. It set out limited Palestinian self-government first, then negotiation over the permanent questions that had defeated generations of diplomats. Oslo II, in 1995, widened Palestinian administration across parts of the West Bank and provided for elections.
For Israel it was a strategic wager: hand over authority, back the PLO as a partner, and bet that diplomacy and Palestinian institutions would deliver security in return.
That history carries a distinction that political argument routinely buries. The PLO signed Oslo. Hamas set out to destroy it. Anyone who claims the two movements jointly sabotaged every Israeli peace effort is telling a story the record does not support.
Hamas and the war on compromise
On this point the evidence is far clearer. Hamas opposed Oslo and used attacks on Israeli civilians to wreck it. Daniel Byman, in his study of Israeli counterterrorism, describes an organisation whose political fortunes depended in part on the failure of negotiations, and which used terrorism to help bring that failure about.
The suicide-bombing campaign of the mid-1990s tore through buses and public spaces. In February and March 1996, a run of attacks killed dozens and put the peace process, and Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s defence of it, under crushing pressure. Arafat responded by ordering arrests of Islamist militants, a sign that the Palestinian negotiating leadership and Hamas were never a single actor.
The damage went beyond the death toll. Each bombing drained Israeli confidence that territorial compromise could buy safety and shrank the constituency for talks. Hamas has been designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States since 8 October 1997. Its later record includes the attacks of 7 October 2023, in which Amnesty International documented deliberate killings of civilians, hostage-taking and other grave violations by Hamas and allied armed groups.
Extremists on the other side
An account that stops at one side’s violence is a brief for the prosecution. In 1994, the Israeli extremist Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron. In November 1995, another Israeli extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Rabin himself, the man who had signed Oslo. Both crimes poisoned the climate in which the agreement was meant to grow.
Naming them does not lessen Hamas’s responsibility. It explains the trap the negotiators were in: enemies of compromise on both sides could destroy trust faster than diplomats could build it.
The offers that went nowhere
A harder question follows: did Palestinian leaders fail to turn serious Israeli proposals into deals?
At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Arafat and U.S. President Bill Clinton failed to reach a final settlement. Clinton later floated parameters on statehood, territory, Jerusalem and refugees. No agreement was signed.
In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put a proposal to Mahmoud Abbas: Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank, land swaps, and special arrangements for Jerusalem’s holy sites. Abbas did not agree. He later said he had been unable to study the map properly because he was not allowed to keep it.
That is a heavy entry in the case against Palestinian leadership: a sweeping Israeli offer, and no settlement. But the record resists a clean verdict. In 2021, Olmert himself said Abbas had never actually rejected the plan and suggested he privately favoured it. A major opportunity went unrealised; not every disputed detail of that failure is settled history.
Kerry’s nine months
In July 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry brought the parties back to direct talks with a nine-month clock. They broke down in April 2014, not September 2013, as some accounts have it.
The bargain was that Israel would release 104 long-held Palestinian prisoners in stages, while the Palestinian leadership would refrain from joining international bodies. It did not include a comprehensive Israeli settlement freeze.
The process unravelled when Israel did not carry out the final scheduled prisoner release and the Palestinians applied to join international conventions and treaties. A Fatah-Hamas reconciliation deal then led Israel to suspend the talks. Settlement construction had already eroded Palestinian faith in the process.
Each side had a real grievance. For Israel: how can an agreement hold when its partner enters a political arrangement with an organisation hostile to negotiation itself? For the Palestinians: why keep faith with talks while settlements spread and a promised release is withheld? Washington’s own assessment was that both sides had acted in ways it called incredibly unhelpful.
What the harvest is telling us
Today’s West Bank reporting settles none of these old arguments, and the history gives no blanket licence for arrests, attacks on farmers or the destruction of orchards. Each act needs evidence and legal scrutiny on its own terms.
What past and present share is a single question: who enforces the commitments? Israel’s initiatives show that diplomatic doors did open. Hamas’s campaign shows that organised violence can be aimed deliberately at closing them. The unfinished talks with the PLO leadership show the limits of a process that produces proposals but never an enforceable, mutually accepted deal.
The next framework, if there is one, cannot be another timetable and another photo opportunity. It needs Palestinian institutions able to honour agreements and restrain armed factions, and Israeli institutions able to protect Palestinian civilians and act against settler violence. Joint economic projects, shared infrastructure and civil-society ties can help build confidence, but they are tools, not substitutes for decisions on borders, sovereignty and security.
For now, the story is a farmer and a tree. Somewhere in the hills, a family is trying to reach a grove their grandparents planted. The distance between that grove and the self-government promised at Oslo is the distance this region has failed to cross for three decades. Closing it will take evidence, enforcement, and the nerve to hold every side to what it signs.
Image curtsey : Wikimedia commons and OWP
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