Could we be attacking the wrong racist tyrant??
On March 4, in the early morning hours, two crop-dusting planes flew over the Negev Hills, spraying field crops with a toxin that caused them to wither and die. Ten people, most of them children, inhaled the substance and required medical treatment.
The farmers whose crops were sprayed are Bedouin who have been living in the region for generations. They say damage was done to thousands of dunams of farmland that they have cultivated as far back as they can remember. These farmers are Israeli citizens who have been living in unrecognized villages since the establishment of the state. Israel has never come to any agreement with them regarding ownership rights and registry of the land.
The crop dusters were hired by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) and the Green Patrol, who say the spraying was carried out at two major sites, encompassing a total of 800 dunams of land.
"Abu Jlidat points to the sprayed field, where the plants are already knee-high. “We are poor people,” he says. “After years of drought that harmed our yields and our income, God blessed us with rain this year. The grain was doing very well, and we were looking forward to a good crop. It seems that the ILA couldn’t stand to see us prosper, and ordered the spraying. Now all the green shoots have turned yellow. They’ll never recover. Nothing can save them. In the end, they’ll die, and be no use to anyone. We can’t even use them for straw for the animals because the chemicals could harm them.”
Salman says that the crop-spraying two and a half weeks ago was carried out without advance warning. “All of a sudden, people saw crop dusters in the sky. Some of them were in the fields at the time. They were sorry they didn’t have their gas masks with them. The children, who were out of school that day, went into a panic. They thought the war had started. Most of the harmed were children from Ghrayer.” The schoolchildren were on holiday because that Tuesday was the Muslim New Year, explains Atiya al-Asam, a Bedouin activist."