"There was a Palestine, and there is a Palestine still!"

The genocidal Netanyahu, just as last year, once again spoke to a nearly empty hall at the UN General Assembly this year. Netanyahu, the killer of tens of thousands of children, tens of thousands of women, tens of thousands of innocents, reeked of blood, reeked of pus. Everyone except the noseless left the hall.

It must be a sign of the apocalypse—the world's most immoral living man called those who left the hall holding their noses "moral cowards." The genocide denier Netanyahu also said that the Israeli army takes measures to protect civilians. Is there a bigger lie than this?

In his speech, Netanyahu also claimed to be against the Zionist-fascists' destruction of olive trees belonging to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Despite the systematic destruction of olive trees for so long, Netanyahu can still say these words.

During the week, Israeli bulldozers uprooted hundreds more olive trees in the village of Deir Nizam in the West Bank. Moreover, they did this just days before the harvest. Palestinian villagers preparing for the harvest mourned the beautiful olive trees that had been uprooted.

While Netanyahu was carrying out genocide in Gaza, he referenced the "Amalek case" in the Torah to his soldiers. Supposedly, God commanded the Israelites to attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything belonging to them, to spare no one, to kill men, women, infants, children, even cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys. The falsifiers who slander God did all of this in Gaza and the West Bank. Netanyahu's reference to the Amalek case was presented as evidence of "genocidal intent" in the case filed at the Court of Justice in The Hague.

The genocidal Netanyahu said they would make Israel the "modern Sparta of the Middle East." As I wrote before, in ancient Greece, when the Spartans launched campaigns into Attic territory, whose capital was Athens, the first thing they did was burn olive trees. Yet the olive trees, described in mythology as the "immortal tree," were reborn from their ashes.

The olive tree has been a symbol of peace and abundance in the Mediterranean basin since ancient times. The olive tree, whose roots go very deep and which can live for centuries by defying drought and harsh natural conditions, also reminds humanity of nature's power of renewal. In the Holy Quran, the olive tree and the olive are mentioned directly and with symbolic meanings in many surahs as a blessed and fruitful bounty. The olive tree is also among the trees praised in the Bible.

Now the Zionists, imitating Sparta—of which no trace or remnant remains—go even further by uprooting the olive trees that are a symbol of Palestinian resistance. The Zionists want to uproot the Palestinians from the lands where they have been rooted for thousands of years. Just as the Spartans systematically destroyed the peoples they enslaved little by little, Israel is trying to eliminate the Palestinians through massacres they describe as "mowing the grass."

Because of its resilience, the olive tree is an important theme in Palestinians' poems, stories, and paintings. The name the Palestinian painter Irina Naji gave to one of her paintings was "Roots of Resilience." This painting depicted a Palestinian family with their children leaning against the trunk of an old olive tree. One of the children has a slingshot, the other a kite.

Unbelievably, last August Israel declared even flying kites in Gaza a "security threat." In fact, because it represents hope, joy, and living free, they target kites and children. Earlier, they had also burned olive trees on the grounds that they threatened the security of the occupying soldiers. Their aim is to deprive Palestinians of everything that is food.

The Zionist occupiers, who cannot tolerate any human society other than their own living happily and freely, want to extinguish Palestinians' attachment to the land by burning their fields. The name of one of the books by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who passed away in exile, was "Olive Leaves." In another poem, the poet, imagining being an olive tree in a destroyed field, said: "If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears."

The Palestinians, subjected to systematic massacres by the Zionist occupiers, defy the tyrants by sprouting anew every time, like the burned olive trees. Mahmoud Darwish expressed this stubborn defiance with the line: "There was a Palestine, and there is a Palestine still!"