Olive Harvest and Iran War: Two Fronts of One Strategy

Every autumn, the olive harvest sets the rhythm of Palestinian life in the West Bank. Families walk to groves their grandparents planted, spread tarps beneath ancient trees, and pick together for weeks. The harvest is income, food, and inheritance at once. This year, as in recent ones, many of those families are being kept from their land, and increasingly, they are watching others take what they grew. At the same time, the world's attention is fixed on a war in the Gulf. That is not a coincidence worth ignoring.
Consider how that war began. It appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not have to work hard to bring President Donald Trump along. Washington had no vital stake in a new conflict with Iran, yet the case put to the president was seductive; a decisive strike on Iran's top and second-tier leadership would shatter the regime and replace it with one friendly to the United States. The pitch also flattered. Trump would be the leader who erased an anti-American government from the map, a feat that would define his legacy.
It did not work. The opening strike gave way to a forty-day campaign, and the regime did not fall. It held. Iranians, including many who despise their government, rallied around it in the face of foreign bombardment, and anti-American sentiment hardened. The costs spread far beyond the battlefield, through energy markets, shipping lanes, and the supply chains that ordinary people everywhere depend on. The world continues to pay. Whatever one thinks of Iran's government, this was a strategic miscalculation, built on the assumption that force could accomplish what Iranians themselves had not.
Who gained? Israel's government has long sought to weaken its regional rivals, and a U.S. war serves that aim even where it cuts against American interests in the Gulf. But there is a second dividend, less discussed: distraction. The genocide in Gaza did not deliver the outcome its architects wanted. Palestinians held on to their perseverance and did not leave their land. The Iran war offers a second chance to change the subject. While governments scramble over oil prices, shipping insurance, and ceasefire diplomacy, the West Bank slips off the front pages.
On the ground, it is anything but quiet. Settler violence has been rising for years, documented by UN agencies, Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, and diplomatic missions. The olive harvest has become a flashpoint. Farmers are blocked from their groves by settlers, often with Israeli soldiers standing by or enforcing closures. Trees are uprooted or burnt. And the pattern has now evolved; harvests are not only prevented but seized, pressed into oil, and sold. A family denied its crop losses thrice: once in the income it would have earned, second in the effort and investment it had made for the olive harvest, and again in the food it would have kept. This is a deliberate squeeze, a slow dispossession by hunger and debt.
Its purpose is not hard to read. Make farming impossible, and life on the land becomes unsustainable. Make life unsustainable, and families leave. When they leave, the land is taken. Ministers such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have championed settlement expansion openly for years. The aim is to change the demography and the geography of the territory at once and to make a Palestinian state physically impossible. This is the continuation of a colonial project that began a century ago, and it advances by increments that rarely make headlines.
Europeans cannot claim ignorance. Their missions file the reports on these incidents. To its credit, the European Union and some member states have begun sanctioning violent settlers. But the measures are modest: a handful of names, asset freezes on people who held little in Europe to begin with, and travel bans that cost almost nothing. Meanwhile, the incentives run the other way. A settler who seizes a grove gains land, income, and a stronger claim, while risking almost nothing. Sanctions that cost less than the land's worth are not deterrence. They are a price of doing business.
The standard should be the one the world applied to apartheid South Africa. That campaign worked not because of any single measure but because it was comprehensive and sustained: trade restrictions, financial pressure, arms embargoes, and cultural and sporting isolation. It pushed the cost of the policy above its rewards for those who profited from it. Applying that logic here means targeting the system, not just individual settlers. It means ending trade with settlements and banning their products, including settlement-pressed olive oil, from European markets. It means sanctioning the officials and institutions that fund and enable expansion. And it means conditioning arms transfers and preferential trade on compliance with international law, including the International Court of Justice's 2024 advisory opinion that Israel's continued presence in the occupied territories is unlawful. Europe is Israel's largest trading partner. It has leverage, and so far, it has chosen not to use it.
The Iran war demands the same clarity. A conflict that has not achieved its stated goal, that has raised costs worldwide, and that appears to have been sold to an American president on a promise that proved false should be ended, not extended. Washington should ask hard questions about whose interests it is serving. Allies and major economies should press for de-escalation and a diplomatic path. Letting the war drag on is costly in itself, and it also provides cover for everything else happening out of sight.
Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will not stop on their own. Nothing in their record suggests restraint. It will come only if it is imposed, if the price of dispossession rises above its reward. An olive tree takes years to bear fruit and can live for centuries, a fitting symbol of a people rooted in a place. The world can still choose to protect those roots, or it can keep watching, with detailed reports, solemn statements, and token sanctions, as they are pulled up one by one.

The writer is Ambassador of Palestine to Bangladesh