April 14, 2025
The European Zionists who created the modern state of Israel may have been cursed from the beginning, not because they were Jews, but because they were urbanites. In other words, they were not then, and are not now, farmers or ranchers, to use the American term.
Not being farmers or ranchers is a big deal if you "create" a country with a self-sufficient pastoral fantasy on top of land populated by actual farmers and ranchers. Urban culture can be a blessing of cultural, artistic, and intellectual achievement, of politics and ideas, of excitement. On the other hand, urban culture is intensely uncurious about rural and farm life, not interested in the people or the culture that keeps food and fuel moving into the cities.
Just recently, our own Vice President JD Vance, himself direct from rural Appalachian poverty, caught heat from China when he said, "We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture." The Chinese were surprised because Vance is known for his "Hillbilly Elegy" that humanizes rural people, and reflects on their toughness and their strength. They were saddened because Vance's words revealed the lack of mutual respect and understanding. Aesop's fable about the city mouse and the country mouse comes to mind.
That fable speaks to the dilemma we find today in the modern Zionist state, where peaceful poverty for Israelis may increasingly be preferable to a higher per capita income and unimaginable levels of fear and uncertainty. Tel Aviv is security dependent on an American president who is mercurial and calculating. Zionist Israel is vulnerable to coming American generations who will inevitably end Zionist Israel's special status, stop US wars on demand for Israel, and slash current outrageous levels of US taxpayer subsidy to a country of 9 million mostly ungrateful inhabitants eight time zones from middle America.
Respecting rural life is one thing, understanding the land and the environment is another. As a farmer, I glimpse the fundamental wisdom of the natural world, and its multiplicity of adaptations to climate and microclimate, land, livestock and wildlife. I am impressed on a daily basis by the sliver of interdependence and resilience that I see around me. I'm humbled because I perceive only a tiny portion of this complexity. There seems to be a continuous dance between too much and not enough, and yet it all leads to growth and healing - of soil, of land, of life.
My ancestors came here from Germany and England 400 years ago, farmers and working class poor people, risk-takers and populists intent on escaping the colonial curse of Europe, not reinventing it the New World. One of my grandfathers was a fan of Thoreau, and despised FDR, I never saw the other one read a book, but he also despised FDR. Both were farmers just north of the Ohio River, not too far from where Vance grew up two generations later.
So when I report the long term "strategy" by the IDF and Israeli settlers of releasing feral pigs into Palestinian lands to destroy the land, the grass, the crops, and the water as a pre-settlement clearing operation, it is in this context. My natural-born contempt for arrogant urbanites, utopian bureaucrats, and people who live primarily as government stooges comes alive in the case of Israeli settlers - pressing to occupy more, steal more and destroy ever more Palestinian land on the Capitol dime with IDF muscle - and using wild boars as their weapon.
For well over a decade, wild pigs have been released into Palestinian areas. Illegal settlers do it, the Israeli government encourages it, and the IDF protects all the pigs by ensuring Palestinians are unarmed and unable to defend their property. It is really quite amazing.
Americans throughout the midwest and south know what feral pigs can do. Whole service industries have grown up to control wild pig populations, and repairing and protecting farms, ranges and suburbs from their rapacious environmental damage. Americans embrace their natural rights to protect themselves, their children and their property, and to bear arms. Palestinians, on the other hand, live under Israeli laws that do not rest on a written Constitution, but reflect only the shifting needs of Zionism. It is "illegal" for them to bear arms, or otherwise protect their property from settlers, or from the feral pigs those settlers send their way.
Given the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the related land theft going on in the West Bank, Syria and southern Lebanon, the issue of feral pigs in Palestine may seem unremarkable. It's just one more method of harassing, dehumanizing, starving and humiliating Palestinians, in a place where the highest order of the state, and the highest value of Zionism is to harass, dehumanize, starve and humiliate Palestinians, and to kill them.
In the United States, we work together to prevent and repair the insane damage feral hogs do to local economies and environments. Our universities study ways to control their reproduction, our governments fight the pigs directly, and assist private enterprise in destroying them. Private citizens in American shoot them, trap them, kill them and process them. We know feral pigs in this country, and we know their place is very likely on a plate somewhere. Ironically, feral pigs in Palestine and in Israel are today a war crime of one side against the other, but they will ultimately become a two state disaster that may require a horde of Texans and Arkansans with rifles and ingenuity to solve.
Israel does not know, or care, one whit about pigs, agriculture, the environment, or how the natural world works. With US money, arms and assistance, the Zionist government - with overwhelming support by most Israelis - has dropped the 𝕏 equivalent of 6 Hiroshima size atomic bombs on a strip of land the size of Washington DC, up to College Park and Laurel, Maryland. Gaza has been physically annihilated, but the real dehumanization has not occurred there, but inside of Israel, within Israeli society.
Feral hogs wreak havoc on farms, fields and forests, leaving destruction in their wake. They destroy what they cannot eat, pollute water, spread disease and terror. They kill and eat lambs and kids, among other things. The USDA - and probably the IDF as well - call them a "feral swine bomb."
Perhaps it is appropriate that Zionist colonialism, a political model inherited from European intellectuals and creatively massaged by European Zionist urbanites, is letting loose wild boars into the holy land as a weapon. European nobility did much the same on lands set aside for the world of wealth, and elite sport, as a demonstration of power, and enforcement of serfdom and servitude of the locals.
Zionist Israel was never a good fit for the second half of the 20th century, and it has become an anachronism in the 21st. 70 plus years of Israel's episodic mass starvation, destruction of property, and murder wreaked on Palestinians has become ordinary, yet unimaginable. One more hell on earth has been created, this time courtesy of US political leaders and Zionist cultists. We don't understand it. But Americans definitely understand feral pigs, and we know only the insane and degraded would set them on their neighbors.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if we wouldn't tolerate it in our own neighborhood, or our own country, we shouldn't fund it overseas.