A strange joke of the fate. The cheerful artist, who always dreamed of being the center of attention, needed to completely withdraw from the world and lock himself in his sadness in order to create something that generations remembered him for.
The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters - Francisco Goya, 1797-1799
This afternoon after morning prayers and the Shabbat meal, settlers from the Yitzhar settlement descend to the Palestinian village of Burin and set fire to olive trees.
Doha Asous with one of her olive trees cut down by Israeli settlers in the West Bank just outside her village of Burin. Photograph: Amar Omran
"I look after about 700 olive trees around the valley. But I and others with groves have lost about 70% of them in the past five years. Some were taken by settlers; others have just been made impossible to cultivate.
These are our groves on our ancestral land, but we have to get permits from the Israeli authorities to nurture them and pick. Believe it or not, during last autumn’s olive harvesting, in some of my groves I was given permission to pick for only two days when it needed two weeks.
The day we started – 1 November – the settlers began their attacks. The next day I went to look to find that they had uprooted trees – some hundreds of years old. Others were cut down to their trunks with the olive branches taken."
As an Israeli minister calls for a Palestinian town to be ‘wiped out’, an olive farmer tells of living with fear in the West Bank