The issue of Gaza and Israel’s expanding war into Lebanon and across the Middle East was mostly absent in the U.S. election campaign last week. Vice President Kamala Harris professed her support for President Biden’s policy of total backing Israel, while Donald Trump was on record urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” as Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, expressed interest in developing beachfront property in Gaza once it is emptied of Palestinians.
After more than one year of war, Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has killed more than 43,000, with 70 percent of the dead women and children. Despite public opinion polls finding that a majority of Americans support an end to the war in Gaza and suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, neither Harris or Trump share those views.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian professor at Bethlehem University and founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History. As a dual US-Palestinian citizen, he could have voted in the American election, but declined, saying the only difference between Trump and Harris on the Palestinian genocide is a rhetorical one. Here he describes the impact of Israeli settlers’ escalating violence and property takeovers in the West Bank, where he lives near Bethlehem and shares his dark view of how war could overtake the region.
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: From Oct. 7, Israel basically had the green light to kill and injure and jail and torture any Palestinians. All previous restrictions were removed, whether it be Red Cross visits to the prison gulags or the settlers being restrained in any fashion. And the settlers are the state, of course. So they were allowed to engage in pograms. It’s a big, big, problem. The settlements have expanded; 23 communities were evicted. Palestinian communities were evicted. Thousands of people were made homeless in West Bank thanks to these evictions.
They fall under three categories. One is increased demolitions of Palestinian homes that are supposedly built without a permit, without an Israeli permit, even though it’s their own land and Israel doesn’t have a right to prevent them. Hundreds of new home demotions under that category. And then there’s the category of communities evicted, like those 23 communities I mentioned, mostly Bedouin communities and villagers in the Jordan Valley and in the south Hebron hills. And the third category is the category of attacks on homes in the guise of military needs. So going especially in refugee camps in the North, particularly in Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm were D9 bulldozers. These are fortified bulldozers that can knock out the whole house in one swoop. They were going in destroying infrastructure, including houses or attacking houses that they claimed there were terrorists hiding in. So those are the three categories of ethnic cleansing activities they engaged in in the West Bank in the past year.
MELINDA TUHUS: I know another big issue is the increase in the number of Palestinians who are being held in Israeli jails. And under harsher conditions post-Oct. 7th, there used to be 8 or 9,000. But now?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: That was the number before. Now it’s probably tripled or quadrupled, but we don’t know because they kidnapped thousands of people from Gaza. Some of them they released, some of them they didn’t release. They refused to give numbers, they refused to give any statistics. They refused to allow Red Cross visits.
MELINDA TUHUS: Do you think this war is making Israel more or less secure? Or neither?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Israel is finished, in my opinion and they can be finished one way or the other. The two options for them to be finished is either the option of the BRICS countries Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, who had just finished their meetings in Russia and decided to already take a strong position in supplying arms to Iran in all of this. And Israel, even with the support of the U.S, they will not be able to withstand the support of the U.S. And NATO, which has been 100 percent whatever Israel asks for. But anyway, they will be finished as a country and we will have human rights and we will have equality. And Jewish, Christians, Muslims will live together here in peace. That’s one option.
A second option, we go to full-fledged global war, nuclear war, which we are very close in.
I don’t know if you know this, but the Iranian regime now had, through their key strategic committee chair, general, I forget his name, he said Iran can make nuclear weapons today if they choose to. And how many is… fatwa said we should not make nuclear weapons. But our new strategy is if Iran feels threatened, then we can and we will develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
And if Israel uses its nuclear weapons, we will use our nuclear weapons and we have the ballistic missiles and we have the ability to wipe that entity off the face of the earth.
That means a global war of course, if Israel chooses to continue down the path it’s been going in—which I have been pushing for a regional war—instead of ending the slaughter in Gaza.
For more information, visit Mazin Qumsiyeh’s website at qumsiyeh.org, the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at www.palestinenature.
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