MELINDA TUHUS: So I was actually surprised that it’d been, I think it was February that I talked to you last time, so 10 months at least. And a lot has gone on in that time. So I’d just be interested in your take on what’s happening, especially close to home for you. If you want to summarize how things have been going in the West Bank and how much more terrible things are, feel free, but we just want to get a close and personal “you are there” kind of feel for what’s happening over in the West Bank.
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Yeah, we are, of course, at the end of 2025, which is one of the most bloody, well, the most bloody year for Palestinians ever in our history. We had over 40,000 people killed and that’s at the minimum in this year.
MELINDA TUHUS: Wait a minute. Stop for a second. Forty thousand. Where?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: In the Gaza Strip.
MELINDA TUHUS: No, 40,000? We’re talking about 70,000 and then a lot of people are saying it’s a couple hundred thousand. Did you really mean to say 40,000?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Yes. In 2025, as I said, in this bloody year.
MELINDA TUHUS: Oh, I’m sorry. You meant I was considering the whole war. Sorry.
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Twenty-five months, of course, is much more than 70,000.That’s the lowest number, 70,000. But 2025 is the bloodiest year we have had. And many of my own friends were lost in Gaza. And all the other friends who are surviving have lost family members and are living in tents now, wet and cold in this winter storm that is here tonight. And so it’s really a very bad situation.
And here in the West Bank, it’s also getting there. People are being depopulated from areas like Jenin refugee camps. Homes are being demolished. Over 65,000 are homeless thanks to Israeli actions in the West Bank over the past two years. Again, worse in 2025 than the years before. And I could go on and on.
Over 25,000 Palestinians have been detained in the past two years. And now about 10,000 remain in Israeli prisons, so-called prisons. They’re not really prisons. They’re torture facilities where they have people crowded, sleeping on floors with a space of one meter by one-and-a-half meter space for each prisoner. That is barely enough for them to lay down in shivering, cold weather. Not enough blanket and not enough food. Already 105 prisoners were tortured to death in Israeli prisons in the past two years.
So, the economy is in shambles here in the occupied territories where I am. And I’m speaking to you from Bethlehem in the West Bank. And unemployment is at 50 percent. Economy is in shambles and Gaza, of course, is much worse. But anyways, that’s the situation that we are living now.
MELINDA TUHUS: So when you say the economy is in shambles in the West Bank and you said unemployment is high, can you say more about how the economy has suffered?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Well, I mean, first of all, Israel has engaged since they occupied these areas. In 1967, they occupied the West Bank in Gaza. Have for those decades, almost six decades, they have been doing what they call de-development, stripping us of sources of income, whether it’s land for agriculture, water for agriculture, industry, tourism. They destroyed a lot of the industries. They don’t allow us to build or to replace equipment from industrial facilities or anything. So there was a de-development process both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip under occupation slowly building. So if you look at unemployment in 1967 and unemployment now, it’s the maximum it has been, but it’s been a gradual process of de-development. But then this accelerated a little bit in the past 25 months in the West Bank and certainly accelerated a lot in Gaza in the last two years. And so in Gaza, they destroyed all means of production, whether it’s agricultural fields.
We did studies actually using remote sensing for tree covers. Domestic trees like olive swigs and almonds and palm trees were all essentially destroyed. Ninety-seven percent of tree cover was destroyed in the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, thousands and thousands of olive trees are uprooted every year and Israel is denying farmers access to land and to water. So most farmers ended their livelihood as farmers, became humanitarian cases.
And if I talk about Bethlehem, for example, Bethlehem is a tourist town. This is the third Christmas we have with hardly any tourists. The last two Christmases were barely any tourists. Now, it’s a little better than last year, but it’s the third Christmas with minimal tourism. So basically, the restaurants, the hotels, the souvenir shops are all shuttered or not working and not … So the employment is gone in those areas.
And of course, all other work, including Palestinians who used to work in Israeli industries and agricultural farms that are stolen from Palestinian land—Palestinians who used to be employed in indentured labor are no longer working there because Israel forbid the Palestinians from working. One hundred fifty thousand Palestinians were working building up the colonial empire because they had to, of course, before the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
So this was 25 months ago. There used to be 150,000 workers. Now, barely 3,000 workers are allowed building in settlements. So 150,000 basically unemployed, additional. And I could go on and on. All policies intended to impoverish and destroy the Palestinian economy and basically force us to leave. The idea is ethnic cleansing of the land from its people, so it becomes open to colonial activities.
MELINDA TUHUS: And I know when you mentioned the building of settlements, that some workers are allowed to … Some Palestinians are allowed to work on these building of settlements, which must be a horrible fate that they, to survive, they need to do that. But I believe that they’re ramping up. They’re definitely ramping up the settlements in the West Bank. And I believe that there’s one planned or perhaps already under construction very near where you live in Beit Sahour, which is next to Bethlehem. Can you talk about that?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Well, my family lost land to an Israeli settlement called Har Homa that was built in 1997. They took land from some relatives of mine. This was in 1997. And that settlement now houses over 40,000 Israeli-Jews. It’s between Beit Sahour, my village, and Jerusalem. And it used to be a forested area and also the valleys around the forest used to be olive fields, etc. All of them were taken, stolen and the settlement is built as a Jewish-only colony. That was done between 1997 and 2000.
Now, today, they’re building a new settlement on an area called Ush al-Ghurab in Arabic and our name for it. The Israelis want to give it a new name. They called it Shdema colony or settlement. And it’s both a military and a civilian Israeli colony, Jewish-only again, like all the other hundreds of colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. So it’s going to suffocate us from the east basically and cause us to be squeezed, even more squeezed.
The Bethlehem District actually contains 270,000 Palestinians. More than 75,000 of our people here are refugees from 1948. But anyway, 270,000 Palestinians living here, there are also 250,000 Israeli Jewish colonists, settlers that are living on 85 percent of the land of the district of Bethlehem where Jesus was born. So basically we are squeezed into only 15 percent and this new settlement will squeeze us even more.
MELINDA TUHUS: Wow, that’s a big squeeze. That’s not much breathing room. So talk about … Well, I guess one question is, I know over the years, besides the positive things you’ve done to develop Palestinian culture and biodiversity, which I do want you to talk about. You’ve also been involved in protesting the apartheid system in the West Bank. Is there any kind of organized protest to the increasing building of settlements now?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Well, I was at the demonstration yesterday, although it wasn’t about settlement activity. It was a group of Israelis and Pestinians who were demonstrating here. There was about a hundred of us demonstrating at the border between Area A and Area C, so to speak. At the circle at the road intersection in Beijala, we were demonstrating about the new Israeli law to execute Palestinian prisoners, death penalty and so forth. And of course, Israel has been killing Palestinian prisoners, as I mentioned earlier, by torture and by other methods, and by executing, extrajudicial executions of thousands of Palestinians on the streets instead of arresting them or detaining them or whatever. But now they want to codify it by law to allow them to do more extrajudicial execution and execution of prisoners they already have so that they don’t have to worry about keeping them. So that’s what we were demonstrating.
But there are other demonstrations about settler activities. Unfortunately, Israeli settlers and soldiers do not respect something called “right to demonstrate.” Even when Israelis are present or internationals are present, our presence in these demonstrations. They immediately use violence and killing and beating demonstrators. And at least sometimes using tear gas and stun grenades and things like that.
MELINDA TUHUS: I’m sure it’s not easy. So I know that you’ve been developing right along over the years, the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability and you’re in the process of a new part of that development, right?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Right. Yes. This institute we started about 11 years ago. The idea is sustainable human and natural communities in Palestine. But also we work globally and regionally on issues like climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, war’s impact on the environment. And it’s not just speaking about these threats or working to mitigate them. We work proactively to build institutions, build agriculture, do eco-friendly agriculture. For example, intensive agriculture as Israel took more and more of our land and more of our water. We have limited land and limited water, so we need to ensure food sovereignty.
So we have a seed bank, for example, and we have other facilities here. A community garden where even the refugees can come and grow some vegetables and take them home. So we have a lot of activities that are centered, again, about the issue of sustainability. Sustainability for people, sustainability for nature. And of course, people cannot be sustained without nature.
So nature can do without people, but people need nature. And so this is the aim of this project that we started and it keeps growing year after year. And now in our second 10 years, we’re going to a much higher, bigger step because we are building a big museum of natural history and we have botanic garden. We have biblical garden. We have ethnography. We have the seed bank. We have animal rehabilitation unit. We have many activities that relate to this issue of conservation and community service.
MELINDA TUHUS: Sounds wonderful. Is there anything that you think is vital for our listeners and readers to know about at this point and leading right up to Christmas of 2025?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Well, they need to know that they can contribute. They can come and volunteer here or they can volunteer from abroad—virtual volunteers, we call them. They can connect with us. They can email us at info@palestinenature1.org, Palestinenature1.org. That’s our website and they can look into potentially volunteering, contributing if they have old books or materials, specimens, whatever. They can also donate cash. Of course, money is always welcome. Eighty percent of our work is done by volunteers and 70 percent of our work is done by small donations coming to us from people around the world, including local Palestinians.
So our work is heavily dependent on these volunteer efforts, be it by time, energy, skills, knowledge. Of course, money is welcome, but skills and knowledge and time is the most critical. And by doing this, people contribute not just to this institution. They contribute to Palestine and they contribute globally because when we work on issues like climate change and habitat destruction, and we collaborate with the researchers around the world challenging what’s happening—the militarization of space, the militarization of the atmosphere and how the military alone is producing more greenhouse gases than most industries.
And Israel produced more greenhouse gases from bombing Gaza just from the jet fuels alone than Spain produced in the same period in the last two years of the genocide in Gaza. Spain produced less greenhouse gases from all its sources: industries, cars, automobiles, everything, kitchens, etc. It trains together less than what Israel produced just from jet fuels alone, bombing Gaza. So Gaza, and of course, other countrie. Israel bombed seven countries in the last two years, all with American taxpayer money, by the way. So that’s an important consideration also and why it is also the responsibility of U.S. citizens to rise up against this. Israel now gets more aid, more foreign aid from the U.S. than essentially all other countries, developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America combined.
MELINDA TUHUS: Are there specific skills that you’re really looking for that people could do from home that could help your organization?
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: They don’t have to have any particular skills. Whatever their skills are, we can put them to use. For example, somebody like you involved in media, certainly you can help us with media work, as you are already doing. Somebody who is interested in politics can help on issues of politics and lobbying and so forth. Somebody who’s interested in, for example, engaging in boycott divestment sanctions, we can work together on this. People who are interested in research in whatever area they happen to be. If they’re psychologists, we can work together on a research project on the psychology of colonization. They could do comparative studies, social studies between what happened to indigenous people in the Americas and what’s happening to us. If they are in biologists, they can certainly help us with analyzing some of our research data and biology or environmental issues or they can write on environmental justice. Or they can work on 101 other potential areas, depending on their area of interest.
And there’s virtually no area of interest that’s irrelevant to our struggle. The struggle is: people struggle, so all areas of knowledge are relevant to this struggle. Yeah, I mean, this is a place that’s important for half of humanity. The Holy Land, so to speak, is important for 2.4 billion Christians, for 2 billion Muslims, because also the Muslims consider it a holy land. That’s where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque is, and also the Muslims recognize Jesus as a prophet. So the birthplace of Jesus here in Bethlehem is holy to Muslims. Just yesterday in the Church of Nativity, I saw two Muslim women lighting candles. So I think we have to look at this. And of course, 14 million Jews, 15 million Jews in the world consider it a holy land, but again, half of humanity consider it a holy land. And so this is an area that shouldn’t be suffering from a genocide, a Holocaust. An “equiside” and a “medicide” and a “scholasticide”—now destruction of knowledge and universities and so on—or destruction of truth, “veriticide.”
That’s why truth telling is important.
MELINDA TUHUS: Yeah, that’s a good word. Is that a real word? I mean, is it a word? It’s not just a word.
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Yes. We wrote research paper. And again, people in the audience can help us write more papers like this about the destruction of truth, but they don’t have to write research papers. They can write articles for newspapers or op-ed pieces or letters to editor and speak the truth of what’s happening in the land that Jesus was born and that the prophets consider important.
MELINDA TUHUS: Right, right. Definitely. Well, I hope to be back. It’s been a long time since I was there. I can’t believe it was that many years ago, but anyway. Well, thank you. Thanks for your time and for all that you do and we’ll be in touch.
MAZIN QUMSIYEH: Take care. Thank you.
MELINDA TUHUS: Okay. You too, Mazin. Take care. Bye-bye.