Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute
for Biodiversity and Sustainability - Bethlehem University and author of
several books including ‘Popular Resistance in Palestine’.
Transcript of talk
given at the Merton Arts Space, Wimbledon Library at the invitation of the
Merton Palestine Solidarity Campaign on 31 October 2017, attended by circa 60
people.
‘Biodiversity, Sustainability and Human Rights in
Palestine’
Professor Qumsiyeh started by drawing a parallel between
nature and human society and argued that as in nature, diversity makes
societies strong and uniform societies rarely succeed. In 2014 he set up the Palestine Museum of Natural
History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at
Bethlehem University. He invited the
audience to support them (quite a bit more money needs to be raised) and to
visit.
Prof Qumsiyeh said that as a scientist and being medically
trained, whenever a patient comes to him, the key to treatment is to arrive at
a diagnosis. Until the correct diagnosis
is identified, the symptoms won’t make sense.
Similarly with the conflict in Palestine, it’s vital first and foremost
to establish a diagnosis. Everything
we’re observing – the brutality, house demolitions, restrictions on movement,
settlements, blockade, counter-attacks, even the terrorism – all these are
symptoms which only make sense when the correct diagnosis is established. And in this case, the diagnosis is obvious -
it’s colonization.
The following is a transcript of most of the talk (with 4-5
minutes missing from both the start and the end, apologies):
“The British Government approached a guy named George Gawler
in 1841, and they told him “You’re an expert on colonization because you were
in charge of the colonization of Australia, setting up the penal colonies in
Australia” (there’s a town in Australia called Gawler City) and they said to
him “Look into the feasibility of doing Jewish colonies like you did in
Australia”. And he did. He published his
report in 1845 and he followed it up with an expansion pamphlet the title of
which was “Emancipation of the Jews … for the maintenance of the Protestant
profession of Empire” and was entitled to the support of the British nation. He
submitted this report to the British government which loved it. He had only a couple of minor obstacles, he
said you guys can overcome them – “one is finding enough money to do this and
the second one is finding enough Jews and non-Jews to support it”. And indeed the main objection in 1847 to this
project came from the only two members of Parliament who were Jewish at the
time – they objected vehemently because they said “you’re going to ship us to
this backwater of the Empire like you shipped the criminals to Australia?”
The British government adopted it and they proceeded and
they funded it in 1852. The funding was
mostly for exploration (“The Palestine Exploration Fund”) but then they managed
to find some Jewish Zionists who have a lot of money, people like Rothchild and
so the first Zionist colony was established in Palestine in 1880. And in 1881 we had our first uprising or
intifada. So for people who say the first intifada was in 1987, I want to
correct that – the first was in 1881 and since then we’ve had 14
uprisings.
In 1881, Herzl wasn’t very important, he was a teenage boy –
his father was a leading Zionist. In
1897 the younger Herzl (Theodor) was a
political leader and managed to gather enough Jews to form a World Zionist
Organisation and he wrote “This would be a good thing as a rampart of Europe
against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”. In 1897, when Herzl held that conference, 97%
of the population of Palestine was not Jewish.
How are you going to take a country that’s 97% not Jewish and make it
the Jewish State of Israel? It’s a conundrum.
Herzl sent two rabbis to Palestine to study the viability of a Jewish
state. The rabbis went and travelled
from North to South and East to West and all the way to the Negev and before
they sent their full report to Mr Herzl they sent him a telegram which simply
said “The bride is beautiful but she’s married to another” It’s a wonderful country
for a Jewish state but what would you do with these people? The answer was
obvious – these people had to go. Send them away? Kill them? We have to do something. And everybody knew this – the British
government knew it, the French knew it, the Europeans knew it, the Americans
knew it, the Palestinians knew and the Zionists knew it. Nobody can claim they
were ignorant of what this entailed.
Because it’s obvious, you cannot do colonization by inclusiveness of the
native people – it’s never happened in history and never will happen. Ben Gurion said there’s only room for one
people here. Maybe we’ll leave a few in Bethlehem and Nazareth – you know why?
Because there were Christians there and he wanted my ancestors to hang around
there for the tourist industry. But then the Zionists changed their minds and
said the Christians had to go as well, and indeed they did. Now to do this required getting Empire
support. There was at the beginning but because of the resistance, they tried
to stop the Zionist project and as a result, the Zionist movement decided to
move its headquarters in 1904 from Vienna to London because London was closer
to the British and French empires. You
know about the Balfour Declaration of 1917 but I don’t know if you know that at
the time, there was a parallel declaration from the French government in almost
the exact same language. Now why do we know more about the Balfour Declaration
than we know about the Paul Cambon document?
For the simple reason that by the luck of the draw, when they divided
the ME as spoils of WW1, Area A ended up under French control and Area B under
British control so it was the British who were left with having to draw up the
Balfour Declaration. If it had been the
other way round then today I would not be coming here to talk about the Balfour
Declaration and speak in English – I would be like the Syrians and my second
language would be French and I would be in Paris speaking about the Paul Cambon
declaration.
Now Balfour by the way, and Cambon, understood why they did
this – it was for geo-political interests, it was little to do with sympathy
for Jews, in fact Balfour was anti-semitic.
He wrote to his successor in the FO saying “Zionism being good or bad,
right or wrong, is of far more import to us and the needs of the Empire than
the desires and wishes of the native inhabitants of the country and we don’t
even go through the ‘form’ of consultation with the Arab inhabitants.” In other
words, “we don’t even bother with looking as though we’re asking for their
opinion – the ‘form’ of consulting, not even consulting itself.
So everyone knew what this entailed and so we too knew as
Palestinians. If you want to know more
about this you can read a book like Ilan Pappe’s book .. 530 villages and towns
were de-populated. By the way 2 villages were de-populated long before 1948 –
they were de-populated in 1921 and 1922 – you know why? The British appointed as the first High
Commissioner of Palestine a guy by the name of Herbert Samuel. He was a Zionist. He represented the Zionists in 1919 at the
Paris conference (which was supposed to be for peace but it was about what to
do with all the territories gained after WW1).
When they gathered at the Paris Peace conference they discovered that
the Palestinians were not allowed to be represented and not even to stand at
the entrance to the building. They tried to send a delegation and the British
government in 1919 which controlled Palestine prevented them from boarding the
boats and they stood on the pier in Yaffa harbour objecting to not being
allowed to board the boats.
Anyway, Herbert Samuel, who’s a name you should investigate
because he is in my opinion more important that either Balfour or Herzl or even
Ben Gurion because he was the first Jewish Zionist ruler of Palestine – 1921. He’s the one who took over Palestine and
established the Jewish State of Israel, as a British citizen who happened to be
Jewish and Zionist. When he was appointed, the major Zionist newspaper in
Palestine had the headline: “The First Jewish King in Palestine in 2000
years!” Indeed, he was like a king
because the British government gave him all the authority of a king. And not a king by even British standards but
a king with absolute rule like in the Middle Ages – he could do whatever he
wanted. For example, he issued a
statement that said: “Segregate public schools”. And it was carried out. The Palestinians could only object and
protest but he could execute this.
Imagine segregating public schools meaning that he had Jewish schools
and non-Jewish schools. And the Jewish
schools were under the control of the Zionist forces not under the control of
religious Jewish institutions – they were not allowed to have anything to do
with them. So that’s how he did it. And
then he said “Give the natural resources of the Dead Sea and all the wetlands
to the Zionist forces, 119 species of migrating birds, and it was all done with
the stroke of a pen. He was a gentleman
who was always dressed in white, meticulously pressed – the Palestinians called
him ‘The White Devil’ and basically everything he touched turned to dust. And this is when the problem started in
Palestine – the formation of the Jewish state, Zionist militias, terrorist
organisations like the Haganah – all this happened under the power of this guy
in the 1920s.
The bottom line for us is that 7 million of us are refugees
or displaced people, literally pushed into the sea and then there’s the
distribution of the Palestinians in the ME and then Israel occupied the West
Bank and Gaza and that’s a part of the story many of you are more familiar with
and proceeded to build colonies in the WB and the map on the right shows major
colonies in the WB. There are 230 Israeli colonies and they house 750,000
Israeli Jews, there are actually more Israeli Jews per square mile in the WB
than inside the Green Line, what some people call Israel, I don’t call it
Israel I call it Palestine 1948 areas. For example in the Bethlehem area, these
are the names of the major settlements and they control most of our territory
in the Bethlehem district when they took land from own ancestors and my own
family etc. Historically then what
happened to Palestine, the shrinkage of the lands allocated to the Palestinians
for the benefit of immigrants from Europe so today we’re left in these
bantustans. This shrinking map of
Palestine, do you know where it came from, who’s the first person who drew
it? It was actually my 13-year old son
because he saw the map (of America) at the bottom in 1998 and he said Dad isn’t this what
happened to Palestine? And I said Yes, and he said “shouldn’t you draw one like
this?” I said “no, shouldn’t you draw
one like this?” So he drew it and I put it in my book and since then it’s been
used ever since – I have no copyright, don’t worry.
This is colonization.
Colonization is a common human phenomenon. It’s not a bad diagnosis for
this patient. It’s like the flu, it’s
common, just about everybody gets the flu.
And just about every country on earth got this illness at one time or another. And if you go through the roster of the UN
alphabetically for the first 20-25 countries, every one of them was either a
colonizer or a colonized country or both.
It’s a common malady if you like.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.
It’s OK, it’s human history. And
we have to accept human history.
Scientists have a notion of acceptance of things as they are. I don’t
like the fact that there are parasites in Africa that attack children’s eyes
and make them blind. It’s part of
evolution and nature unfortunately. It’s
terrible for those children, but that’s the way things are. As scientists, we just have to describe
them. OK but if we consider them an
illness, what is the cure and how do we proceed? First, you have to look at
other patients and what happened.
Amongst other colonial struggles, there are three possible
scenarios. Scenario 1: the Algerian
model. It’s very rare that the natives
win and the colonizers pack their bags and go.
It doesn’t happen very often because the natives don’t have the
wherewithal or weapons or anything else and in the case of Algeria I wouldn’t
want anybody to think that we can follow this model because it cost the
Algerians 1 million lives and 1 mil French packed their bags and went to
Europe, I don’t say went back to Europe because they were there for
generations, 5 or 6 generations. If you go to Algiers it’s French architecture.
It was only in 1962 that this happened.
Scenario 2 is a little more common but still fairly rare, and that’s
genocide. You kill the natives and you
can stabilize the situation. Think
Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, the US. There are so few natives left
that you can think of these countries as long-term stable countries though I’m
a US citizen and on Columbus Day I went out and demonstrated with the native
Americans in Boston and other places. For Thanksgiving Day which is this
mythology that the natives and the colonizers sat down and shared food around
the table – it was a thanksgiving holiday for the successful genocide / massacre of the native Americans. That was
the original thanksgiving. But in the
end, thank God, very few countries are like that.
The third and most likely outcome, which is found in most
countries in the world, is what? Think
South America, Central America, Caribbean islands, Canada, SE Asia, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, all these islands in the Pacific and Atlantic
oceans – the colonizers and the natives get together and you can call it a
lose-lose situation or a win-win situation depending on whether you see your
glass as half full or half empty.
But these are the 3 scenarios. Which do you prefer? Which scenario do we
Palestinians prefer? We Palestinians
have always called for the third scenario and I can send you document after document
from the 19th century, from the first Palestinian organizations
called Jewish-Christian Associations that issued declarations about Herzl and
about everything that we Palestinians love diversity, we have no problem with
Jews, they can live with us, we have no problem with immigrants either by the
way. We welcomed for example the
Armenians when they came, including after the Armenian holocaust (the word
‘holocaust’ was used for the Armenians before it was used for Jews and gypsies
and others in WW2). So we welcomed them,
we even gave the Armenians a quarter in our old city – it’s called the
‘Armenian Quarter’ in Jerusalem. They
became natives in every sense of the word.
We’re all at some level immigrants, we all came from East Africa. So that is what I believe is the outcome and
what we as Palestinians have been calling for.
It’s also important to have the right diagnosis so that you can
understand the symptoms. If you do not
make the right diagnosis, the symptoms will seem puzzling. If someone has
cancer and you see anaemia you might say well they’re not eating well, they
should eat more spinach. But you need to
understand the symptoms, and the symptoms are many. Think of anything - the
wall, the settlements, the discrimination against Palestinians, the home
demolitions, the violence, call it the terrorism I don’t care – but the bottom
line is, it’s all understandable in that context. Because after all violence is totally
understandable in the context of colonialism. Colonialism cannot be done
nicely, you have to kick people out violently and people resist. It’s
understandable. What do the colonizers think about this resistance?
Understandable also – not excusable, but understandable. When the Europeans went to North America or
South Africa they were just circling the wagons protecting themselves from
these savages and barbarians, attacking us for no obvious reason, killing our
women and children, maybe it’s a religious question, maybe it’s a language
problem, maybe they don’t understand what we’re trying to do bringing them
technology and knowledge and building shining cities, manifest destiny, maybe
they don’t understand our language and that’s why they are trying to kill
us. It always becomes logical but if you
remove the diagnosis it doesn’t make sense, it would not fit. Why did the Israelis start an operation
called “Operation Hunt Cow” in your town to catch the 18 fugitive cows in your
town? We had that in Beit Sahour - there was a military order that said we cannot
own milking cows so why was that? What
do they expect us to want to do? Of
course they don’t want us to have milking cows, for the same reason that the
Europeans and Americans killed millions of buffalo, to deprive the native
Americans from a way of life so they don’t retain their livelihood and they go
away. It makes sense, logically. Again,
you don’t have to vilify this, you don’t have to .. whatever but it’s naturally
to be expected.
So I want to switch themes now because you’re not here to
hear me describe the symptoms and I’m not going to carry on talking about
symptoms – there are many. But I want
to start thinking in winning attitudes, not in describing inherent problems which
we’re facing. If you look at the
situation, what comes into your mind, with Israel doing this and doing that?
When I saw a picture like this (pointing
to slide showing two women holding placards – one saying “I am a Palestinian
Arab. I was born in Jerusalem. Palestine is my homeland but I cannot return
there” and the other reads “I am an American Jew. I was born in the USA. Israel
is my homeland but I can “return” there”), the first time I met these two
ladies actually I said this is good, it’s great – it’s two ladies, one
Palestinian, one American Jew working together for peace and justice. This is what we have to look at, we have to
look at every good thing. The nakba, everybody said the nakba was such a
horrible thing, well it was – my grandmother was from Nazareth and we suffered,
my mother lost her best friend in Deir Yassin, she was a school teacher, she
was killed with all her students, horrible things, but the nakba also had a
positive side, I discussed this in my book. I mean if you think about it,
there’s a lot of things that are positive about us as humans and when
challenges face us we rise up and improve.
I am sure if we didn’t have the nakba, I wouldn’t have a PhD, I’d
probably be a farm worker now in Beit Sahour.
But I got education and went into medicine because of the nakba –
necessity is the mother of invention and all that. So we have to start thinking about positive
things. I’ll skip because of time. These
ladies for example (pointing at another
slide), were the first leaders of the Palestinian Women’s movement in the
1920s. They were going to meet the British High Commissioner and realized it
was a waste of time so they started demonstrating and not only that, theirs was
the first demonstration in human history that used automobiles – in October
1929, 120 cars were gathered from throughout Palestine (you can imagine there
weren’t many cars in Palestine at that time) so they came from all over - Haifa
and Jaffa etc to Jerusalem. That story made the London Times. These ladies organized lobbying in
Parliament, the first lobbying for the Palestinian question one-on-one came
from these ladies and the first support for Palestinian rights came in 1931 as
a result of the action of these ladies who used their own money to travel to
London to lobby Parliament here. We need
to start thinking about the successes and not the failures. When these
gentlemen (another slide showing
Palestinian dignitaries of different religions) met and objected to the
Balfour Declaration on 2 Nov 1932 in Jerusalem – these are people of various
religions, they’re usually at each other’s throats, sometimes the priests are
hitting each other over the head with brooms because one is Catholic and one is
Greek Orthodox etc - but they managed to
get together and they agreed to object to the Balfour Declaration and to the
British so-called mandate over Palestine but not only that but to engage in
civil disobedience and action against the British government in Palestine and some
of these people ended up in British jails – this is in 1936 in a Jerusalem jail
where there’s 4 Muslim leaders and one Christian leader together.
We Palestinians engaged in many forms of resistance and I
discuss this in my book. When soldiers
prevented teachers and students going to school and they have their classes in
the street, that’s a form of resistance, as when we climb walls etc. All these are forms of resistance. And even
innovative forms of resistance like involving people like you internationally
and ISN people. ISN International
started in my village of Beit Sahour and brought tens of thousands of people to
Palestine to help us and we welcome you anytime by the way, you can come and
visit and see what you can see if you want. If you decide to take positive
action you can also join ISN, for example these ISN people protected the Church
of the Nativity when it was being shelled by the Israeli army. Israel is more careful when there are
internationals in demonstrations of civil disobedience. Not always however,
Richard Cauley and many others were killed by the Israelis and hundreds of
internationals were injured. For example my friend Emily .. who happens to be
an American Jew. Emily was a Zionist
actually and she came as a visual artist to draw. I told her to stay away from demonstrations
and she stayed distant and yet they shot her in the eye and she lost her
eye. But her family are all
anti-zionists as a result. Since I came
back to Palestine by the way in 2008 for the past 9 years I’ve lost 19 of my
own friends. Imagine losing 19 friends
of yours in 9 years, how would you feel?
People like Bassem Abu Rahman, the most gentle person you can
imagine. None of these people by the way
were engaged in any armed resistance.
Bassem Abu Rahman was the most gentle human being you can imagine. I study nature and I went to his village and
was catching some insects and he said “why are you killing them?” I said I
needed to capture them to study them and understand biodiversity, it’s
taxonomy, and he said “but they’re living creatures”. But anyway he was shot with tear gas. I went
to his funeral and also went a month later and his sister Jawaher showed me his
room and it was kept the same way as it was and unfortunately she herself was
killed by inhaling tear gas at the same demonstration 11 months later. And the last friend I lost was this guy on
the right (pointing at another slide)
wearing the T-shirt I gave him and here we’re standing in front of a bus stop
to try and ride the bus – this is what we call ‘Palestine Freedom Riders’ and
the idea was to show the racism in the state of Israel and have civil
disobedience by trying to ride the buses.
Because any Jewish person can come to Palestine, get automatic
citizenship at Lod airport which Israel renamed Ben Gurion Airport and now
we’re not allowed to use it. But anyway
any Jew in the world and even any convert to Judaism can come to Palestine, get
automatic citizenship, live on stolen Palestinian land and freely travel around
including Jersusalem whereas I as a Palestinian, I happen to be a Christian but
I cannot go to Jersusalem where I used to be a high school teacher, which is
only 3 miles away. I cannot even enter
Jerusalem according to Israeli military orders, I cannot enter Jerusalem with
my American passport – this is how racist the state is. So we’re trying to highlight the racism. I was arrested many times during these acts
of civil disobedience, more times than I can count. We call you to join us and boycott the
sanctions as the sensible way of working with us as human rights
protesters. You saw the film about the
Museum – the Museum is also a form of resistance – the Museum’s motto is
‘Respect’. First as Palestinians we have
to start by respecting ourselves. Mental
occupation is more dangerous than physical occupation. Steve Biko I think in South Africa said this: “The best weapon in the hands of the occupier
is the mind of the occupied” and that’s because they make us believe that we
are sub-human beings, that we have to obey orders. I think I told you that I am not allowed in
Jerusalem by Israeli military orders, that doesn’t mean I don’t enter
Jerusalem, last month I was there. I
smuggle myself in, as we say in Arabic “Tuz”, I don’t care, laws here, laws
there, it’s not their country to give us laws.
This is what we do and we have to do this, by freeing our minds. In the
Civil Rights Movement, in a similar saying to what Steven Biko said, in the US
among black people, it went something like this “Free your mind and your ass
will follow”. We have to free our minds
and how do we free our minds? We have to
encourage children and children have free minds by the way. What we do as adults is we try to suppress,
suppress their curiosity, suppress everything, we say “don’t touch”, no let
them eat that, it’s good for their immune system. Give them a little freedom, let them think,
let them challenge. “Why is the sky
blue?” “Oh shut up son, I don’t know why, God created it this way”. No let them
think, say “let’s go and look it up together”.
This is what we have to do, encourage children, start with
children. And once they respect
themselves then they can respect others, other religions or cultures or
backgrounds, whatever, and they can also respect nature, the environment, animals
and plants.
So that’s what we do in the Museum but we also do more in
terms of research, the effect of Israeli what I call environmental injustice,
for example stealing the water of the River Jordan basin by diverting it to the
Western areas and drying up the Jordan Valley and now to help the Dead Sea
which has shrunk a lot they want to use sludge from the desalination plants of
the canal which they have already half-built between the Red Sea and the Dead
Sea. The Canal has been dug on the
Jordanian side not on the so-called Israeli side, you know why? It’s so that
Jordan will be saddled with the debts of this canal – about US$ 15 bn! It’s the
most stupid project I can imagine as an environmentalist. I did some study and
won’t bother you with the details, it’s devastating to the environment and the
future prospects and it’ll saddle Jordan with all this huge debt which
Jordanian citizens of future generations will look back on and curse – why
Jordan signed this agreement under American pressure. We have many problems including climate
change, we have problems with water not because we have a shortage of water,
there’s actually more rainfall in Ramallah than there is in London.”
This is as far as the recording got. Three or so minutes are missing from the end
of Prof Qumsiyeh’s talk but he ended on the hopeful note that those working
against the occupation of Palestine are not only on the side of history but of
nature too. When I spoke to him
privately the next day and confessed a degree of despondency and hopelessness
as I saw increasingly the success of the Zionist strategy of equating in
people’s minds, the media, governments etc any criticism of Israel as a veiled
form of anti-semitism, he said “all I know is, every morning when I get up I
look at myself in the mirror and say, if I can do one little thing today to
help the cause, then I must, and that’s all I can do”.
FC 17.11.17
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