'Maybe this will be the last genocide'

In April I saw Palestinian scientist and academic Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh speak at the Yagoona Community Centre. It was a Tuesday night and it was cold, but maybe 80 people turned out to the dinky little community hall to hear him speak and eat knafeh afterward.

It was Qumsiyeh’s fifth event that day. He was not quite halfway through a tour of Australia and Aotearoa that would run for 53 days and take in 212 separate events in 17 cities, including a visit to Parliament House.

I’d never heard of him before his tour publicist reached out to me, which felt pretty dumb on my part as soon as I starting reading his Wikipedia page. Besides a storied career as an associate professor of genetics and director of cytogenetic services at Duke and Yale universities, Qumsiyeh is also a world-leading biologist and zoologist.

In 2008 he left Yale and moved back to his hometown of Beit Sahour, east of Bethlehem, with his wife Jessie Chang. “Leaving America and good money to go back to Palestine was the best decision we ever made in our lives,” he told the room.

In 2014 he founded the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University; he and his wife donated $250,000 of their own money to help set it up. The goal of the Institute, which also encompasses the Palestine Museum of Natural History, is “researching and disseminating knowledge on the fauna, flora, and human ethnography of the region” in order to “foster sustainable human and natural communities”. He calls it “an oasis cultivating hope, biodiversity, and sustainability”.

Building a Palestinian museum of natural history was a lifelong dream of Qumsiyeh’s uncle, Dr. Sana Atallah — Palestine’s first zoologist — who took a young Qumsiyeh on field trips as a child. Atallah was killed in a car crash in 1970, when he was 27.

Qumsiyeh covered a lot in the hour or so that he spoke — the role that Colonel George Gawler, South Australia’s second colonial governor, played in laying the groundwork for Zionism in the 1840s and '50s; the 500 million migratory birds that traverse Palestine each year on their journeys from Europe to Siberia; the $200 billion of natural gas from fields off Gaza’s coast that Israel is exporting to Europe each year; the 44 native languages that were spoken in Palestine before 1948 — but one of the central themes was the ecological and environmental devastation settler colonial societies like Israel wreak in their efforts to legitimise themselves and displace the land’s indigenous people.

Qumsiyeh spoke of Israel’s habitual seizure of Palestinian aquifers; of its policy of restricting the daily water intake of Palestinian communities in the West Bank; of its claim to ownership over rain that falls on Gaza; and of its flooding seawater into Gaza’s tunnels, destroying the water table.

“It rains more each year in Ramallah than it does in London, but the Zionists take our water,” he said. “They use it as a weapon.”

The phrase “making the desert bloom” is as central to Zionism as “terra nullius” was to Australia’s colonial project — the false idea that Israel has “tamed” and “civilised” a previously barren and barbaric land. But like in Australia, Israel’s efforts to remake the colonised land in the image of the colonisers has led to disaster.

He told the room how Israel’s introducing irrigation agriculture to support Zionist colonies in the Negev Desert in the early 1950s has devastated the once-mighty Jordan River, dried up more than 95% of Palestine’s vast wetlands (classed as “wasteland” by both the British occupiers and their Israeli successors) and killed off hundreds of local species. The shoreline of the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan flows, is retreating by about a meter each year, sucked dry by irrigation and mineral extraction.

It reminded me of the Bradfield Scheme, the undying obsession of Australian policymakers to “unlock” or “open up” the northern part of the continent to agriculture either by building endless dams or turning the rivers inland.

“There are many parallels with Australia and Aotearoa in terms of the environmental impact of colonialism,” Qumsiyeh said later via email. “Clearing indigenous trees, introducing hundreds of European plants and invasive and destructive animals — cats, dogs, foxes, rats.”

In 2021, enormous wildfires around Al-Quds/Jerusalem burned huge plantations of pine trees imported by Israel from northern Europe, exposing the remains of ancient Palestinian villages and farm terraces. Those same pine trees, planted to displace Palestinian olive groves, burned in the recent wildfires around Kiryat Shmona on Israel’s border with Lebanon — a town that, Qumsiyeh points out, is a colony built on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Al-Khalisa in 1948.

Qumsiyeh’s decades of human rights activism is tied up with his deep knowledge of Palestine’s land, its water, and its natural history. In 2003 he co-founded al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which advocates for a universal right of return for Palestine’s global diaspora. When his son was 13, they drew the now-famous “shrinking map” of Palestine together for a school project.

Qumsiyeh told the room that, as of that night, 24 of his friends and loved ones in Palestine had been killed by Israel since October 7.

Even so, he expressed hope that the genocide would soon end, and that the global outpouring of solidarity and action for Palestinians would lead to the decolonisation not only of Palestine, but of occupied land around the world.

“People are refusing to be silenced,” he said. “The ranks of supporters are growing and the sails of change are picking up wind. I think it must lead to decolonisation not just in Palestine but globally. Colonial powers need to reckon with their own past. The alternative to decolonisation is this mad push to global war that will result in the destruction of human civilisation as it now exists.”

“This genocide is unique because the world is waking up,” Qumsiyeh told the room. “Maybe this will be the last genocide. Inshallah.”

Fundraiser update

Somehow we’ve raised more than $21,000, which is a lot of money! About half of that has come in the last two weeks — I don’t know what’s changed, but thank you to everyone who’s found the fundraiser and donated recently.

Noor’s asked that I raise the donation target, as she has more members of her immediate and extended family who are trying to get out of Gaza. Any money will help Noor and her family support themselves until the Egypt border crossing reopens again.

What I’m looking at

• Palestine’s Jordan River drained of water and livelihood

• The night Israel killed my family

• The Herd feat. Sereen, Mo and Big Rigs — ‘Soul of my Soul’