“Scars on the land.”
The environmental catastrophes of Zionist colonialism.
25 FEBRUARY—Israeli tanks rolled on Sunday into jenin, the northernmost West Bank governorate, marking an escalation in the Zionist regime’s war of annexation against the West Bank. Mainstream media would have you believe this was the first time in 20 years tanks have deployed against Palestinian communities. In fact, Israeli Occupation Forces have routinely used tanks against Bedouin communities throughout Occupied Palestine this past decade. This startling fact was one among many reported by Miriam Barghouti who spoke yesterday with Democracy NOW!
On 21 January apartheid Israel launched what we must now realize is its final push for annexation of the West Bank, in a blitz dubbed operation “Iron Wall.” This was only two days after the Gaza ceasefire began. In the 36 days since, 57 Palestinians have been killed, including eight children. Two children were murdered just this past Friday, both shot in the back. Ayman Nasser al-Haymouny, 12, was killed in Hebron, 13-year-old Rimas al-Amouri in the governorate of Jenin.
The Zionist regime mounted an intensive depopulation campaign in the first two weeks of operation “Iron Wall.” More than 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been displaced. Zionist Defense Minister Israel Katz recently announced that I.O.F. forces will remain in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams. “Israel wasn’t just waging a war on the families,” Barghouti told Democracy NOW!, “it was changing the landscape of Jenin refugee camp and Tulkarm.” This as it demolished hundreds of homes, bulldozed buildings and roads, and destroyed infrastructure—water, electricity, medical facilities—necessary to sustain communities.
By the third week of the blitz, Israel was renaming streets and putting up new road signs in Hebrew as it occupied, transformed, and Judaized—ethnically cleansed—former Palestinian communities. The destruction and transformation of communities and land—of every aspect of the environment of Palestine—have been a necessary strategy of the Zionist occupation and takeover since the first European settlers arrived and the state of Israeli, once it was established, continued the project with enthusiasm.
What follows is the first of a two-part series reporting on the environmental destruction that has accompanied settler colonialism in Palestine. Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, with whom I spoke at length in his Bethlehem office, has made it his life work to research and document the catastrophic legacy of the Zionist state’s colonization project.
—C.M.
I first learned about Mazin Qumsiyeh when I was planning a trip to the West Bank a year ago this month. Professor Qumsiyeh directs the Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at the University of Bethlehem, where he also teaches and serves as director for Cytogenetic Services. Qumsiyeh is well-known for his research documenting the environmental devastation of Zionist settler colonialism in the land of Palestine. And it was for this reason I was eager to meet him.
Unfortunately for me, Qumsiyeh left Bethlehem for a speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand a few days before I entered the West Bank in late April. As I traveled the Palestinian governorates of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Ramallah, witnessing firsthand the shocking environmental abuses heaped upon the land of Palestine by the apartheid state, I grew increasingly frustrated at having missed Dr. Qumsiyeh—and more determined to return to Palestine during a time he would be there.
I finally met this learned, dedicated professor during a second trip to the West Bank in November. And he was as informed and informative on the topics of land and conquest as I had anticipated.
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Land theft is the original sin of settler colonialism. This fundamental violation informs all aspects of Zionism—and indeed any settler society—and the violations I will write of include how Israelis relate to the land itself. What was acquired through violence requires violence to defend and maintain. Violence engenders fear, which gives rise to more violence in an endless cycle. This dreadful and ultimately unsustainable dynamic has left its scars upon the land as well as the people.
The creation of an apartheid Jewish state has been from its inception one uninterrupted act of violence. The visual proof can be seen in the environment, and it is everywhere visible. I saw the evidence in the settlements, in the ubiquitous roadblocks and checkpoints, and, not least, in the dreadful scar of the infamous apartheid wall.
I saw it also in the road construction. Zionists have built an elaborate and entirely duplicate system of roads and highways throughout the West Bank so that Israeli Jews don’t have to travel on the same thoroughfares that Palestinians use. This is the absurdity of colonial logic. It is apartheid taken to the extreme. Imagine for a moment the environmental impact as ancient vineyards and olive groves, growing in agricultural terraces millennia old, are bulldozed to build a highway, often parallel to one that already exists. Imagine the consciousness of people capable of inflicting such damage. Imagine, indeed, their nonexistent relationship with the land they come to steal and claim as rightfully their own.
You see the evidence of which I speak in Palestinian communities—refugee camps, villages, cities—where roof tops are crowded with water storage barrels. Israeli Jews control all of the water and allow Palestinians one tenth of what they take for themselves. Palestinians are forced to purchase, install, and maintain numerous storage tanks so they have water throughout the dry season—eight months of the year—and also when Israel shuts off the supply.
These tanks are then targeted by I.O.F. soldiers who shoot holes in them, especially in the refugee camps and rural villages. I have seen pictures of bullet holes in storage tanks located above a kindergarten and put my finger into the bullet holes in a water tank above a home in the old center of Hebron.
From my initial days in the West Bank, and upon my first view of an illegal Israeli settlement, I was struck by two things: how ugly, aggressive, and entirely alien the settlements appear; and, how very much they look like any typical American suburb or industrial park sprawling into the countryside and farmland.
Here I must interject. The Israeli settlements reminded me hauntingly of a road trip I had then recently taken from Guadalajara, in central Mexico, north to the New England state of Connecticut. The environmental devastation along the way had been shocking. Certainly in Mexico, where the consequences of the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement have been environmentally devastating—nowhere more than in the smog-shrouded, industrial wasteland enveloping the city of Monterrey, where cancer rates are high—but also in the cities and countryside of the North American states I passed through—ten in all.
In this respect, witnessing the Israeli settlements was like gazing into a mirror in which I could see reflected—and more clearly than at any time in my previous 64 years—the history and legacy of my own country.
Like so much of what one sees when traversing the United States, Israeli settlements have no relationship to the land around them. Many have been built to resemble European towns, houses and apartments topped with red-tiled roofs as one might see in France, Italy, or Spain. They’re frequently surrounded by non-indigenous European pine trees—often diseased, I noted, as if reflecting the disease of Zionism itself.
All of this so that European and American Jews feel more at home. And, as I was told by my young guide on a tour through Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, so that Westerners, recognizing their own reflections in these Europeanized communities, identify more closely with illegal settlers. As opposed to the oppressed and brutalized indigenous Arab population. It seems nothing has been overlooked in Israel’s long campaign of propaganda.
It is from these settlements that Zionists descend to destroy olive trees, some of which date to before the birth of Christ. Numerous settlements are now planned and being built upon UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Bethlehem Governorate.
What conceivable claim can Zionists have to ownership of a land to which they have no organic or historic connection and which they so grotesquely abuse?
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I met Mazin Qumsiyeh at last on an early morning in November at his Bethlehem office at the Institute for Biodiversity. He is a modest man in appearance and demeanor, with a broad smile and a kind face.
Qumsiyeh travels the world lecturing on the sustainable coexistence of human and natural communities, climate change, and other global environmental crises—and always on the pressing issue of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty. He has visited 45 countries and frequently meets with representative of indigenous communities. In spring 2024 he spent seven weeks traveling in Australia and New Zealand addressing the urgency of ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A Palestinian Christian, Qumsiyeh is fundamentally a man of peace. He believes in the efficacy of nonviolent civic engagement and rejects violence as ultimately ineffective and counterproductive. As a scientist, he is also a realist. Qumsiyeh’s politics and views—set forth in his book Sharing the Land of Canaan—are grounded in international law, in the history of Zionist settler colonialism, and in the prolonged suffering of indigenous Palestinians.
From the moment European Zionists—Christian and Jewish—settled on Palestine for their project of establishing a Jewish state, the peaceful coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jew long-established and enjoyed throughout Palestine, became impossible and was soon destroyed.
Israel was, as Qumsiyeh explained, an apartheid project before it was even an established state. He told me: “Segregation began in the 1920s under the British Mandate, when Herbert Samuel [ardent Zionist, high commissioner for Palestine, 1920–25] was in charge of Palestine. At the time, even the local papers said ‘We have our first Jewish king in Palestine in 2000 years.’” I detected bitterness in Qumsiyeh’s voice as he related this terrible and prophetic joke.
He continued:
Under Samuel’s authority, public schools were segregated. He seized control of natural resources and created Jewish organizations to control water. He took land from Palestinian villages and allocated it to Jewish agencies such as the Jewish National Fund.
This was the briefest gloss of a depressing history few Westerners know anything about: The role played by the British and later the United States in creating and legitimizing the Zionist state. All while countenancing, when not actually abetting, its many crimes. Every Palestinians I met knows this history well.
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Given all I had seen on my first visit to Palestine what I most wanted to hear Qumsiyeh talk about was the range of environmental impacts of illegal settlements. I wanted a comprehensive picture and I was given one. Qumsiyeh launched into an answer that was almost certainly an abridged version of one of his talks. He began precisely at the root of the problem: European colonialism.
“Colonialism refers to all groups that take indigenous people’s land,” he said. “This is always accompanied by damage to the environment, to native animal and plant life, along with the introduction of invasive species.”
A pause, and then: “In your country the Europeans slaughtered the buffalo in order to starve native people. This is to be expected. This is colonization.”
I hadn’t until that moment fully comprehended the diabolic logic driving settler colonialism. It’s nothing less than a logic of elimination. That is to say, extermination—not only of indigenous populations, this we know, but also the extermination of all that sustains them. For that reason, settler colonialism frequently finds its apotheosis in genocide and the mutilation or even total destruction of habitable environments—this as we have witnessed these past seventeen months in Gaza.
If the West Bank has any lesson in these matters it is this: Settler colonialism cannot be conveniently relegated to a remote, inaccessible past. The logic of elimination that drives and sustains any settler society, including my own, continues into the present. It is expressed in politics, policy, governance, institutions. The evidence is everywhere in the environment across Palestine. Settlements, as I’ve already mentioned, are among the most visible of examples.
Every settlement I saw, and I saw many, was built atop of a hill. They are ugly against the surrounding environment and so loom menacingly over the landscape. This is intentional. Israeli Jews seize the best land—always. They build their communities and industrial parks on hilltops and surround them with walls, barbed wire, and watch towers. Cameras line the perimeters—many of them pointed at passing vehicles. Armed I.O.F. soldiers patrol their entrances. I was warned against taking pictures from a car window.
From the hilltops, settlers surveil and terrorize the people below even as their sewage and industrial waste flows downhill. This, too, is intentional—the effective use of Arab farmlands and residential areas as toxic dumping grounds. There are now Palestinian communities located below settlements and industrial parks with unusually high cancer clusters, birth defects, and evidence of DNA and chromosomal damage, Qumsiyeh told me
Environmental degradation—of land, water, plant and animal life—is not merely incidental in settler societies. Very often it’s a strategic and central feature of colonization. Qumsiyeh sketched for me, in brief, four examples of this process as it unfolded in Palestine. He began by talking about water resources.
Zionists understood from the beginning that controlling water resources was a necessary and effective tool of colonization. It was an easy way to control the indigenous Arab population. They started in the north. “Beginning in the 1960s, they diverted water from Lake Tiberias. Denying water to the people of the Jordan Valley was a way to try to drive them out.”
Lake Tiberias is more familiarly known outside Palestine as the Sea of Galilee. It is in actuality a freshwater lake. Zionist diverted the water from Tiberias to the new state of Israel and to Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley and Negev Desert for their project of “making the desert bloom” by creating agricultural lands in arid regions. In consequence, the Jordan River is now drying up. Incredibly enough, when I crossed it this past December at the King Hussein Bridge, I would guess it was no more than five feet from bank to bank, confirming Qumsiyeh’s ironic claim, “You can jump across it.”
Israel controls all of the water within Palestine and determines how much water Jordan receives. It will now, after the fall of Assad’s regime in Damascus, control much of the water Syria is allowed. Over the years Israel has intensified its monopoly over water in the Jordan Valley. As in the past, so now: Controlling water resources is a key aspect of the Zionist strategy to force indigenous Arabs from their lands and annex the West Bank—and not incidentally to bully their neighbors in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
What little water remains in the lower Jordan River as it flows to the Dead Sea is saline, highly polluted from agricultural runoff and raw sewage, and unfit for consumption. All of this impacts the Dead Sea, the level of which has dropped nearly 150 feet in the past 50 years. It continues to drop. This is poor water management, but it is also one of the many ecological consequences of Zionist exterminitory policies.
When talking about the terminus of the Jordan River, there was bitterness and disdain in Qumsiyeh’s voice. While commonly known as the Dead Sea in the West, the body of water is actually a large inland salt lake. Qumsiyeh referred to as Lake Lot. “Lake Lot is neither dead nor a sea,” he said with a strong measure of contempt.
This comment, delivered almost as an aside, reveals much about the arrogance and ignorance of Zionists who have little knowledge, understanding, or respect for the land and ecosystems they are determined to take and remake into Greater Israel. It also reveals something of the Palestinian regard for their Zionist oppressors.
In Part 2, I share Qumsiyeh’s comments on three additional areas of environmental impact caused by Zionist policies: damage to indigenous plant and animal species of Palestine, including species extinction; the catastrophic consequence of afforestation; and, the introduction of invasive species.
Instead of making the desert bloom, settler colonial Israelis are degrading the desert to their own detriment. How sick can people be!
This is very powerful writing. It is so vivid. It makes me feel all the more angry at what is being done to the Palestinians. The Zionists miss no opportunity to inflict harm. They have no scruples at all.