Interview with Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The Israelis dropped explosives on Gaza—an area smaller than Hiroshima—with seven times the power of the atomic bomb the Americans dropped on the Japanese city in 1945. They have also killed more journalists than those who died in all the wars of the 20th century, including World War II (source).
Not only have the crimes of the Israelis long surpassed in brutality and scale those of the German Nazis (source), considering the size and population of Palestine, but the very global, historical significance of the genocide of the Palestinians has now exceeded that of the atrocities committed in Europe by Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists. This is due to five reasons, which Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University explains in detail in an interview he kindly granted us from Bethlehem.
A Palestinian Christian of Bedwin origin (a community also under constant persecution by the Israelis, source), Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh resides in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and is the founder and unpaid director of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History. He teaches and collaborates at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Prize. But his most essential quality is that of a fighter for the freedom of the Palestinian people—a vanguard in the struggle for humanity’s freedom—and an advocate for environmental protection, which again means the salvation of people. All these qualities, I think, could be summarized in one word: he is a human being, and he deserves to be called such.
The West Bank, though not yet the “Dante’s Inferno” of Gaza, remains a giant concentration camp where Israeli soldiers and settlers kill at whim, and waking up in the morning offers no guarantee of survival until nightfall. A book would be needed to document the testimonies. Here is a key article from Israel’s Haaretz describing how soldiers and settlers break into Palestinian homes, bind the residents’ hands and blindfold them, then destroy their furniture and belongings with axes (source). In one case, the same newspaper reports, an Israeli soldier, part of a three-man patrol, entered a home and cold-bloodedly shot and killed a young Palestinian man in his sleep. Attacks by right-wing settlers against Palestinians have now reached a 20-year peak, as highlighted by UN services (source 1, source 2). The Israeli occupation forces have escalated their raids in recent times, attacking Palestinian cities, arresting civilians, and banning the operation of Christian churches: https://www.defenddemocracy.
Nevertheless, of course, the residents of the West Bank live in a “paradise” compared to those in Gaza (see also the interview we conducted with ZiadMedoukh: https://www.defenddemocracy.
In Gaza, Israel is trying to kill two million people through starvation and thirst—or drive them mad. It has banned all UN and humanitarian operations. Its secret services, collaborating with deranged American Evangelicals (Christian Zionists) and criminal jihadist mafias, created a fake humanitarian organization that lures starving Palestinians with promises of food, only to shoot and kill them. In recent days, reports have emerged of new “attractions” in these sadistic games, such as trapping Palestinians in covered pits and burying them alive with bulldozers. Another “game of death” they find amusing is poisoning food aid with toxins and drugs (source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4). They also have a particular preference for doctors and their families, such as the director of a hospital they executed recently along with his entire family. For reference, read the following: https://news.
Even in darker times, with much more tangible and direct threats against journalists, journalism had never reached today’s levels of shamelessness and vulgarity. Unfortunately.
What we mentioned above is certainly terrifying and undoubtedly constitutes one of the greatest crimes against humanity, the guilt for which will weigh for eternity on those Jews who did not actively resist the crimes of their state, as well as on the allied—or rather satellite—states of Israel that practically aided in the extermination of the Palestinians. And also, on those who did not exhaust all means at their disposal to condemn and halt the great Genocide of the 21st century. That Pontius Pilate washed his hands certainly did not save his reputation. One wonders how it is possible for humanity to celebrate, on the one hand, the victory over Hitlerism while simultaneously watching with relative indifference—or even approval—the revival of its methods and practices. This is not just a colossal moral issue. The nature of the Zionist regime is such that every attempt to appease it ends up exacerbating the problems. The inadequate response to the genocide in Gaza facilitated the surrender of Syria to the beheaders of Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda. And this, in turn, facilitated the war against Iran, which, if successful, would have been the prelude to wars against Russia and China.
“The genocide is not carried out by Israel alone, but by its allies—the US, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, etc.,” emphasizes Professor Qumsiyeh, who calls Erdogan a hypocrite for rhetorically campaigning against Zionism while supplying Israel with the kerosene its planes need. And it reminds us of what all the history of the Middle East (or West Asia as it prefers to call it) teaches us, even though opportunism wants us to do what we don’t understand: the centrality of the Palestinian question to the whole region (if not to all of humanity).
