Over the last two years, world attention has mostly focused on Israel’s war and genocide targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But since Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vastly increased its repression in the occupied West Bank, where over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, some 20,000 have been imprisoned and more than 10,000 have been driven out of their homes by the Israeli military and extremist Jewish settlers.
As the end of the year approached, Israel’s security cabinet approved 19 new settlement outposts in the West Bank implementing policies to prevent the formation of a viable Palestinian state. Nearly 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population of 7.7 million people now live in these settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor of biology at Bethlehem University and a longtime Palestinian anti-apartheid activist. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus reached Qumsiyeh at his home in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour and spoke with him about the increased repression in the West Bank, attacks on the local economy and a planned new Israeli settlement in his own community.
MELINDA TUHUS: 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: First of all, Israel has engaged since they occupied these areas. In 1967, they occupied the West Bank and Gaza. 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 that 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. In Gaza, they destroyed all means of production.
In the West Bank, thousands and thousands of olive trees are uprooted every year. 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, Palestinians who used to be employed in indentured labor are no longer working there because Israel forbid the Palestinians from working—150,000 Palesestinians 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.
MELINDA TUHUS: 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?
For more information, visit Mazin Qumsiyeh’s website at qumsiyeh.org.
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