Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?
Solidarity Delegation, Reflection #7
By, Noushin Framke
When I talk to people about Palestinian human rights, I’m often asked “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis? Where are their Mandelas?” Staying in Bethlehem where the message of love and peace was born, we met three of them on the same day.
We were at the Casa Nova Hotel in Bethlehem, attached to the Church of the Nativity and operated by the Franciscan Order here. Driving SW from the “little town of Bethlehem,” we headed to the Tent of Nations, a family farm run by the Nassar family who are holding on to the last hilltop in this area; all others have been taken by Israel. The Nassars not only have ownership documents going back to Ottoman times, but also the British Mandate era and the Jordanian era before Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967. They have been fighting for their land for decades, watching huge Israeli-only settlements go up all around them.
Daoud Nassar of Tent of Nations
The seven mile drive from Bethlehem to the Tent of Nations took us about 45 minutes; the main road to the farm has been blocked by Israel since 2001 with giant concrete blocks, so we had to take a much more circuitous route to get there. We met Daoud Nassar at his farm, in a room that is really a cave dug into a hill. They are not allowed to build “on” the land, so they have dug into it. Israel will also not allow the farm to hook up to water or electricity, so they are using solar power and water cisterns. Standing in his black and red jacket, in front of the green doors to the cave room, Nassar looked like the Palestinian flag, now a symbol of resistance worldwide.
He told us about the kafkaesque court cases he has been through to hold onto his land as every hilltop has been taken one by one around him. No amount of ownership documents can match the Israeli government’s stubborn desire to wear Palestinian landowners down, whether through the labyrinthine court system or outright harassment. Two years ago, after decades of fighting to keep his land, Nassar was offered a blank check. They told him to “fill in how many millions” he wanted to sell it for, but he said no. The land came to him from his father, and his father before him. “For us, land is part of our identity. You cannot sell your soul,” he said. “Our connection with the land is not only physical, but more spiritual. We feel we do not own the land. We are the stewards of the land… I got it as a gift, and a gift cannot be sold.”
Life has been made so difficult by the ongoing Israeli land grab that many “react negatively or sit down and cry, or give up and leave,” said Nassar. “ We give ourselves none of those options… We are against violence, but at the same time we are against sitting down and crying and becoming victims. We are not giving up and leaving.” Now an icon of Palestinian nonviolent resistance, Nassar told us that living here with these commitments is “easily said, but very, very, very difficult to practice, especially in the last three years.”
We went on to visit Dar al Kalima University, the first and only university dedicated to the arts and culture in all of Palestine. They are a partner of the Presbyterian Church (USA), as we gave them an early large grant at the founding of the school. The president and founder of the school, the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, says, “Our aim is that our people, who admire stars, will dare to look up and dream, to believe in goals to strive for, and develop a new sense of hope, community, beauty and faith.”
Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb of Dar al Kalima University, Bethlehem, Palestine
When we spoke with him, Rev. Raheb had just returned from The World Social Forum in Nepal, where he met with the World Forum on Theology and Liberation (WFTL) to impart the realities of the Palestinian people. As part of their final statement, the global group of theologians asserted that they “oppose a Zionist reading of the Bible utilized as software in justifying the Israeli settler colonization of Palestine, which has been going on for decades and producing the current and inhuman genocide of Palestine in Gaza.”
In our 90 minutes with him, we realized that the world before the war on Gaza is not going to be the world after the war on Gaza — or as Rev. Raheb said, “theology after Gaza is going to be different than theology before Gaza.” Just as theology had to change after the Holocaust, so it will after Gaza, where hundreds of innocent civilians are dying everyday and there is a famine underway. One doctor who has operated in war zones wrote in the LA Times that what he saw in Gaza “was not war, it was annihilation.” So it follows that churches and people of faith will need to reassess their theologies to make sense of what has happened in Gaza. In the face of annihilation, Rev. Raheb said, we cannot continue in our day-to-day witness as the Church without addressing the tragedy of Gaza.
As another icon of Palestinian nonviolent resistance, Rev. Raheb models sumud, Arabic for steadfast hope. He continues to live in Bethlehem, Palestine and prepares the next generation with steadfastness to keep hope alive. He told us that we are all in a marathon, not a sprint, and it is key for us “to learn how to breathe” so we can stay in the race. This led to him recalling Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which King responded to white liberal pastors telling him to slow down his call for Black civil rights. Rev. Raheb connects the Palestinian struggle for human rights with the struggle for civil rights in the US, saying that Dr. King took issue against three evils in American society: racism, poverty, and militarism. At the time though, Raheb said, King didn’t have a collective word for all three. Today, Raheb traces these three evils back to settler colonialism, a system of power and mode of domination that eliminates native and indigenous peoples and cultures.
After the end of WWII with the establishment of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European colonial powers slowly began to release their grip on their colonies. As independence spread, member nations at the UN rose from 51 countries in 1945 to 193 countries today. Colonialism began to be dismantled brick by brick, except in Palestine/Israel where there is a holdover colonial state from the 20th century.
Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb has now turned his efforts to fighting settler colonialism in his native land, and is not about to walk away and give up his ancestral home to an entity created by the Western colonial powers of Britain and France whose original racist motivation was not to help the Jews of Europe, but to rid their nations of their own Jewish populations.
We met our third “Palestinian Gandhi” in the gardens of his institute in Bethlehem. Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian Christian, was born and raised in Beit Sahour, the biblical Shepherds' Field just on the outskirts of Bethlehem.
Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh in his biodiversity garden
After earning his PhD in Texas, Qumsiyeh trained in medical genetics in Memphis, Tennessee, and served on the faculties of medicine at three U.S. universities —Tennessee, Duke, and Yale— before returning to Palestine in 2008. Using largely volunteer efforts and local donations, Qumsiyeh founded the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) and its offspring, the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the ecological botanical gardens at Bethlehem University. He is now a professor of Biology and Director of Cytogenetics at the University of Bethlehem.
Qumsiyeh met us in his gardens, where he teaches students and farmers how to install biodiverse and self-sustaining systems. He has spent the last decade saving endangered species and explains that in fact this land is not a desert —and contrary to popular belief, Israel did not “make the desert bloom.” Being a more dry climate than Europe, the European Jews who came and settled here erroneously saw it as a desert. Speaking as the scientist that he is, he showed us how the climate in the region actually produces a rich array of flora that is sustainable if not overtaken by invasive species brought in from other places.
One example he gave is the European pine tree, which was brought in after Israel was established as a state. The European pine needs more water to thrive than the native trees and flora here, and when they drop their needles, they make the soil more acidic so that very little else can grow alongside them. This has been devastating for the environment, said Qumsiyeh, as witnessed in 2010 and 2021 when massive wildfires burned up huge swaths of the non-native pine forests. What’s worse, Qumsiyeh explains, is the fact that Israel created these new forests on top of the villages that were depopulated in 1948 when Israel forced Palestinians from their homes and made them refugees, never to return. So not only are these new forests hazardous for the environment, they also serve to cover up the crimes committed in the making of the state.
Qumsiyeh further told us that Israel was set up from the beginning to change the character of the country not just with people, but also environmentally. Even though Israeli scientists lobbied Ben Gurion to try to dissuade him from Europeanizing the area with European style houses and flora, slowly but surely, the landscape has been turned into something else, and the natural biodiversity of Palestine has been destroyed.
Israel also diverted the water from Lake Tiberius westward for crops. Palestine’s rain-fed agriculture used to yield crops like wheat, barley, lentils and chickpeas. Israel replaced this kind of cultivation with irrigated crops, using diverted water instead. While the River Jordan used to flow at 1650 million cubic meters per year, it is now down to just 20 million cubic meters. It’s no longer a river but a small knee-deep stream that you can easily walk across. Needless to say, this has devastated the surrounding environments of the River Jordan. Only recently have Israeli biologists decided that they need to revert to native species and indigenous plants and trees to save what they can.
Since returning to Palestine in 2008, Mazen Qumsiyeh has been quietly working on bringing back the biodiversity that was lost in his native land. Through outreach programs, empowerment of the locals, and education efforts towards sustainable agriculture, his day-to-day efforts are in fact a powerful form of resistance, as he is educating the next generation on how to live sustainably as their ancestors did.
In Palestine, people say “existence is resistance.” But some Palestinian heroes, like the ones we met in Bethlehem, go even further, working to make it easier for others to resist oppression in nonviolent ways. It was a privilege for us to meet three remarkable Palestinians on the same day, all of whom have endured in their mission under intolerable oppression. Daoud Nassar, Mitri Raheb, and Mazen Qumsiyeh are all living examples of Palestinian steadfastness —sumud— and remain bonded to the land of their ancestors. They are showing in their daily lives how to stand up to empire and to resist, in spite of everything determined to expel them from their homeland.
Noushin Framke
Noushin Darya Framke is a West Asian Christian whose family is Armenian on one side and Iranian on the other. Noushin’s maternal grandmother walked into Iran in 1915 as a ten-year-old refugee survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Noushin was educated in Iran at a Presbyterian mission school and in boarding schools in England. She came to the United States in 1978 for college and her freshman year turned out to be the year of the Iranian Revolution. Noushin served six years as a member of MRTI, Mission Responsibility Through Investment, which advocates for corporate responsibility and socially responsible investing for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). From 2006, Noushin has been a founding member of IPMN. She is a member of the Presbyterian Church’s Committee on Ecumenical and Inter-religious Relations. She is also a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Board of Presbyterian Women. Noushin is a Presbyterian elder and lives in New Jersey and New York City. She and her husband of 42 years have 2 adult daughters.