People who don’t care that Israelis are destroying Palestinians aren’t going to care that they’ve also destroyed flora and fauna. One interesting aspect of the latter destruction is that the Israelis are essentially befouling their own nest. From Cara Marianna at thefloutist.substack.com:
The scars of Zionism, Part 2.
Destroying the Jordan. 1951. (מעזבונו של גדליה בר ז”ל, cc by 2.5./ Wikimedia Commons.)
This is the second of two reports on the work of Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, who is an authority—and maybe the authority—on the West Bank environment and the environmental consequences of settler colonialism. Qumsiyeh is the founder and director of the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at the University of Bethlehem.
Part 1 of this series can be found here.
—C.M.
6 MARCH—The Jewish state’s creation was accompanied by a profoundly destructive transformation of the historic land of Palestine, including the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Calamitous damage to watersheds, a topic I took up in Part 1 of this report, was among the graver consequences of what amounts to another aspect of the catastrophe that has befallen Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist regime.
As Professor Qumsiyeh and I conversed, he commented on three additional areas of environmental degradation: harmful impacts to plant and animal species, including species extinction; damage to fragile ecosystems caused by a cynical project of planting non-native trees, and the introduction of invasive species.
