Palestinian rights campaigner nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh is a geneticist and environmentalist in Bethlehem, known for his bus tour of the US advocating an end to occupation

Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh, a scientist and activist for Palestinian rights, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Photo: Takreem

A Palestinian rights activist who advocates one democratic state in Israel-Palestine has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a winner recognised for her campaign in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh is a scientist based in the occupied West Bank, whose work ranges from treating cancer to protecting Palestine's natural heritage. He lived for more than two decades in the US, where he held a professorship in genetics at Yale and Duke universities, and advocated non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation and apartheid.

In the early 2000s and until 2006, he led a bus tour of US colleges, schools, mosques and churches to call for an end of the occupations of Palestine and Iraq. “In my view the way to solve this problem is through a simple one word thing: justice. If you have justice, and you allow refugees to return, you bring peace. It happens everywhere in the world,” he said during a tour.

Upon returning to Bethlehem in 2008, he established a genetics laboratory to treat cancer patients. He was arrested twice by Israeli forces, once for protesting the destruction of farmland by an Israeli bulldozer in Al Walaja, a village outside Bethlehem in 2010, and during Nakba day protests the following year.

He and his wife founded two educational institutions dedicated to nature conservation in Bethlehem: the Palestine Museum of Natural History opened officially in 2017, and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, was established in 2014 with a $250,000 donation from the couple.

Prof Qumsiyeh has called for one democratic state where Jews and Palestinians live together with equal rights, and which draws on the South African post-apartheid model. He outlined his vision for this in book Sharing the Canaanite Land (Pluto, 2008), and co-wrote a Declaration for a One-State Solution with academics including Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in 2007.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, whose peace activism in Northern Ireland won her the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize nominated Prof Qumsiyah this week, praising the “enduring legacy” of the Wheels of Justice tour.

The nomination comes after criticism that last year’s award had not been given to those calling for an end to Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, a member of the grass roots movement of atom bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was awarded the 2023 peace prize last October, said he’d thought “those fighting hard for peace in Gaza would deserve it”. He said “the images of children in Gaza covered with blood held by their parents” reminded him of Japan during WWII and in the aftermath of the bomb.

A Bethlehem man holds up a portrait of late Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and South Africa's anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, after a milestone South African court appeal aimed at ending Israel's war in Gaza at the International Court of Justice in January 2024. AFP

Heads of state, cabinet ministers, international jurists, university professors and Laureates are among those who can nominate a person for the prize. But the selection process itself is shrouded in secrecy, despite the annual public speculation about who could win.

Ms Maguire became a laureate in 1976 for bringing together thousands of Protestant and Catholic women in Northern Ireland together to march for peace, after three of her sister’s children were killed. “I have great pleasure in nominating Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh for the 2025 Nobel peace prize. I have met professor Mazin and have followed his inspiring peace work for many decades,” she wrote.

Long record

While in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, he was involved in several civic rights organisations including the leadership committee of the Palestinian American Congress.

He co-founded the Triangle Middle East Dialogue and the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which advocates for Palestinian return. He organised some of Washington DC’s largest demonstrations for the Palestinian cause, drawing in thousands – numbers only surpassed last year in response to the current Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

He was awarded the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Raymond Jallow award in 1997, and the University of Alabama’s Peace and Justice Studies Award in 2011. He won the Takreem Award for Sustainability and Environmental Leadership in 2020.

He lectures at the universities of Bir Zeit in Ramallah and Bethlehem, and is a regular speaker on environmental issues and biodiversity conservation in Palestine.