Frazer Hay in conversation with Mahmoud Soliman, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
Mahmoud Soliman’s life is rooted in the hills and farmlands surrounding Bethlehem, where land is not simply property but identity, memory and survival. Raised in a large farming family in the village of Al-Masara, he grew up working the land, tending sheep, building terraces and learning a way of life grounded in resilience, self-sufficiency and deep attachment to place. ‘If you eat from your axe digging, your thoughts will be independent,’ he reflected, recalling a proverb that shaped his worldview from childhood onward.
Today, Mahmoud is widely known as a Palestinian nonviolent activist, researcher and peacebuilding practitioner with more than two decades of experience organising grassroots resistance, protecting communities and safeguarding cultural heritage in occupied Palestine. Yet his route into this work was neither straightforward nor ideological. It emerged gradually through farming life, education, loss and a growing awareness that heritage and land could not be separated from justice, dignity and survival.
I met Mahmoud at Coventry University’s Jaguar Building, home to the Centre for Peace and Security. He greeted me warmly, with the strong handshake of someone accustomed to physical work and long days outdoors. Throughout our conversation, I was struck by his calmness, hospitality and patience. Mahmoud speaks carefully and thoughtfully, but beneath that calm is an immense moral clarity shaped by lived experience.
He was born into a family of eight brothers and five sisters. Their life revolved around farming, livestock and seasonal rhythms. The family cultivated olives, grapes and crops across the hillsides, while also raising sheep and goats. Mahmoud described how farmers and Bedouins once occupied distinct social worlds in Palestine, though over time these boundaries blurred through changing lifestyles and shared struggle.
What remained constant was the relationship to land.
‘I would say the more you are close to land, the more you are close to nature, the more resilient you are,’ he told me.
That idea runs through everything Mahmoud does. For him, resilience is not an abstract concept, but something learned physically through labour, weather, hunger, exhaustion and care. As a child, he worked the farm while attending school, studying in the mornings and tending sheep or ploughing fields in the afternoons. His father, a strict but deeply respected man, insisted on both education and farming. Mahmoud remembers building stone terraces as one of the hardest tasks imaginable, carrying heavy rocks under pressure to ensure the winter rains would not collapse the walls. Yet he also remembers the beauty of springtime fields, the freshness of shaded hillsides and the emotional peace his father found in the land.
Some of the most powerful memories he shared were simple ones. Returning from the fields at dusk to find his mother sitting outside waiting with hot lentil soup. Watching his father kiss olive leaves while living with Alzheimer’s, seeking comfort and memory through touch and landscape. Sitting on different sides of the hills depending on the season: the cool shaded slopes in summer, the sunlit southern sides in winter.
‘When I was a child, no,’ he said when I asked whether he understood how special those moments were. ‘When I grow up, yes. And when I start to travel, even more so.’
That awareness deepened as Mahmoud pursued education. Like many Palestinians, he described higher education as both an aspiration and a necessity. ‘In Palestine, it’s a tradition to invest in education,’ he explained. Although his roots were firmly rural, he recognised early on that education was also a form of survival. He studied physics because the university offered a scholarship and because few others were willing to attempt such a difficult subject. Later, he became a physics teacher, teaching for thirteen years with genuine passion.
Yet his life changed direction after the death of a close friend during the Second Intifada. Mahmoud had begun doctoral research in Grenoble, France, focused on superconductors and resistance in physics. But while abroad, he learned that his friend had died after an accident involving an Israeli settler, left untreated by emergency responders while the settler received immediate medical care.
The shock altered his priorities completely.
‘I didn’t want to work with neutrons, protons, all these things,’ he said quietly. ‘I wanted to work with humans.’
He abandoned his PhD in physics and became increasingly involved in nonviolent activism, grassroots organising and protecting farmers whose lands were threatened by settlement expansion and the construction of the segregation wall near his village. His background in physics remained important to him, however. He believes it shaped his analytical thinking and ability to understand systems, patterns and human behaviour.
Over time, Mahmoud became one of the founders of Palestinian nonviolent grassroots resistance networks, working to mobilise communities against land confiscation and violence while deliberately resisting armed struggle. During the Second Intifada, while many around him embraced violence, Mahmoud instead contacted Israeli peace activists and invited them to stand alongside Palestinians.
‘I knew we had to think in a different way,’ he reflected.
That commitment to nonviolence eventually led him into peace and conflict studies, cultural heritage work and collaboration with the Cultural Protection Fund. His involvement with CPF began through a university-led project in Palestine around 2017. Initially brought in to help navigate local dynamics and relationships, Mahmoud soon became central to the project’s development and expansion across the West Bank and Gaza.
What mattered most to him was not simply documentation or exhibitions, but local impact.
‘The most important thing is to ensure that the value of the project arrives in the minds of the people,’ he explained.
Working with rural communities, cave dwellers, farmers and shepherds, Mahmoud helped document oral histories, traditions and threatened ways of life. He spoke passionately about caves still inhabited in Palestine today, not as primitive remnants of the past, but as highly sophisticated responses to climate, displacement and restrictions on building. Some of these cave systems, he explained, remain invisible from satellite imagery while housing entire communities.
‘Palestine is known as the Holy Land, and wherever you go, you step on a holy site rich in history and culture,’ he reflected at one point, describing Palestine as layer upon layer of human history, belief and belonging.
For Mahmoud, cultural heritage protection is inseparable from land rights, memory and resistance. Heritage is not frozen in museums; it exists in water wells, terraces, farming practices, oral histories and relationships between generations. One of the project’s greatest achievements, in his view, was helping younger Palestinians reconnect with older generations whose knowledge risked disappearing.
He described how young people who once sat silently beside grandparents now ask questions about landscapes, stories, traditions and memories. Some share this knowledge through social media; others use documentation gathered through the project to support legal efforts resisting eviction and land seizure.
In Mahmoud’s words, the challenge in Palestine is especially complex because it is not only about erasing people, but about appropriating and rewriting identity itself.
‘It’s not people who want to replace people,’ he explained. ‘It’s: I want to replace you and take your cultural identity.’
Despite the immense pressures of displacement, violence and fragmentation, Mahmoud remains remarkably hopeful about human connection. Throughout our conversation, he repeatedly returned to the importance of trust, solidarity and shared humanity. He spoke warmly about Israeli activists who have worked alongside Palestinians for decades, about international solidarity campaigns and about the traditional Palestinian concept of faz3a: collective support and mutual aid.
This philosophy also shapes his view of the Cultural Protection Fund.
‘In Palestine, the team was amazing,’ he told me. He spoke appreciatively about the flexibility, accessibility and trust offered by CPF staff, describing relationships built not only professionally but personally. For Mahmoud, that human dimension matters deeply. The ability to contact people informally, ask for help, exchange ideas and feel genuinely understood reflects the same relational values that underpin his own work.
At its heart, Mahmoud’s story is about continuity. Continuity between generations, between land and identity, between heritage and resilience. Although he now spends periods living in Coventry while parts of his family remain in Palestine, home for him remains inseparable from the hills, terraces, smells and memories of Al-Masara.
‘When I close my eyes,’ he told me, ‘I think of every step I have taken in the village.’
That sentence stayed with me long after our conversation ended.
Because Mahmoud’s work, like the Cultural Protection Fund itself, ultimately asks a profound question: what does it mean to protect not only buildings or artefacts, but ways of belonging in the world?
In Mahmoud’s case, the answer begins with land, family and memory. But it extends outward into peacebuilding, cultural identity and the difficult work of keeping human connection alive even amid conflict and displacement.
And perhaps that is why his story belongs so naturally within this series. Because through his work with communities, farmers, young people and cultural heritage, Mahmoud reminds us that resilience is not simply endurance. It is the ability to remain human, rooted and connected, even under immense pressure.
