The following article on apartheid-Israel’s ecocide of Palestinian life was written of Rawan Masri of Decolonizing Palestine for Issue 41 of Critical Resistance’s cross-wall newspaper The Abolitionist. Issue 41 prints the week of June 24, 2024 and will be sent to thousands of imprisoned people for free in jails, detention centers and prisons across the US and some internationally. Supporters outside of cages can sign up for paid subscriptions that sponsor free subscriptions for prisoners. Sign up by June 19 to receive your own copy of Issue 41 with feature articles on ecological justice and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition.
Consider pairing your subscription with a donation to a Palestine solidarity organization like Decolonizing Palestine, Arab Resource & Organizing Center, Palestinian Youth Movement, Palestinian Feminist Collective, Addameer, Jewish Voice for Peace, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) or Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA). FREE PALESTINE!
Palestine is a Lab for Climate Apocalypse: When Worlds Are Threatened by Colonialism
Written by Rawan Masri
In Amsterdam in November 2023, 21-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, known for challenging world leaders to take immediate action for climate change mitigation, expressed her solidarity with Palestine and her understanding of the interconnectedness between movements for a free Palestine and for environmental justice. As she inspired the crowd to chant, “Palestine will be free,” a man walked across the stage and took the microphone away from her to declare he was there for “a climate demonstration and not for a political view.”
The fight against climate change is inherently political. Palestinians have been intimately acquainted with this fact due to the US-backed Zionist settler-colonial project and its political experiment of the apartheid state of Israel, wreaking havoc on Palestinian land and natural resources all the while branding itself as green and environmentally friendly, a tactic called “greenwashing”. When examining the violence that apartheid Israel deploys to destroy Palestinian life and unraveling Israel’s greenwashing of its military occupation and escalating ongoing genocide, in all its manifestations, we are also examining the fight against climate change. As imperialist forces attempt to neuter the environmental movement via greenwashing and obscure the distinction between the oppressors versus the oppressed, the struggles against US imperialism, environmental racism, and the prison industrial complex (PIC) are essential to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, freedom of the land, and freedom of our planet.
Zionism, Ecocide, and the Destruction of Palestinian Life
In Gaza there is no “climate anxiety”; there is only the apocalypse. At the time of writing this article, apartheid Israel has carried out seven-going-on-eight straight months of a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip of historic Palestine—which has only exacerbated the catastrophic conditions created by the 17-year-long blockade and closure, and all the wars and clashes since settlement withdrawal in 2005. According to the Guardian, since October 2023, Israel has dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Gaza, with satellite analysis from January indicating that between 50 and 62 percent of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed. While much destruction has been caused by constant aerial bombardment, ground troops also invaded and dismantled greenhouses while tractors, tanks, and vehicles uprooted orchards and fields of crops, ultimately destroying an estimated 38 to 48 percent of tree cover and farmland. Forensic Architecture’s Assistant Director of Research, Samaneh Moafi, describes this systemic destruction of agricultural land and infrastructure in Gaza as not only genocide but “a deliberate act of ecocide.”
The climate apocalypse Palestinians are facing did not start in October 2023. Rather, apartheid Israel has been deploying ecological warfare on Palestinians for decades. As stated in the 2012 report “Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression” released by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), the colonization of Palestine was once part of the British and French attack on the movement for Arab unity and independence that threatened European control of the region’s resources, hence Israel’s tight partnership with the US for the same control of those resources. Therefore, a major component of establishing Western dominance in historic Palestine through military occupation since 1948 has been the intentional use of environmental destruction as well as resource extraction, making environmental oppression an insidious strategy for Zionist settler-colonial and apartheid practices.
While land has always been central to the settler-colonial imagination, Israel has refined this colonial staple to frame the environment as separate from humans, which exists as a site to be owned and controlled by technologically advanced, “deserving” people. As explained by DA Jaber in her research on settler colonialism and ecocide referencing Al-Khader in the Bethlehem area of the West Bank as a case study, “the ability to dominate and manipulate an ecology for power benefits contributes to the settler goal of native elimination. Therefore, ecocide as the destruction of native ecology is simultaneous with the creation of settler exclusive space.”
Safe and clean water should belong to everyone. Instead, the wastewater Israel reuses for irrigation is an environmental and health hazard, given its poor pretreatment, inadequate oversight, and lenient standards in areas where Palestinians live—another manifestation of separate and unequal apartheid policies. Palestinian environmental scholar Sharif S Elmusa describes Israel as being a water sponge, and a greedy sponge at that: Israel uses 73 percent of the West Bank’s water, diverting an additional 10 percent of it to illegal settlements, and selling to Palestinians the remaining 17 percent. Meanwhile, in the nearby settlements, settlers have ample water supply. They have swimming pools and lush irrigated vineyards, herb farms, and lawns—verdant even at the height of the dry season—standing in stark contrast to the parched and arid Palestinian villages on their doorstep. This is not an isolated case. It has been found that, overall, water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory.
As IJAN and other organizations have exposed, the Israeli government assumes a major, worldwide role in enforcing limitations on the freedom of movement, the policing of communities, and undermining peoples’ struggles for liberation. Israel’s occupation of historic Palestine and routine military campaigns “serve as a laboratory” in the global development and business of weapons, surveillance technology, and tactics of population control. Israel’s concurrent use of ecocide further advances its military and political objective—to destroy all Palestinian life—an experiment for sale and export.
“Israel’s concurrent use of ecocide further advances its military and political objective—to destroy all Palestinian life—an experiment for sale and export.”
Today there are 9,500 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank caged in Israeli captivity, including 3,660 prisoners in administrative detention (without charges or a trial). One in every five Palestinians has experienced arrest or charges in their lifetime, a dramatic increase since October 7 that has targeted released prisoners and, specifically, women activists. Many behind Israeli bars have made the connection between the occupation and the need to protect the environment, as reflected in their research, writing, and activism. All, however, have been met with detention because of the ways their very existence has been deemed resistance to Zionist settler colonialism, a dynamic that should inform our organizing not only in Palestine regarding our fraught relationship to our land but in solidarity movements globally.
Resisting Israel’s Greenwashing: No Such Thing as a Green Genocide
A pillar of Israel’s Western-backed apartheid regime from its inception has been racist, anti-Arab propaganda. It is no wonder, then, that Israel has invested in a huge amount of greenwashing as a propaganda tactic and broader political strategy to shield against scrutiny into its military operations and to hide genocide. Stemming from colonialism’s separatist staple, Zionist propaganda portraying Israel as an environmental steward to justify the subjugation of Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian land has since only evolved to be a bit more subtle. In the context of Palestine, greenwashing is a form of environmental racism in which Zionists pay lip service to ecological preservation and ahistorically depict Israel as “making the desert bloom”. All the while, Israel continues polluting Palestinian land, planting invasive species, building “ecological preserves” to cover up ethnically cleansed villages, and presenting its theft of Palestinian water as a miraculous answer to the water scarcity that Israel itself is actively contributing to. This propaganda serves to cover up and distract from the displacement and uprooting of Palestinians in service of the Zionist colonial project.
While greenwashing is deployed to excuse or hide the different tools for ecocidal destruction mentioned above, another greenwashing method includes seemingly environmental initiatives by the Israeli state that undermine Palestinian (and therefore Indigenous) stewardship of the land. Tree-planting campaigns, for instance, are cynically exploited for colonial ends, with the trees themselves used as proof that Zionism is “bettering” the land in ways Palestinians could not and as a symbol of an imagined Israeli past. According to Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), despite its racial justice based mandate and its involvement in settler-colonial projects, deceptively depicts itself as an environmental charity, boasting of having planted over 240 million trees, having had large successes with forestation, rehabilitating forests, and preventing forest fires. In reality, the practices of planting extensive non-native trees and using hazardous chemicals have been disastrous, killing off much of the native habitat and resulting in massive deadly forest fires.
These trees are also intentionally planted over the remains of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the 1948 Nakba; the aforementioned pine trees, for example, were planted over the remains of the Palestinian village of Al-Trina. The purpose of this is to make Palestinian life and Indigeneity physically invisible, by literally obscuring evidence of their previous existence on the same land. Furthermore, designating certain areas as national parks aims to first obscure Palestinian life and then make it impossible by concealing remnants of Palestinian heritage on the land, putting a “green face” on Israel’s colonial expansion. This is what happened in Wadi Qana, leading to an absolute ban on Palestinian farming, which meant the loss of an important source of income and way of life. One organization that supports Palestinian farmers in the face of farming bans and other apartheid policies is the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), which, according to an Equator Initiative 2014 case study, is one of the oldest nonprofit organizations in the state of Palestine that works with farmers, herders, and fishermen to attain food sovereignty by restoring and conserving natural resources and fighting for Palestinians’ rights to access them.
Sites like Al-Trina are not spectacular exceptions, as the Zionist settler-colonial project aims to turn mass burial grounds and the destruction of communities and ways of life into places of leisure and entertainment. This thinking is applied in different ways across historical Palestine, reaching a fever pitch through the Gaza genocide. Former senior advisor to the Trump administration Jared Kushner is openly daydreaming about dollar signs in the form of “valuable waterfront property” in Gaza. The Harey Zahav settlement real estate company, following the December 2023 Practical Preparation for Gaza Settlement Conference in Tel Aviv organized by a coalition of settlement organizations funded by the Israeli government, published an “artistic rendering” of luxury homes superimposed over an actual photograph of a Gaza neighborhood destroyed by Israeli attacks. Essentially, as Khaled Odetallah has theorized in Arabic regarding the shift in violence against Palestinians in Gaza, once Israeli settlements were withdrawn in 2005, strategies of imprisonment, exploitation, and elimination of the existing population have become inherent in the production of a new reality and geography in Gaza.
The impact of this violence since then has been devastating. Tens of thousands of unrecovered bodies are decomposing under rubble and proliferating inside homes, public places, and the streets, with the whole Gaza Strip being referred to not only as an “open-air prison” but as an “open-air graveyard”. The lack of proper burial poses a health and environmental threat, to say nothing of the psychological torture of seeing these bodies and makeshift mass graves. Furthermore, thousands of explosives from the current and previous wars have polluted the air and ground, including highly incendiary white phosphorus, leaving another toxic layer of chemicals in Gaza’s air and soil. The carbon emissions generated in just 60 days (of 170 days and counting) of the war are greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. This is likely an underestimate, with researchers attributing over 99 percent of the 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza.
However, despite the genocidal violence enacted against Palestinians and the ecocidal war being waged on their land, Palestinians have continuously resisted and challenged Israel’s greenwashing. Al Jazeera reported in 2022 that in Naqab, historic Palestine’s largest district covering 5,000 square miles that has faced unrelenting colonization since the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinians have been protesting Israel’s rapidly accelerating land theft and greenwashing efforts, organizing sit-ins and sometimes blocking the invading Israeli forces from entering their villages and townships. Despite facing arrest, violence, and repression for their organizing, “Palestinians in the Naqab have no intention of giving up and allowing the theft, use, and abuse of their ancestral lands without resistance.”
Similarly, Science for the People Magazine published in 2020 that “a significant movement for environmental justice and sustainability is growing even under the very difficult conditions of occupation and colonization.” They cited the power of the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and the work of Palestinians at the grassroots level to build popular institutions to enhance and promote sustainable, natural, and humane communities in the context of a larger anti-colonial struggle. This grassroots work is also educating new generations of Palestinians about their culture and history—conjoining the fights for environmentalism and Palestinian liberation as one.
“However, despite the genocidal violence enacted against Palestinians and the ecocidal war being waged on their land, Palestinians have continuously resisted and challenged Israel’s greenwashing.”
In Order to Save the Planet, We Have to Save Gaza First
The Zionist colonial project has constituted an environmental and existential war against all of historical Palestine since its inception. Nowhere are the stakes clearer than in the Gaza Strip. Ambiguous and abstract “climate anxieties” would be a privilege to Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Instead, the worst-case scenario is unfolding before our eyes. Whether it will continue this way now and repeatedly is a matter of the political will and organization needed to grind the machinery at play to a halt. Until then, Gaza is being put through the end of the world, and time will tell if the West Bank will be exposed to the same.
At this critical juncture, Palestinian climate activist, Manal Shqair in her article “No, Israel Is Not Making the Desert Bloom,” published in Jacobin in October 2023, asserts that environmental movements must support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination “by centering and valuing eco-sumud (‘steadfastness’) as an Indigenous knowledge that can inform solutions to, and strategies to mitigate, the climate crisis.” Shqair goes on to declare: “The dark tunnel that is Palestinians’ life under Israeli oppression is getting darker. Yet a glimpse of light can be seen that illuminates the Palestinians’ long path to liberation: that light is the increasing resistance of the Palestinian people, who refuse to be isolated, dehumanized, and obliterated.”
These existential considerations regarding Palestinian land and our right to life and dignity have long been central to Palestinian political movements and resistance, with Land Day honoring the six Palestinians murdered by Israeli police during the 1976 mass protests against land seizures and settler-colonial practices of erasure being a noticeable example. In his October 2023 op-ed published in Al Jazeera, Muhannad Ayyash reminds us that “Palestinians will not be erased.[…] People from across the world will continue to see their struggles reflected in the Palestinian struggle, ensuring that Palestine as a political story, a political vision, and as a revelation of the current political conditions and systems of power, will never be erased from the hearts and minds of people the world over. […] The Palestinian revolutionary spirit that shows the foundational violence and injustice of this colonial world order and insists on liberation and the creation of an alternative system will outlast all of the powerful states who are currently ruling the world and plotting to erase Palestine from the map.”
This piece should be seen as one of many contributions to how the Palestinian cause is, among other intertwined things, an environmental cause that is part of the struggle against Global North domination and exploitation. Just as there are no national borders for capital, there should be none for our solidarity against the forces of violence and oppression stacked against us, especially the most peripheral and marginalized among us most threatened by climate change.
Author Bio: Rawan Masri graduated with honors from the University of Southern California with a BA double majoring in Middle East studies and political science and a minor in Arabic. She is a translator for the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank, Palestine. Currently living in Ramallah, with her husband, Fathi, she helped write the collection of resources for organizers and those wishing to learn more about Palestine that is DecolonizePalestine.com. She is also studying for an MA in critical cultural studies at Birzeit University. While in the US, she was president of her local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, where she helped lead solidarity actions, and in Palestine she has organized and continues to do so. You can write to Rawan and DecolonizePalestine at: info@decolonizepalestine.com
About the Author:
Rawan Masri graduated with honors from the University of Southern California with a BA double majoring in Middle East studies and political science and a minor in Arabic. She is a translator for the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank, Palestine. Currently living in Ramallah, with her husband, Fathi, she helped write the collection of resources for organizers and those wishing to learn more about Palestine that is DecolonizePalestine.com. She is also studying for an MA in critical cultural studies at Birzeit University. While in the US, she was president of her local Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, where she helped lead solidarity actions, and in Palestine she has organized and continues to do so. You can write to Rawan and DecolonizePalestine at: info@decolonizepalestine.com