Rundale

By Bana Abu Zuluf, Patrick Bresnihan and Rory Rowan

Over recent months, activists, scholars and journalists have highlighted the environmental dimensions of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. Framed in terms of ecocide, organisations like Forensic Architecture have demonstrated that the destruction of the natural environment is not simply the ‘collateral damage’ of Israeli military attacks but one of its principal targets. At a different scale, researchers have also calculated the carbon emissions of the first 60 days of the ongoing genocide, making vital links between militarism and climate injustice.  

This work is important for building the case against the current, gruesome Israeli slaughter in Gaza. But there is nothing new about Israel’s strategy of targeting life-sustaining environments, including Palestinian agricultural lands and civilian infrastructures. It has been a defining feature of the colonial occupation since the foundation of the Zionist ethnostate. Beyond simple environmental destruction, the Zionist project has instrumentalised the environment as a means of dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian population. For that reason, ecocide and environmental control are both part of the same settler-colonial agenda of divorcing Palestine’s indigenous people from their land.

Settler Colonialism’s Environmental Foundations

The Zionist project is not unique in seeking to displace the indigenous population from their lands, appropriate natural resources, and reorder the landscape to reflect the norms of white settlers. These dynamics are well-documented in the histories of the United States, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and elsewhere. Israel differs, however, in being a settler colonial state founded during the post-war period. Israel has proven deft at adopting the latest discourses and technologies of governance, adapting them to normalise its anachronistic colonial project. In doing so, it has also developed novel ‘techniques of elimination’ alongside new means for controlling surplus populations. This is no less true with regard to the rubrics and practices of environmentalism that have become a core feature of Israel’s colonial occupation over recent decades.

The founding mythologies of Zionist statehood are tightly bound up with two slogans, both of which are fundamentally grounded in settler colonial conceptions of the environment. The first, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, which was popular first amongst Christian Zionists, has been widely cited by Palestinian historians including Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Nur ad-Din Masalha as indicative of an ideology that sought to undermine Palestinian nationhood and claims to the land. The exact meaning of the phrase is contested, but whether we take it to mean that Zionists understood Palestine to be uninhabited or that those residing there lacked legitimate title, its effect was the same: to ideologically separate the Palestinian people from their land to make way for an incoming ‘chosen people’.

The second, claiming that Zionist settlers have ‘made the desert bloom’, is frequently cited to this day as a source of legitimacy for the Israeli state (and not long ago by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen). ‘Cultivation became the prime basis for establishing a moral and legal right to land in Palestine, in the eyes of political Zionists,’ writes the historian Brenna Bhandar. Such claims are long familiar from other settler colonial contexts, from the plantation of Ulster to the expansion of the American West, where land appropriation and ethnic cleansing have been justified on the basis of bringing supposedly ‘uncultivated’ land into productive use.  

Needless to say, these settler colonial environmental imaginaries baked into Israel’s founding mythologies fundamentally rested upon the violent erasure of indigenous land ownership, agriculture, and modes of environmental stewardship – a process which continues today. That these mythologies continue to be evoked as justification for the ongoing expansion of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian lands conforms to a pattern of orientalist and anti-Palestinian racism informed by what Abu Laban and Bakan term “racial gaslighting”.

Palestinians who have endured decades of displacement and occupation are not only denied legal claims to their land, as well as access to and use of their land, but even to their very understanding of their land. In a perverse paradox, Zionist mythologies also provide testimony to the settlers’ obliviousness to the land, its topography, its flora and its fauna, which have resulted not in the ‘desert blooming’ but to acts of devastating environmental degradation, from the draining of Hula Lake to the forest fires caused by non-native tree species in the Galilee.

Dispossession by Degradation

Environmental degradation has become a particularly useful tool in the arsenal of the Zionist settler colonial project, ethnic cleansing having long been pursued through the slow violence of deliberate ecological damage. By intentionally dumping toxic chemicals, agricultural pollution and contaminated water on Palestinian lands, rendering them uninhabitable, Israel seeks to create a coercive environment driving Palestinian displacement. Research conducted by ARIJ shows that approximately 80% of the illegal settlement’s wastewater is dumped on Palestinian land damaging the soil due to high volumes of calcium, solid waste, and chemicals. The wastewater has destroyed olive groves, hampered vegetable growth and caused irreversible damage to the almond trees that nearby villages have long subsisted upon. Thus, environmental harm is weaponised to serve the settler colonial objective of removing indigenous Palestinians from their land.

In addition, settlers guarded by the Israeli military routinely burn olive groves in Palestinian villages. In one instance in the village of Burin near Nablus, settlers burned more than 100 olive trees across 37 acres of land. Such events demonstrate that direct attacks against the environment are part of a calculated Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing to facilitate ongoing territorial expansion. This calculated campaign of targeted environmental devastation gives the lie to the facetious myth of Israel ‘making the desert bloom’.

Take the case of Abu Ghneim Mountain in East Jerusalem. Originally a protected green area, Abu Ghneim has since been replaced by the Israeli settlement of Har Homa, recognised as illegal under international law (as if the rest of the colonial occupation of Palestine meets any legitimate standard of legality). This settlement was constructed in part to obstruct the expansion of the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem, and hence destroyed a protected environment in order to exert spatio-ethnic control over demographics. To maintain this settlement, water sources in Palestinian areas were diverted to the settlement causing desertification around the expanding settlement.

Greenwashing Occupation

Over recent decades as global environmental consciousness has developed Israel has sought to strategically deploy environmental narratives to legitimise the Zionist project and deflect criticism from the brutal business of settler colonial expansion. As early as 1976-77, the Israeli state established the ‘green patrol’, a paramilitary unit designed to push the Bedouin population of Southern ‘Israel’ off their lands and into urban settlements, including Gaza. The supposed reason for the green patrol, which exists to this day, is the need to conserve the desert ecosystem; a cynical use of environmental rhetoric to further the ends of territorial expansion and population control.

National parks or ‘green’ zones have long been associated with the dispossession of indigenous populations, a form of green colonialism. Israel has established over 70 such parks across the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. These include areas with little or no natural or archaeological significance, demonstrating that the main purpose of such designations is to prevent Palestinian development – whether for agriculture, housing or basic services. This has led Israeli NGOs to label this form of land grabbing ‘green settlement’.

Beyond so-called conservation, Israel has strategically sought to position itself as a ‘pioneer’ in green technology – colonial language that is particularly fitting in this case. ​​A recent report published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs opens with a quote from the Old Testament ‘I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.’ It goes on to outline the wonders of desalination, water recycling and, in particular drip irrigation, not only solving Israel’s water scarcity problems but the world’s. Approximately 80% of Israeli agricultural technologies are sold overseas to countries in the EU, Asia, Central and South America, and the United States.

Technologies like drip irrigation are presented as a way of ‘feeding the world’, particularly in the face of climate change. But this focus on Israeli innovation and environmental ‘progress’, obscures the fact that Palestinian land is used as a testing ground for these technologies. It also ignores that Israel’s ‘success’ in water management relies on the usurping of water from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as from neighbouring Jordan. According to Palestinian environmental scholar Sharif S. Elmusa, Israel currently uses about 80% of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The sale of these green technologies not only generates profits for Israeli companies, but also promotes Israeli diplomacy and international relations, particularly with neighbouring Arab states, also known as ‘eco-normalisation’. A key aspect of this are ‘green’ energy developments, with Israeli companies, such as Enlight Renewable Energy (ENLT) and NewMed Energy, taking on projects in Jordan, Morocco, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Oman. As with water technology, these energy companies have developed their energy portfolios and expertise in occupied territories and illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli companies and the settler-state reap the benefits, while Palestinians are prevented from developing their own energy sovereignty, forced to rely on expensive and inconsistent energy services from Israel. This is climate injustice made manifest through the structures of settler colonialism.

A particularly dystopian example of Israel’s greenwashing is the Brand Israel Campaign, first launched in 2005 in response to the emergence of the BDS campaign. This on-going State-led public relations campaign seeks to counter growing global criticism of Israel’s occupation by rebranding it as a “relevant and modern” nation, embodying the supposedly cosmopolitan, progressive and democratic values of the West in contrast to its supposedly Islamist, homophobic and repressive Arab neighbours. One aspect of this campaign has involved promoting Israel as a beacon of environmental leadership, including through the sordid image of IOF soldiers wearing vegan leather jack boots. Indeed, in 2019 the IOF declared itself “the most vegan army in the world,” a branding exercise so grotesque it defies pastiche.

Land Back and Environmental Justice

Ecocide and colonial environmentalism are paradoxical twins, two sides of the same racist project of separating the indigenous people of Palestine from their land. Perversely, Israel can simultaneously appeal to conservation – to be saving life (from Palestinians) – in the ‘48 territories, whilst conducting an omnicide – the destruction of all life – in Gaza. Yet both are colonial rubrics designed to support the ethnic erasure of the Palestinian people from their homeland, a process fundamental to the Zionist state project.

Demanding environmental justice in sites of anti-colonial struggle requires a commitment to undoing settler colonialism as the fundamental driver of ecocide and environmental destruction. Environmental justice in Palestine entails reclaiming indigenous Palestinian practices of land use from Zionist environmentalism and reuniting Palestinians with their land. This conception of environmental justice cannot be separated out from questions of land – land restoration and the right of return.

Further, environmental justice in Palestine is not just about Palestine. In his speech at COP28 in December, the Colombian President Gustavo Petro said: ‘What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.’ He was referring to the ease with which Western leaders supported the genocidal and barbaric acts inflicted on the Palestinian people. A similar fate, he argued, awaits those trying to escape unliveable conditions brought on by the climate crisis. He could have extended this analogy to highlight how Israel’s genocide, its treatment of the indigenous surplus population, sits comfortably alongside Israel’s status as a supposed leader in climate and environmental solutions. The acute depravity of this contradiction should not be lost on anyone who considers themselves concerned about climate change and our collective future on this planet.

Environmental advocates must denounce Israel’s settler colonial occupation with as much vigour as they condemn the ecocide currently underway. They should recognise that imperialism and the military-industrial complex are primary drivers of global environmental destruction, not just in the form of direct emissions and impacts but via the suppression of national development and indigenous flourishing across the Global South. Without solidarity with the oppressed at its core, environmental activism risks being co-opted by the very system it aims to dismantle.

This is as true in Ireland as anywhere else. Ireland’s Green Party is currently propping up a centre-right coalition government that talks tough on Palestine but has taken no concrete steps to hold Israel to account for genocide or prevent its conduct during seven months of live-streamed slaughter. As local Palestine solidarity activists have pointed out, when the Green Party Minister of Transport signs exemptions allowing the transit of US war planes through Shannon airport he not only renders Ireland complicit in Israeli genocide (and fails to enact the state’s duties in light of January’s ICJ ruling) but lubricates the machinations of the world’s greatest force for environmental destruction: US militarism.