Palestine and the ecology of genocide

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has shown the world the level of barbarity that a colonial system is willing to inflict against people who dare to resist. It has changed politics in many ways. Around the world, terms such as Nakba (catastrophe), apartheid and settler colonialism are common currency. Many recognise that Israel is armed both militarily and ideologically by the United States and other Western powers, including Britain under a Labour government, as they pursue their own imperial interests in the region.1

One element of this shifting political consensus is the way some activists in the climate justice movement have embraced Palestine solidarity. Climate justice activists such as Greta Thunberg have rightly defended this stance against attempts to silence them. Thunberg states that the climate movement has not “become political”­—climate justice has always been political.2 The Climate Justice Coalition, the main organiser of the various annual protests in Britain during the Conference of the Parties (COP) climate talks, makes the centrality of the struggle against genocide explicit. Its website states: “All over the world, peoples and communities are fighting for survival, for their rights, for justice in the face of economic turmoil, ecological and climate catastrophes, political instabilities, vicious attacks on fundamental human rights, militarisation and, in places like Palestine and Sudan, genocide”.3 Speeches in solidarity with Palestinians, placards and Palestinian flags are a regular feature of climate protest in Britain.

The system that puts the profits of the oil and gas multinationals and their backers before the lives of humans and other species is the same system causing the slaughter of Palestinians. For Marxists, imperialist clashes in the Middle East and North Africa and climate breakdown are both interlinked aspects of the “new age of catastrophe”.4 As socialists, our task is to point to the systemic nature of these crises and put an argument for the centrality of mass resistance in overthrowing the system that drives both climate chaos and imperialist war.

This article discusses the ecology of Palestine and especially the way in which Israel’s occupation has impacted agriculture, water supply and vulnerability to natural disasters. It addresses the way in which the assault on Gaza has damaged the natural environment and more broadly, how war, occupation and displacement have blighted Palestinians’ ability to resist the effects of climate and ecological breakdown. The immediate cause of climate breakdown is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The Middle East plays a central role in the development of a fossil-fuel-based world economy, as a source of oil and gas and as the arena for inter-imperialist conflict over access to energy sources.5 However, for reasons of space, this article primarily focuses on the consequences of climate breakdown rather than the causes.

The leadership of the Labour government in Britain, along with other governments of the global north and much of the mainstream media have insisted that there is no genocide in Gaza. Many continue to treat the Israeli forces and Hamas as equally at fault for the bloodshed. However, bringing together some of the research into the way in which Israel has undermined access to the basics of life for Palestinians, including food and water, ought to make clear that this is not a “conflict” between two equal sides. Israel’s actions have nothing to do with self-defence or peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians.

The desecration of Gaza

The Israeli far right makes no secret of its intention to completely remove Palestinians from the Gaza strip. In 2025, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, said that Donald Trump’s proposal that Palestinians can “find other places to start new, better lives is an excellent idea” and that he would work with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to implement it “as soon as possible”.6 Trump’s plan for a “Gaza Riviera” would erase Palestinian presence on the land. His vision seems to be one of hyper-modern luxury urbanism with cities that bear little relationship with the surrounding environment, likely modelled on Dubai.7 This talk of expulsion is backed up by an Israeli assault that has destroyed large parts of the infrastructure upon which people depend for survival. Israel has killed at least 72,500 people and caused unimaginable suffering.

Alongside the bloodshed, living conditions have become horrendous. One displaced person interviewed by the Guardian in 2024 said, “There is pollution everywhere—in the air, in the water we bathe in, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the area around us”.8 The report referred to sewage contamination in the sea and soil and water contamination from munitions and from collapsed buildings, which leach asbestos, sewage and other toxic materials into the soil and water. Damage to infrastructure has left the population unable to manage sewage treatment and waste collection. Israel’s late October 2024 ban on the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which manages refuse collection in refugee camps, will only make this grim situation worse.

Alongside the obstruction of humanitarian aid and the targeting of schools, hospitals and other facilities such as bakeries, agriculture in Gaza has been decimated. This has exacerbated the famine already faced by Palestinians. Research by the Forensic Architecture (FA) research agency in collaboration with local farmers’ associations and agricultural workers has started to make the extent of the destruction visible.9 FA’s researchers say that the destruction of agriculture is both “systematic” and “deliberate”. They use the term “ecocide” to describe what is happening to Gaza.10

Using satellite imagery, FA has shown that between October 2023 and March 2024, Israel reduced the amount of agricultural land available in Gaza by 40 percent. By summer 2024, Israel had uprooted most of the homes and orchards on what FA refers to as the “perimeter”, the Gaza side of the border with Israel, reducing the amount of space where Palestinians can live and grow crops. For example, the Abu Suffiyeh farm in East Jabaliya was completely destroyed in the ground invasion to make way for a new road and military bases. Around a third of greenhouses have been destroyed throughout Gaza, in the north this figure is as high as 90 percent.11

Israel’s conduct since 2023 builds on an existing legacy of attempts to obstruct agriculture in Gaza, which relies on food aid. In the early 2000s, Israel uprooted orchards in order to make way for settlements until its withdrawal of settlements in 2005. Gaza has faced an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since 2007, meaning that any food and fuel and other supplies entering the strip have to pass through Israel. It has prevented farmers accessing sufficient water and farming materials.12 At the time, Israel also banned agricultural exports from Gaza (to both Israel and the West Bank), cutting farmers off from a market overnight.13

FA’s research found that airborne herbicides have been sprayed into Gaza from planes flying on the Israeli side of the border since 2014, intentionally damaging crops.14 Israel has argued for some time that vegetation higher than one metre represents a security threat as it could be used for guerrilla forces as a hiding place. In 2024, for example, an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said, “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land”.15

The conditions of siege in Gaza stimulated forms of urban farming and small scale subsistence production as people looked for alternative ways to feed themselves. Gaza has shown it can be self-sufficient in some crops—primarily fruits and vegetables—and this is an important source of income, especially for women.16 Nevertheless, Gaza is not self-sufficient in key areas, such as grain for making bread, and was already heavily reliant on food aid before October 2023.17 Now, the destruction of Palestinians’ ability to produce their own food in Gaza further drives this reliance on outside aid—with lethal consequences when Gazans queuing for aid are deliberately targeted with violence.18

Israel has also deliberately targeted both fishers and fishing infrastructure. The United Nations (UN) argue that its attacks “have resulted in the collapse of the fishing industry, which was once a main source of livelihoods and food for Gaza’s population” and that this has contributed to famine, creating conditions that threaten the survival of Gaza’s population. Prior to October 2023, the fishing sector grew in importance, in parallel with the production of fruit and vegetables mentioned above. It provided an important source of nutrients and a livelihood for thousands of people and their dependents. Some families engaged in fishing have been doing so for generations. They are the descendants of fishers from across the Mediterranean coast who were displaced to the Gaza strip after the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes during the founding of Israel.19

However, after October 2023, the Israeli Naval Forces blocked Palestinians’ access to the sea (which was already severely restricted). They confiscated boats, harassed and violently arrested and detained fishers and fired on them without warning, killing hundreds of people and injuring dozens more. Even people in small paddling boats were attacked.20 Israel severely limited Palestinians’ ability to recover the fishing industry by destroying most of the infrastructure including, through airstrikes, the port of Gaza.21

Numerous reports mention people resorting to cutting down trees for firewood due to the lack of fuel to keep warm in winter or to bake bread. They have also been forced to make fires with plastic and run cars on cooking oil. This further adds to the burden of air pollution. For example, in April 2025, Ibtisam in Gaza told Socialist Worker:

We are now 55 days with no food, water, fuel or medicines. We are being starved. Women are cooking on fires made up of plastic, which causes illnesses such as asthma. People are pale, losing weight, gloomy, speechless. We have olive trees, and I am looking at the leaves to boil up on a fire.22

Olive trees often appear in accounts of Palestine’s ecology in both the West Bank and in Gaza. As well as their place in the everyday lives of Palestinians, they play a symbolic role in discussions of national identity and its ecological dimensions. Olive oil is ubiquitous in Palestinian cuisine. Around 100,000 Palestinians are economically dependent on the olive industry and harvest times are often a social gathering for farmers and their extended families.23 Moreover, for many Palestinians, including families in Gaza who cultivate smaller numbers of the trees close to their homes, the longlived trees have also come to be associated with the concept of sumud—steadfastness or resilience. They serve as a material reminder of Palestinian presence before Israel’s foundation with the Nakba. Olive trees appear in the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s poet of the resistance, in artwork and even in the Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, which traditionally depict olive leaves and fishing nets.24

Israel’s intentional and ongoing destruction of olive trees can therefore be understood as part of its attempt to break people’s resistance. The Israeli state has destroyed at least 800,000 olive trees since 1967.25 In the West Bank, settlers and the military routinely harass and attack Palestinians—in some cases killing them—as they try to harvest olives.26 Palestinians are left waiting for hours at security checkpoints before being able to access their olive groves.27

War itself has direct environmental consequences. A study produced earlier in 2025 shows that the first 15 months of Israel’s attack have produced more planet wrecking carbon emissions than 100 of the world’s poorest countries. The researchers point out that militaries account for 5.5 percent of global emissions, more than civilian aviation and civilian shipping combined. Militaries around the world contribute to climate breakdown with their aircraft, vehicles and bombs and by transporting goods and people. War also causes fires, destroys ecosystems and produces waste that often ends up incinerated.28

To support the genocidal assault, the US supplied 50,000 tonnes of goods to Israel using over 500 aircraft. Israel’s military-related greenhouse gas emissions alone are greater than the whole of Palestine’s emissions for all purposes. Trying to calculate the environmental costs of war reveals a murky world where militaries, including the IDF, refuse to report their contribution to climate change.

The researchers make clear that they do not want to divert attention from the human suffering in Palestine by pointing to the war’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, their contribution is important as it shows how war undermines the conditions for human existence and that environmental costs are “inseparable from the wider humanitarian costs of war”.29

Israel’s attack also damages Palestinians’ relationship with the natural world in other ways. All 12 of Gaza’s universities have been damaged or destroyed, at least 94 university professors have been killed alongside hundreds of students. Many more academic staff and students have been displaced.30 Alongside the loss of human life, these attacks, sometimes referred to as scholasticide, undermine the conditions for knowledge production, including research into scientific and ecological topics.31

Gaza’s metabolic rift

Gaza has a population of over 2 million and an overall population density comparable to London. It is higher in Gaza City or Khan Younis.32 A crude neo-Malthusian analysis might argue that such high population density invariably exerts “pressure” on natural resources and leads to crises, such as difficulties in sourcing water or in managing waste.

There is a fundamental problem with rooting Gaza’s ecological problems in its high population. Such a neo-Malthusian approach fails to account for the way in which the capitalist system shapes the relationship of a population with its environment. It also risks feeding right-wing and racist fears about migration and about the irresponsible growth of global south populations.33 If neo-Malthusianism is problematic in general, such a stance, blaming the Palestinians themselves for cutting down their own olive trees for fuel, would be absurd in this case.

A more sympathetic approach from political ecology addresses the wider societal forces that cause people to act in ways that are not environmentally sustainable. The degradation and marginalisation thesis rejects apolitical understandings based on overpopulation. It instead argues that the intervention of states and integration into local and global markets leads to increased poverty and marginalisation. Marginalised groups of people are then pushed towards over-exploitation of natural resources.34 In this case, we might argue that Gaza’s population density is a product of the way Palestinians were historically forced into ever smaller areas of historic Palestine from the Nakba onwards. However, the degradation and marginalisation thesis still starts from the implicit understanding that humans exert a pressure on the planet’s resources in a negative way.

To better understand the ecological aspects of colonialism and genocide in Palestine, we must focus on the way in which a genocidal assault has both directly undermined the natural environment on which Palestinians depend and also undermined their ability to collectively manage their own relationship with that environment.

The concept of metabolic rift, developed by ecological Marxists from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s writings, offers one such analytical tool. It starts from the understanding that humans, like all species, are a part of nature and exist in a relationship with the natural world. For our existence, we depend on exchanges of material and energy with the rest of the natural world—for example, we all need to extract from the world around us by eating and drinking.35 Yet, a Marxist analysis does not stop here. It is also rooted in an understanding that humans have organised themselves in many different ways throughout history. Capitalism subordinates human needs to the production of profit. In doing so, according to Marx, it “undermines the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker”.36 As a result, it generates “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself”.37

Under capitalism, the metabolic rift is generated through the process of alienation. As people are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalist, they are increasingly alienated from each other, from the natural environment, from their own species being and from their control over their own labour power. Labour power is no longer in the hands of the workers, hence fracturing our ability to control our relationship with the natural world. Marxist geographer Brian Napoletano makes the case for such an understanding of metabolic rift based on the concept of alienation. He shows how there is a direct link between ecological problems and the “immiseration and exploitation of the working class”.38 Ecological Marxists tend to conclude therefore that a socialist society would mean a more rational approach to managing our collective relationship with the rest of the natural world.

People learn how to transform and modify the natural environment in culturally specific ways. For example, Palestinians might adopt traditional agricultural practices or grow and cook foods that they consider to be representative of their Palestinian identity. This is not to imply that “culture” is something fixed and innate. Something as apparently culturally specific as the type of food people eat can change over time and can combine influences from many other localities.

Marx developed his understanding of the metabolic rift with reference to how the emerging industrial capitalism of his day systematically destroyed soil fertility.39 In classical Marxist terms, “exploitation” refers to the way surplus value is extracted from workers when they sell their labour power in exchange for a wage. Nature, on the other hand, is not “exploited” as such. However, there are interlinked processes at work when capitalism desecrates the natural environment in ways that also undermine human existence because we are dependent on a relationship with nature. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark use the term “expropriation”—or more simply robbery or plunder—to refer to such processes where human societies take from nature without giving back. The extraction of nutrients from soil without replenishment by industrial agriculture, in Marx’s time and ours, is a good illustration of this. Foster and Clark add that expropriation also refers to how capitalism treats human beings using the term corporeal rift:

For Marx…this robbery was not of course confined simply to external nature, since humans as corporeal beings were themselves part of nature. The expropriation of nature in capitalist society thus had its counterpart, in Marx’s analysis, in the expropriation of human bodily existence. The robbery and the rift in nature’s metabolism was also a robbery and a rift in the human metabolism.40

What does this mean for our discussion of Palestine’s ecology? Israel’s genocide can be understood as inducing an extreme form of metabolic rift. As people struggle to find the means to survive, their ability to moderate their relationship to the natural world has been stretched almost to breaking point. So, Gazans’ dependence on food aid is not a product of either overpopulation or some inherent inability to feed themselves, nor is it simply explicable in terms of Palestinians exerting pressure on an external environment because they have become marginalised. Instead, it is a consequence of the Israeli occupation and the way this has shaped the relationship Palestinians have with the natural environment in destructive ways, whether by suppressing their ability to find secure sources of water or by destroying the means to practise agriculture. This destruction has intensified since October 2023, but it did not start then.

What forces have caused this rift? So far, this article has discussed metabolic rifts in terms of capitalist exploitation, expropriation and alienation. Yet, Palestinians are not just exploited and oppressed by capitalism. They face a specifically settler colonial form of domination. Combining theories of metabolism and metabolic rift with discussions of settler colonialism suggests that the opening of a rift between humans and nature alongside a process of dispossession could be an ongoing process in settler colonial contexts such as Palestine.

Settler colonialism and the question of land

Israel’s attempt at domination over Palestine has been described by various authors as a settler colonial encounter.41 Settler colonialism is distinguished from other forms of colonial domination in that it involves the permanent relocation of people­—in other words, “settlers”—from the colonial metropole to the colonised place. Some also define it in terms of the attempted or actual elimination of the indigenous population. For example, in Australia and the Americas, colonisation meant a catastrophic population decline of indigenous people after contact with Europeans. However, Sai Englert contends that defining settler colonialism in this way overlooks the extent to which some forms of settler colonialism can also involve the exploitation of the existing population as a source of labour.42 Indeed, destruction of much of the means of survival for the existing people and their exploitation as a workforce or use as a market for goods can co-exist. As Charlie Kimber points out, a clear example of this is apartheid in South Africa, where “there were internal battles among colonisers over whether to eliminate black people, enslave them or suck value from them through wage labour”.43 Settler colonialism in South Africa involved both establishing a white, European population, displacing black people into townships and Bantustans, and the use of black labour power. In the case of Palestine, the situation seems somewhere between these two poles.44 There is still a large Palestinian population, but Palestinians have been systematically marginalised from the labour market, including as a result of the actions of Israeli settlers and their trade unions.45 In all these examples, settler colonialism is predicated on violence against the existing population, it invariably involves racism, and it tends to provoke resistance as indigenous people fight back against their oppression.

The continued existence of apartheid Israel cannot be understood in isolation from global imperial contestation. Anne Alexander, drawing on some of Tony Cliff’s formulations, describes Israel as a “settler colonial garrison in a new imperial order”. This helps to explain how Israel has been able to maintain itself for so long while other settler colonial projects have collapsed. As Alexander points out, the founders of the Israeli state were able to pull off “a spectacular coup”. They forged a close relationship with the US ruling class, securing the backing of the world’s leading economic power by taking on the role of “watchdog” in the Middle East­—where the US maintains an interest in exerting influence over the circulation of fossil fuels. Israel’s importance to the West helped legitimate its racist system of government and ensure that the US or others did not try to force the Israeli ruling class to allow the emergence of a Palestinian state. The relationship between Israel and the US has shifted over the decades. The growth of the Israeli economy and its increasing military capabilities mean that Israel is increasingly able to assert its own interests rather than simply doing the bidding of the US. However, the central relationship still stands.46

Rob Ferguson argues that the racist nature of Israel was not just tolerated but was actually useful to its imperialist backers. He writes, “Israel’s unique state structure as a settler colonial society has made it an indispensable pillar of the imperialist order. Unlike the Arab regimes, it is not vulnerable to revolt from below”.47 This is not to say that ordinary Israelis objectively “benefit” from the oppression of Palestinians as such. However, it is difficult to see any possibility of Israelis revolting against the existence of Israel or uniting in solidarity with Palestinians. Israelis have a stake in the existence of a “Jewish state” if it means resources continue to flow from the West. Racism towards Palestinians has long been used to cement their loyalty. Regular polling among Jewish Israelis reveals alarming levels of apathy towards loss of Palestinian lives and growing support for positions such as expelling Palestinians from Gaza entirely.48

Importantly for this discussion of ecology, settler colonialism reshapes indigenous people’s relationship with land. One of the most striking aspects of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians is the way the Israeli state has encroached on more and more land over the decades. As settler colonialism often requires the removal of people from the land to make space for settlers, it tends to reshape ecological relations both literally and ideologically. The Dene (indigenous to Canada) scholar Glen Sean Coulthard describes how practices such as forcibly removing children from families and sending them to residential schools, establishing “minuscule” reserves or installing gas and oil pipelines across Dene, Métis and Inuit territories both physically removed people and also undercut people’s established relationships with the land.49 He shows that such policies marginalised indigenous people, leading, if not to their complete physical elimination, to their elimination as a people culturally and politically distinct from the rest of the population of Canada. Coulthard quotes Patrick Wolfe in saying that the primary motive of settler colonialism “is not race (or religion, ethnicity and grade of civilisation) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element”.50

Coulthard draws on Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation in Capital. Marx described how, in Britain, dispossession of people from the land created the basis for capitalist relations to develop during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Peasants who had been largely self-sufficient agricultural producers were forced from the land by practices such as land enclosure. Many of them moved to urban areas and began to sell their labour power as part of the proletariat or urban poor. This was a brutal and violent process­—Marx wrote that capitalism came into existence, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt”.51

Coulthard finds Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation a relevant framework for understanding contemporary colonialism but proposes some modifications in the case of contemporary settler colonialism. He contends that Marx’s outline of primitive accumulation in Capital implies that it was a historical event that is now over, when it should be understood as an ongoing process; it suggests that the removal of people from land, although violent, was inevitable or even progressive; and it is economically reductionist in that it does not account for the role of power relations such as racism. Moreover, it emphasises proletarianisation whereas, for Coulthard, the dominant experience facing contemporary indigenous people has been one of dispossession or exclusion from the working class, not inclusion within it and exploitation. Unlike the labour of the British proletariat of the 19th century, which was exploited to produce profits for the capitalist class, indigenous labour was increasingly “superfluous” to the Canadian economy.52

Coulthard’s core argument is that attempts to redress the historical injustices committed against indigenous people within Canada and elsewhere have been based on a politics of recognition. Indigenous people are­—at best—recognised as human beings with “equal rights”. Based on liberal assumptions about human rights and citizenship, it gives indigenous people a seat at the table, but at the same time, it engages them as inferior participants.53 It allows for some redress of historical wrongs as long as this does not interfere with capital accumulation, and it does little to address the ongoing material dispossession affecting indigenous people including loss of access to land.

This understanding is applicable to the way in which questions of land and ecology have played a part in Palestinians’ ongoing dispossession. Similarly, Palestinians have been forcibly removed from land and coastal areas they once used for agriculture and fishing and have also been marginalised as a labour force. There are, however, elements of this study of settler colonial Canada that will not map directly onto the Palestinian situation. In his efforts to highlight what is distinctive about processes of dispossession and exclusion from capitalist relations, Coulthard also potentially overemphasises these processes over those of exploitation. Some working-class Palestinians do sell their labour power to capitalists and are therefore exploited. In that way, they differ from the pre-capitalist peasantry as described by Marx. We should be wary of creating a binary distinction between the global exploited working class on the one hand and a separate sphere of humanity who face distinct processes of immiseration and expropriation on the other hand. In the case of Canada, some indigenous scholars such as Coulthard tend to frame struggles over land and ways of life and class struggle as somewhat distinct. It is more productive to try to understand the ways in which settler colonialism is built on dialectically interlinked dynamics of exploitation and expropriation of both human livelihoods and the natural world.

However, Coulthard’s Marxist approach also points the way towards seeing how exploitation and dispossession stem from the same source. Against this backdrop, he argues that there are growing opportunities for solidarity between Canadian workers and indigenous people and that the left is starting to take radical anti-colonial movements more seriously.54 Similarly, Marxist John Bellamy Foster argues for “a historical-materialist approach to settler colonialism that sees it as dialectically connected to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, rather than as an isolated category”.55

Settler colonialism has implications for the way the natural environment is thought about and discussed as well as its material use. Palestine was famously described as a “land without people for a people without land”.56 This reflects an assumption that Palestine before the Nakba could be considered “terra nullius”­­—literally “land belonging to nobody”. As Kimber points out, settler colonialism often begins “with the common lie that the land was ‘empty’ or ‘unclaimed’”.57 Land can be understood as empty despite the obvious presence of an existing population if racist assumptions that the population’s relationship with the land is somehow improper can take hold. For example, Native American claims over land could easily be dismissed by European settlers if they had not divided up the land according to the same measures of ownership that the Europeans did. In the case of Palestine, the cruel irony is that existing land owners were accused of abandoning their land, even if they had been forcibly displaced.58

According to Shourideh Molavi, this is why settler colonialism is characterised by attempts of the settler population to create a new relationship with the environment via heightened and efficient production. She writes that “pushing the land to its full productive capacity is part and parcel of settler-colonial thinking”.59 Ideologically, this helps to justify the introduction of settlers to the land—something that is especially striking in the case of Israel, which has a long history of using its specific form of metabolic interaction with nature as part of its attempts to justify its existence.

Does Israel make the desert bloom?

Israeli settler colonialism involves both the actual separation of Palestinians from their land and the attempted erasure of evidence of their existence.60 In its place, settlers establish new relations with land. Israel promotes itself, to its own citizens and to the rest of the world, as a global leader in environmental sustainability.61 It is particularly associated with water conservation projects such as the use of desalination, which it plans to use as its main source of water by 2030, and with specialised forms of irrigation for agriculture.62 Israeli institutions such as the national water company Mekorot also sell their technological expertise to other states, such as Cyprus.

This projected image of ecological enlightenment and rationality clearly looks absurd when contrasted with the barbarities of the environmental and human destruction unleashed on Gaza. Nevertheless, it continues to play an important ideological role for Israel as a form of greenwashing. One of the most pervasive Zionist sayings is that Israel transformed the desert into something productive. For example, in 1969, former Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol stated that the Palestinians were only interested in getting their land back once Israel had “made the desert bloom”.63

As Palestinian activist researcher Manal Shqair explains, “Israel’s green image, which is set in contrast to a savage and undemocratic Middle East, has been central to its efforts to greenwash its settler-colonial and apartheid structure. Israel uses its expertise in agribusiness, afforestation, water solutions, and renewable energy technology as constituents of its greenwashing efforts and narrative globally”.64 This contrast between Israel as a supposedly green society and the “savage” nature of the rest of the Middle East builds on older colonial and Orientalist tropes of the East and the people who live there. This also draws on the notion of terra nullius discussed above and the ideas that go with it­­—that non-Europeans do not cultivate the land in acceptable ways. It is further based on the romantic image of the Middle East as an arid and largely empty landscape of camels and rolling sand dunes. Jan Selby and others caution against taking at face value Zionism’s commitment to greening the “desert”. The ideology of making the desert bloom was a means to an end, underpinned as it was, by “a set of deeply practical, material considerations” around claiming ownership over territory through dispossessing Palestinians.65

In reality, there is no evidence behind the assumption that Palestine was a desert environment before Israel was established. In fact, much of historic Palestine falls within what is sometimes referred to as the Fertile Crescent, one of the areas where settled agriculture first originated thousands of years ago due to the fertile soils and potential for river-based irrigation. The West Bank has comparable levels of rainfall to Europe; Jerusalem has a higher annual average rainfall than Berlin.66 This land was extensively cultivated by Palestinians before the Nakba. Israeli agricultural achievements are not the outcome of the ingenuity of a resilient people building something from scratch where there was nothing before. The Naqab (Negev in Hebrew) in the south is drier and it is fairer to call it a desert. However, it was still cultivated by Palestinian Bedouins prior to the Nakba.67

Israel’s greenwashing has a long history. The state has used tree planting projects to promote itself to the rest of the world for decades through organisations such as the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, JNF). The JNF was founded by Theodor Herzl, one of the key theoreticians and early promoters of Zionism, in 1901. Accordingly, the organisation is built on Zionist principles, that of buying land for the purposes of “establishing and developing a Jewish state for the benefit of Jewish people”. It does not sell or lease land to non-Jews.68

The JNF played a central role in projects to “transfer” the Arab population to neighbouring countries. Yosef Weitz, the notorious head of its forestry department from 1932 until his death in 1972, envisaged the planting of millions of trees to ensure that Palestinians would not be able to rebuild their destroyed villages. In 1940, he wrote in his diary:

Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country… With Arab Transferring the country will be wide open for us. And with the Arabs staying the country will remain narrow and restricted…and the only solution is the Land of Israel, or at least the western Land of Israel [ie Palestine], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point.69

Weitz remains a hero of the Zionist settler project.

Today, the JNF website offers numerous opportunities to support Israelis affected by the events of 7 October 2023, including those in the area around Gaza, while saying nothing about the losses and suffering that Palestinians continue to experience. It sends volunteers to Israel who take part in projects to build and develop the country, especially the “impoverished” Negev. Green projects are a key aspect of this, and JNF UK states that it has planted at least 240 million trees and “developed” 250,000 acres of land.70

Jewish families around the world were encouraged to keep the “blue box” charity collection tins in their homes to collect donations for the JNF. This, alongside the opportunities for voluntary work in Israel, cemented the idea that to be Jewish meant to feel some connection to Israel and to actively work towards building a Jewish homeland including through working on the land. Environmentalist Naomi Klein has described how as a child growing up in a Jewish family in Canada sponsoring a tree to be planted in Israel by the JNF was a common gift to mark occasions such as births, deaths and bar mitzvahs.71 She argues, “The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer­—it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation”.72

However, as Klein notes, the trees the JNF plants are often species such as eucalyptus or pine, which are not native to the region. Overall, Israel has uprooted about 2.5 million native trees since 1967, replacing them with 4 million trees from European species, which have reduced biodiversity and damaged the environment.73 As hydrologist Clemens Messerschmidt argues, Israel has been able to establish oases of green in desert landscapes­­—but only by using vast amounts of water. This calls into question its claims to be a pioneer of sustainability. For Messerschmidt, “Agriculture in Israel is important in terms of preserving the national ethos, and is not calculated in terms of the actual conditions of the water economy”.74

Recently, Israel’s claims to be a green pioneer have played a role in its attempts to normalise acceptance for its existence among its Arab neighbours. Shqair calls this “eco-normalisation”.75 As she points out, the Abraham Accords that Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020 (as well as earlier agreements including the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty) mean that these states effectively recognised Israel’s “right to exist” through calling for cooperation between states. This naturalised settler colonialism and denied the possibilities for Palestinian refugees to return to historic Palestine. The agreements signalled that Israel would collaborate with surrounding states on issues of security, the economy and the environment.

One such joint initiative is the proposed Project Prosperity. This would involve Jordan purchasing freshwater from an Israeli desalination plant that is in turn powered by a solar photovoltaic plant to be established in Jordan. As Shqair explains, this allows Israel to present itself as a moral and benevolent supplier of water to its parched neighbour Jordan. Israel frames itself as a country affected by climate change, but one that, unlike other states in the Middle East, has been able to overcome the harsh environment through the application of technological ingenuity. However, Shqair notes that this overlooks Israel’s own role in Jordan’s water scarcity. Israel has been plundering water from the River Jordan (which runs between Jordan and historic Palestine) for decades. The National Water Carrier of Israel, a canal project completed in 1964, intensified this extraction by diverting water from the Jordan to supply Israeli settlements in the Negev and on the coast. Syria also uses water from the Yarmouk, a tributary of the Jordan, and is in dispute with Israel over access to the river due to Israel’s occupation of the Jawlan (Golan). The use of water by both Israel and Syria ensures that neither Jordanians nor Palestinians in the West Bank have access to water from the Yarmouk.76 As will be discussed below, Israel has left Gaza with an even more acute water shortage.

Israel’s use of solar power from Jordan can also be understood as a form of green energy colonialism, where a more powerful state plunders resources from its neighbours in order to increase its own dominance. In this case, Project Prosperity means that Jordan will “help advance the State of Israel’s transition to green energy”, in the words of one former Israeli energy minister.77 This will be done using land in Jordan that is otherwise considered to be “unproductive”. At the same time, Jordan will not have access to this renewable energy and will continue to be reliant on oil and gas—including gas from Israel itself—for over 80 percent of its energy supply.78

Climate change in the Eastern Mediterranean

As well as the immediate effects of the genocide, Palestine faces the ongoing threat of climate breakdown. Conflict and violence, starting before Israel’s assault over the past two years, make it more difficult for societies to cope with a rapidly changing climate. Palestine, and the Middle East and North Africa more widely, are already experiencing the effects of this. In September 2023, a devastating storm, Storm Daniel, hit Derna in eastern Libya with a death toll of 11,300 people in a single night as a river burst its banks and water and debris ripped its way through the city, demolishing houses. The storm’s intense rainfall, 70 times more rain than the average for the whole month of September, has been associated with Mediterranean water temperatures that were 5.5°C warmer than the summer average.79

With a focus on Lebanon, Simon Assaf notes that the Eastern Mediterranean region will warm at twice the rate of the global average. The region is already facing temperatures that sometimes exceed 50°C, along with wildfires and dust storms. It will be affected by intense cyclones and by rising sea levels and coastal erosion. Assaf describes a combination of summer drought punctuated by heavy rainfall and flash flooding. Although there is scope to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some of the effects of climate change are already locked in and are now unavoidable.80

This is not just a catastrophe imposed on the region from the outside world. The Middle East’s own greenhouse gas emissions have risen rapidly since the 1950s, largely due to the use of fossil fuels in electricity production but also driven by poor public transport and poorly regulated industries such as cement production. In places like Lebanon, once communally farmed land has been privatised, there has been a trend towards industrialised agriculture and production of “cash crops” for export. This has driven up water use as well as the usage of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers.81

The whole Eastern Mediterranean region is facing the effects of a rapidly changing climate. However, the differences in its effects for an average Israeli settler and an average Palestinian are vast, despite them living on the same land. The stark differences in the amount of water Israelis and Palestinians are able to access illustrates how the two populations can have very different metabolic interactions with the natural environment. As explained above, Israel does not achieve its abundance of water availability through technical innovation or ingenuity. Instead, it is important to locate the reasons for this in Israel’s apartheid robbery policies.

Selby and colleagues have shown how Israel has appropriated water in ways that Palestinians are not able to. They describe how, from 1967 onwards, Israel has been able to establish itself as the main user of groundwater by digging deep wells that enabled it to expropriate water from the Mountain Aquifer that also forms the main source of water for Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli settlers enjoy access to swimming pools and green lawns and an ample and reliable supply of water for washing and drinking.82

As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote in 2023, “The regime deliberately creates a huge disparity in consumption. One group enjoys the luxuries afforded by a first-world water superpower, its lifestyle effectively impervious to weather conditions and climate change. The other—Palestinian subjects—suffers a chronic water crisis that stands to grow along with climate change”.83 Overall, the average Israeli (including in settlements) uses three times as much water per day as the average Palestinian. Some 36 percent of West Bank Palestinians have access to daily running water compared to 100 percent of Israelis. Most Palestinians store water in rooftop tanks to cope with shortages. However, these are also subject to attack and sabotage by soldiers and settlers.84 Palestinians are not permitted to drill new wells for irrigation, there are quotas restricting how much water they can extract and wells and installations deemed “illegal” are routinely destroyed by the Israeli military.85

Water scarcity for Palestinians is especially acute in Gaza. Although the strip has lower rates of rainfall than the West Bank, prior to 1948, water extraction rates in Gaza were very low. After the Nakba, the population quadrupled. Increased water extraction, however, was not simply an issue of “overpopulation”. In the following decades, Israeli settlements in Gaza likely further added to the rate of expropriation of water and the area was made a “dependent periphery” of the Israeli economy as Palestinians produced citrus fruits and vegetables for export.86

Alongside Israel and parts of Egypt, Gaza shares access to a water supply from a coastal aquifer on the Mediterranean coast. This is frequently over-extracted—more water is withdrawn than is replenished. Extraction also draws saltwater from the Mediterranean into the aquifer and even sewage, which contaminates that part of the sea off the coast of Gaza.87 By the mid 1990s, “most of Gaza’s groundwater was not fit for drinking”.88 Israel has the means to use alternative sources of water during periods of over-extraction, including imported water or water from desalination plants. Palestinians in Gaza, on the other hand, after facing years of siege, which has restricted their ability to establish water infrastructure, and now a military assault and blockade of their access to basic resources, have few other options than to use the saline and polluted water.

Selby and others make a comparison between Gaza and Manhattan in New York. They explain that most cities obtain water from well beyond their municipal boundaries. Manhattan is similarly densely populated as Gaza but is able to source enough fresh water by obtaining it from the city’s periphery, including from upstate New York. The authors add that the West Bank was incorporated into the Israeli national water supply network, albeit in a strikingly unequal way. Gaza, by contrast, had already been excluded from this network before the current Israeli assault. It was effectively abandoned by a state that was indifferent to whether its indigenous population survived.89

We might think of the Middle East as a region vulnerable to drought. Yet, Selby and colleagues tend to emphasise the possibilities for technological ingenuity in overcoming apparent scarcity of water resources. For example, they provocatively state that “water is not life”.90 Although admitting that some water is obviously essential for drinking, they say its other uses can be substituted­—for example, it is not necessarily needed for transport. They argue that water is an abundant resource, not a scarce one. Moreover, some natural disasters are related to too much water rather than too little, even in supposedly dry regions, as Storm Daniel illustrates. This kind of reasoning will sit uneasily for those Marxists who assert that there are genuine limits to economic growth or boundaries imposed by nature on human resource use. Nevertheless, the work of Selby and others is an important corrective to understandings that see climate change as an alien force impacting on society from the outside. They are also strongly opposed to the Malthusian assumption that a too high population density or population growth invariably creates a pressure on resources, and they object to the politicised narrative that claims that Palestinians are unable to manage their own water resources.

When looking at the way the climate crisis will affect a population, we cannot understand things in terms of a changing climate alone. The effects of climate change also need to be understood in the context of inequality, exploitation, oppression and (settler) colonial relations of dominance. We can accept that climate breakdown is real, it does have consequences for everyone. We might even accept there are limits to the ability for even a state like Israel to cope with its effects. However, Palestinians’ ability to cope or otherwise with climate breakdown are inseparable from the impacts of occupation. We might all be facing the same stormy weather, but we are not all in the same boat.

Neoliberal Palestine versus steadfast Palestine

The overriding threat to Palestinians is the Israeli occupation. In this context, it is important to recognise that a section of the leadership of the Palestinian national movement has accommodated Israel’s existence and embraced neoliberalism, with implications for environmental understandings and strategy.91 The Palestinian Authority (PA), governed by the Fatah political party, has engaged in a process of state-building and peace-building as it seeks to project itself to the international donor community as a potential state­­­—even though so far, it has been prevented from gaining actual statehood.92 This process has intensified since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. Although the peace process was celebrated by some at the time as bringing the prospect of an end to violence, it has proved disastrous for Palestinians. Israeli land grabbing in the West Bank—including seizure of much of the agricultural land, apartheid policies of racial domination and brutal violence—have continued.93 It has meant the PA accepting the existence of Israel rather than waging a revolutionary struggle for its overthrow. More recently, the Abraham Accords have further normalised the existence of Israel among its neighbours.

As Muna Dajani argues,

there are actors in place that have facilitated an exodus, even a complete detachment of Palestinians from their land, most notably of course the Israeli occupation but also…the Palestinian Authority that came in as an interim self-government authority. What did it mean for agriculture? It meant there is a replication of the settler colonial modes of monoculture agricultural production, a market centred agricultural sector.

She continues, “International aid flowed in and international aid was interested in also transforming the Palestinian economy in general to show that economic peace is possible with Israel”.94

Palestinian scholar Toufic Haddad points out that international donors led by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank subjected Palestine to neoliberal policies from the 1990s onwards. Yet, “elements of the Palestinian leadership and society have also come to embrace a neoliberal worldview, integrating it into their vision for national liberation and statecraft”.95 Neoliberal ideology prescribed a flourishing private sector and efficiently operating markets as the most effective way to create jobs and wealth and generally meet people’s needs. Crucially, neoliberalism does not simply mean the “retreat of the state”.96 In this case, it was an international peace agreement between the leaderships of (putative) states that was a key element in creating the context for neoliberal development.

The rhetoric of a liberal peace builds on an existing assumption in the field of international development known as the security-development nexus.97 It is the view that an end to violence leads to greater opportunities for development, but also that the reverse holds true: development will create the right conditions for peace and security. In the case of Palestine, neoliberal endeavours aimed at bringing “prosperity” to Palestinians were supposed to reduce their willingness to engage in violent conflict and also to build links between Israelis and Palestinians through mutual cooperation on projects related to finance, trade and development of natural resources.98

Needless to say, this has not brought anything close to peace and justice. In reality, an aggressive Israeli state left Palestine extremely limited in its ability to pursue economic development, even on a neoliberal basis. Israel completely surrounds the fragmented pieces of land allocated to Palestinians in the West Bank, cutting it off from both Gaza and potential trading partners in the rest of the region. It controls what Palestinians in the West Bank can import and export, controls access to water including for agriculture and treats the West Bank as a captive market for Israeli goods, often of low quality. Israeli officials also channelled funding from aid towards their favoured representatives of the Palestinians, enriching a small Palestinian elite. Some young Palestinians who no longer had access to agricultural land became a source of cheap labour in Israeli cities, although after 1993, the number of work permits issued to Palestinians declined in favour of even more highly exploitable migrant workers, and unemployment rose among Palestinians.99

Palestinian environmental scholars have critiqued those projects that are based on neoliberal development principles at the expense of indigenous Palestinian traditions and forms of knowledge.100 For example, agriculture projects funded by international donors tend to be based on heavy use of pesticides and fertilisers and on cash crops aimed at international markets. Note that the effects of Israel’s occupation on agriculture are very different in the West Bank compared to Gaza, where, as mentioned earlier, there is a much greater emphasis on small-scale production for subsistence rather than production for export. Israel introduced a regime of high input monoculture crops on the land it managed. The PA, however, also conceded to this logic. Except it was caught in a bind. Intensive agriculture requires synthetic pesticide and fertiliser inputs that are imported internationally. The severe restrictions Israel imposes on trade in both Gaza and the West Bank inevitably pose limitations to this strategy.

Dajani contrasts the type of agriculture practised by Israel—and increasingly by the PA—based on monoculture plantations with traditional forms of Palestinian agriculture based on baladi (local) seeds and methods. For example, Saad Dagher from Ramallah, often described as the father of agro-ecology in Palestine, has developed humanistic farming methods and spread them to other farmers in the region.101 The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in Bethlehem has preserved and shared seeds and local knowledge in defiance of attempts by Israel to erase this knowledge. Yousef Abu Rabea in northern Gaza even recovered seeds from under the rubble and started growing food again before being murdered by an Israeli drone. For Dajani, these practices are not just about preserving a relic of the past but about finding ways to survive under brutal conditions.

Conclusion

When we discuss climate breakdown, we are often looking to the future. How much will sea levels rise? How will extreme weather affect us? How hot will it get? How can we generate energy more sustainably? What kind of future can we try to build? However, dealing with a rapidly changing climate also means reckoning with the past. It means addressing a history of capitalism and colonialism and the ecological relations they involve.

Many Palestinians, just like everyone else, have hopes for a more rational and just relationship with the natural environment. Many of them aspire to be able to produce their own food and find their own solutions for water supply, waste management and the like, free from interference by the Israeli state and without needing to rely on scarce food aid that puts them in danger. Several authors, including Palestinian scholars, have reflected on the role of ecology in Palestinians’ visions of liberation and resistance to the erasure they experience as a result of the occupation. Last year, a young Palestinian, Abubaker Abed, shared a video online of himself showing off a yellow rose. He described how the rose, still apparently thriving despite the destruction, was a symbol of hope. In her book Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance, Molavi describes Palestinians observing birds flying freely over the border between Gaza and Israel with no concerns for national borders. This helped provide visual inspiration for the 2018 Great March of Return.102

Despite everything that Palestinians have faced for the past 76 years, they have remained steadfast. Even after two years of atrocities, Israel has not won in Gaza. Gaza has been described, even by well meaning commentators, as unlivable or unsuitable for human life. For example, in 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories already referred to Gaza as “unliveable”, in part due to the widespread contamination of drinking water.103 Yet, people clearly did and do continue to live there. Dajani argues that we should reject the characterisation of Gaza as unliveable. She emphasises Palestinians active presence in Gaza, especially through projects related to food growing and food sovereignty.104

The tradition associated with this journal, and increasing layers of the Palestine solidarity movement internationally, call for a single, democratic and secular Palestine. This is opposed to a so-called two state solution and recognises the impossibility of a colonial aggressor, backed and armed by Western countries to play the role of watchdog in the Middle East, existing alongside a liberated and democratic state of Palestine. This leaves open the question of what kinds of ecological relations a single Palestinian state would have. To which Palestine would people return? Perhaps it would look something like the Palestine that existed before the 1948 Nakba. Some accounts of ecocide in Palestine have lamented the loss of the orange groves that were world-renowned. Perhaps in a more drought-afflicted climate, Palestinians would grow more dates rather than the water hungry orange trees? In any case, would it be a predominantly agricultural society or would people desire to live in urban areas? Cities like Jerusalem and Haifa have existed for thousands of years­—far longer than the state of Israel. Urbanisation is as much a part of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean as agriculture. Would a liberated Palestine make use of technology like solar panels and desalination plants? All these questions would be up for debate and contestation among Palestinians themselves if they could free themselves from occupation. The point here is to avoid romanticising one particular vision of the past and projecting it onto the future.

This article has applied theories of metabolic rift developed by ecological Marxists to the current genocide in Gaza. It has addressed how conditions of settler colonialism create a situation that can be described as a metabolic rift in its most extreme form, a severe disruption of Palestinians’ ability to manage their collective relationship with the natural environment. It has further discussed how, even though climate breakdown affects the entire Eastern Mediterranean region, people’s differentiated ability to cope with its effects cannot be understood without understanding the impacts of decades of occupation on the Palestinian population. It has discussed Israel’s own ecological regime and how some elements of the Palestinian leadership have ended up adapting to and accommodating neoliberal logics.

Many readers of this journal will already be part of the Palestine solidarity movement. The live-streamed genocide is sufficient reason to do so, without needing to add on an additional argument about the ecological problems Israel is causing. However, looking at the occupation through the lens of ecology can hopefully go some way to deepening and developing our analysis of the nature of settler colonialism and the system that breeds the horrors of both war and environmental destruction.

Camilla Royle is a Socialist Worker journalist and author of A Rebel’s Guide to Engels (Bookmarks, 2020).

Notes