Genocide Fuels Climate Crisis. The Fate of Palestine Shapes Our Climate Future

May 10, 2024

The Palestinian struggle for survival is also a global struggle against a potentially horrific future for humanity.

Seven months of Israel’s genocidal attack — with massive U.S. support — has left more than 35,000 Gazans dead with thousands more missing and tens of thousands injured. Israel has obliterated more than 70 percent of all homes in Gaza. Hospitals and ambulances have been destroyed, with medical staff imprisoned, tortured and killed. The annihilation of Palestinian life and culture includes scholasticide, with 76 percent of Gazan schools and all of Gaza’s universities damaged or destroyed. And Israel’s brutality has not been restricted to Gaza. Roughly 500 Palestinians in the West Bank have been murdered by Israeli settlers and soldiers since October 7, 2023, and thousands more imprisoned or tortured.

The Guardian reports that since October 7, “olive groves and farms [in Gaza] have been reduced to packed earth; soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.” Ecocide is part of Israel’s program of genocide.

Before October 7, Israel waged ethnic cleansing partly through toxic waste-dumping, intentional destruction of water storage and sewage facilities, and the expropriation of freshwater sources from Palestinian communities for exclusive use by Jewish settlers. As a result, 97 percent of groundwater in Gaza was undrinkable prior to Israel’s most recent attack, 71.5 percent of the Gazan population were food insecure and 65 percent lived in poverty.

Israel uses the West Bank as a sacrifice zone, where toxic wastewater is concentrated, resulting in high risks of cancer and other illness in the Palestinian population. Millions of trees have been uprooted so as to destroy olive harvests and force Palestinians off their lands. These environmental crimes are integral to Israel’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. More than 10 years ago, Friends of the Earth International described what was happening in Palestine as an Environmental Nakba, and the escalating climate crisis will only make the situation worse.

The worldwide outpouring of support for Palestine in the face of Israel’s genocide presents an opportunity to build lasting coalitions, not only for the liberation of Palestine, but to protect the planet from imperialism and the rapacious ecocide of capitalism.

Continue reading here 

[Top photo: Palestinian man inspects the damage caused by Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ]