Slow violence and environmental war

The current military assault is part of the deliberate escalation of a long process of the Israeli occupier subjecting Palestine’s ecology to subtler, less visible or slower forms of violence. This began with the planting of non-Indigenous trees to hide the remains of ancient villages that Palestinians were forced to flee in the 1948 Nakba. While afforestation may be seen as good practice in slowing and reversing climate change in some parts of the world, Israel has found a way to weaponise this practice. Continuous planting of alien trees is one of the key causes of drought and flood cycles, and the rise in seasonal wildfires.

Israel also consistently exploits whatever water sources it finds. Since imposing the military siege in 2007, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s waters, including both its desalination plant and water infrastructure, its ancient coastal aquifer and the sensitive coastal wetlands of Wadi Gaza. Yet in a spectacular display of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, Israel boasts of its innovative agricultural and water technologies, and claims to be a world leader in conservation methods. Israel is also a great proponent of desalination technologies, which are polluting and fossil-fuel intensive. 

Other forms of slow violence include the deployment from Israel of agricultural toxins on days when the wind carries them westward into Gaza, damaging crops. Mature fruit trees were deliberately uprooted during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009 and subsequent assaults have prevented their replanting. Meanwhile, the bombing and laying waste of farmlands is part of an overall onslaught against Palestine’s food sovereignty. 

Cumulatively, these forms of deliberate environmental violence are an assault on Palestine’s food systems and agricultural livelihoods. They steadily undermine farmers’ capacity to practise the ancient Ba’li soil and water conservation methods that, until now, supported the production of fresh fruits and vegetables in which Gaza had managed to remain sufficient before the current onslaught. 

This deliberate undermining of Gaza’s food sovereignty, and of the “eco-Sumud” of the Palestinian people (Shqair, 2023: 79), is part of the occupier’s longitudinal efforts to malnourish the population, which has now escalated to famine as a weapon of war. The deliberate starvation of a civilian population constitutes a war crime (Article 49 of the Genocide Convention). Beyond its immediate cruelty, the enforced lack of adequate nutrition will have an enduring impact, with far-reaching and currently immeasurable implications for public health that will be felt for decades to come.

Impacts of military violence on a heating planet

The genocidal Israeli violence against Palestinians takes place at a time in which atmospheric carbon dioxide, responsible for heating the Earth, hit the highest-yet recorded levels in May 2024, followed by the hottest summer on record for 2,000 years. It is difficult to imagine how much the intense heat added to the suffering to which Israel is subjecting Palestinians, or to anticipate how they will survive the oncoming winter. 

Israel is weaponising the extreme weather associated with climate change. Its destruction of infrastructure deliberately exposed Palestinians to a harsh winter, then the full force of summer heat. If a ceasefire is not negotiated urgently, Gazans will be forced to undergo a second winter under full military assault, which many will not survive. An uncounted number of especially-vulnerable people, including babies and the elderly, have already died from a combination of exposure to the elements, poor nutrition and an intentionally devastated health system. Even neonatal services, first targeted in the early weeks of the war, killing preterm babies in incubators, have been subjected to ongoing assaults. 

Israel’s ecocidal violence is not confined to militarily-blockaded Gaza. In eastern Palestine, escalating land and water seizures and settler-colonial terrorism is reducing Palestinians’ capacity to grow food and tend livestock. The increasing heat, combined with exposure to agricultural additives and toxins forced onto farmers by the Israeli agricultural sector, has multiple negative effects on human health. 

At the same time as it wages war on Palestine’s ecology, Israel’s military actions are worsening the entire region’s vulnerability to year-on-year drought. Seasonal dryness is rapidly increasing, taxing to the limit governmental capacities to control summer wildfires, and this year war-induced forest fires have been raging in the plantations on the northern border with Lebanon. This apocalyptic scene would be terrifying even in the absence of a genocide.

In addition to all its other cruelties, Israel is intentionally denying Palestinians the possibility of devising mitigation or adaptation strategies to help them cope with climate change. 

In the east of Palestine, the continuous expansion of illegal settlements targets, disrupts and overwhelms Palestinian land-use practices, and pollutes and over-extracts water for the benefit of illegal settlers. Vast open-pit stone quarries that supply building materials — and profits — for settler expansionism are destroying the air quality and the health of  workers. Illegal settlers raid and steal baladi livestock (Indigenous breeds managed by Palestinians for centuries, that are well-adapted to the harsh and water-scarce landscape), and attack and terrorise shepherds with impunity. Settlers erect multiple barriers to prevent farmers from reaching ancient terraced lands and tending the established olive groves that are central to Palestinian well-being, livelihoods and culture. 

In addition, eastern Palestine is being so severely polluted by settler activities that social scientist Sofia Stamatopoulou-Robbins describes it as being in a state of Waste Siege (2020). 

In western Palestine, fully enclosed under Israeli military blockade since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been turned into a “standing reserve” for “effluents and toxins” (Liboiron 2021: 96), having been repeatedly exposed to military pollutants, among which are illegally deployed white phosphorus and probably depleted uranium. These toxins are bioaccumulating in bodies, soils and water, impacting the future health of whoever survives the current onslaught in ways that cannot yet be understood (Nixon 2011).

Climate change in an escalating military occupation

Water scarcity is a daily reality for Palestinians, and a direct and cumulative result of the military occupation. Israel has spent the past five decades absorbing every water source it can conquer through military means, whether in historic Palestine or the neighbouring countries. It has simultaneously run a propaganda campaign through which it argues that it has more water than its neighbours because of its superior water-management technologies, hiding the costs of extraction of natural resources for profit and successfully marketing itself as a “water superpower.” 

This story is only possible because Israel has successfully, at least until very recently, disguised its colonialist-capitalist extraction and profiteering from natural resources — a profitable strategy that, a decade ago, allowed it to realise $2.2 billion USD annually in tech related to water. It has also profited from exporting tons of water-intensive crops, all while Palestinians were starved of the minimum water resources needed for life. 

Israel’s process of depleting colonised land, extracting, misusing and profiting from its natural and human resources, and the accompanying propaganda campaign that denies and misrepresents what is happening on the ground, takes place with the full complicity of the international donor community. Palestinian elites have also profited, both by inadequately refuting the occupier’s narrative and by deploying similar language and policies for profit.

In these circumstances, all of the supposed mitigation measures Palestinians are encouraged to apply in response to climate change are impractical and unworkable. While many reports have been written on “improving” Palestinian coping mechanisms against climate change, including through the imposition of the military occupier’s technologies, no interventions can be made more technically effective. All of them are attempts to respond to a state of militarised coloniality as if it were a navigable mechanical obstacle. It is not: it’s a deliberately produced political, economic and ecological crisis whose resolution appears not to be anywhere on the global agenda. 

In the face of Israel’s self-presentation as a major player in green technology and climate change solutions, one of the major tasks of Palestinians and their supporters is to show the rest of the world that climate change rhetoric and actions in Palestine, as encouraged by the international community to date, are a smokescreen. They are just one more instance of an ongoing effort not to challenge an appallingly unjust and violent military occupation of an Indigenous people and their land. 

One tangible consequence is that Palestinians find it difficult to build expertise around concepts such as regeneration, adaptation and other climate mitigation measures. They cannot devise, urge or implement meaningful actions towards mitigation and adaptation while they have no political freedom to take these issues on. 

Among all the other kinds of support feminist peace activists can bring to Palestine, advocacy efforts are needed to represent it as an Indigenous nation with a long and tangible cultural heritage of practices that emphasise greater connection and reciprocity with the land, built strongly on the foundations of human reverence, reciprocity and compassion for the web of life. 

Yet Palestinians have, as an occupied nation, been deliberately prevented from accessing the benefits attached to practical engagement with global climate change efforts. The capacity of Palestinian scientists, engineers and climate activists to defend their work from ever-deepening power asymmetries, exclusions and incursions into their air, lands and waters, is continually undermined. This process is accompanied by aversion from the global community to name or resolve the real causes of accelerating climate change effects in Palestine: the genocidal military occupation.

It is time to recognise the impacts of settler-colonial ecocide, because it isn’t just a terrifying reality for Palestinians. All of the Earth’s systems are connected. This means that in our millions, in our billions, we are all breathing the same toxifying air, while our Earth’s waters and soils are being polluted in ways we cannot yet understand or ameliorate. 

In our millions, in our billions, we are all affected by the Israeli onslaught on Palestinians.