Gaza’s devastation

The environment for Palestinians has been degraded in many ways. There is the long reshaping of their territory through the occupation and the erosion of their capacity to live off the land, often through settler violence. There has been a devastating spoiling of land during the Gaza onslaught. But Palestine is also in an area of the globe most affected by climate breakdown, which ultimately may create the biggest threat to Palestinian survival.

During the 2024 Jewish Socialists’ Group Seder, I offered to talk about environmental breakdown as a modern analogy to one of the plagues visited on the Egyptians before the exodus from Egypt. The war on nature waged by the fossil fuel empire is arguably the greatest of modern plagues: 69% of all mammals, amphibians, reptiles and birds have disappeared in the 50 years since 1970, with similar declines in insect populations. In the web of life, the disappearance of one species affects the survival of many others.

This period of the earth’s history when humans are shaping geological time – often called the Anthropocene but more accurately, the Capitalocene – will hurt everyone, but is harshest for the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth, disproportionately affecting countries of the global south. So it remains bewildering that groups on the left are sometimes reluctant to prioritise looming environmental collapse when it should be the overarching concern of all of us. One of my tasks as an environmental activist is to persuade left groups I work with to shift their priorities.

We are in the endgame to preserve the environmental conditions in which future generations will flourish, our own near dear descendants included. We have a chance, a very small number of years, to limit climate and biodiversity collapse, but the window of opportunity is rapidly closing and the forces destroying nature are still gathering strength.

Our choices, their lives

It was during the rise of neoliberal hyper-capitalism in the 1980s that I first realised there was a contradiction in the way people profess care for their families while being prepared to jettison their descendants because of their attachment to profits and the capitalist system. I characterised the spirit of the Thatcher/Reagan era as “grandchild murder” following Thatcher’s announcement on the steps of Downing Street: “We are a grandmother”. With widely available knowledge of the rapidly growing threat to life from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the contradiction has become starker. The oil industry and the governments they lobby continue to pursue policies that accelerate global environmental collapse, knowing in their hearts the extent to which they imperil life on earth. A decade or so ago, I started to use the term “nepoticide” rather than“grandchild murder” to capture the spirit of our times.

For me, the idea that we live in an age of nepoticide is a stark reality. I say in court trials for my actions to publicise the destruction of nature, that I want to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye; that my grandchildren stand for all children in their generation and future generations. But I know that many people hide away from what is happening through one or another form of denial. There is ignorant denial, lying denial, as in the misinformation campaigns of the oil companies since the 1950s, self-deluding denial and hiding under the duvet denial. I think the end of denial involves passing through a portal connecting truth with action. For socialists it involves a move from “Oh yes I know it’s happening and it’s really worrying,” to putting the defence of nature at the centre of our socialist political activism.

Impact on Palestine

The crisis for Palestinians and the rest of the world is exacerbated by global failures to stop oil and gas extraction. Yet even as the bombardment of Gaza gathered force in October 2023, Israel was exploiting gas reserves off the Gaza coast. British Petroleum was amongst the beneficiaries of licences awarded in areas within Palestine’s maritime boundary.

More heat, less rain

Palestine is hot and arid. Temperatures are increasing faster than the global average. At present rates, Palestine/Israel will be 4 degrees C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, when it will become unliveable for most people. Annual rainfall has dropped by 10%. This combines with more intense yet sporadic precipitation and more rapid evaporation to reduce the availability of fresh water. Rising sea levels threaten to salinate fresh-water aquifers along the Mediterranean coast, adding considerably to water crises.

The spring and summer of 2024 in Palestine/Israel have been particularly hot. My sister in Tel Aviv told me that for the first time she has had to keep the air conditioning on through the night to be able to get a good night’s sleep. This says everything about the unequal impacts of global warming in the region. The heatwave raging in Gaza in April, with temperatures reaching 41 degrees, killed a woman and several children whose weakened bodies were unable to cope. The nylon tents in the camps operated as greenhouses and there was very limited water to cool people down. Around Rafah, adults and children left their tents and went in the sea to cool. Zakaria, a five-year-old boy, said that his swim in the ocean had made him happy. But for his father, the heatwave had been “torture, in every sense of the word. We don't know what to do with our families, with our children. We don't know how to face this heat, we are terrified.”

Reshaping the land

From its inception, the colonisation of Palestine involved a reshaping of the environment, breaking the links developed over thousands of years between humans, animals and plants. The destruction of 800,000 olive trees since 1967 has been a direct assault on the history and livelihoods of Palestinians. In November 2022, Israeli settlers uprooted and destroyed 2,000 olive trees in the Palestinian village of Qarawat Bani Hassan. Omar Ghoneym, the farmer, expressed his defiance:

They fight the tree, they fight the stone, they fight the land: they fight anything that bears testament to Palestinian history. They want to change the face of the land because they are afraid of the truth it holds. But we have one weapon that they can’t have, with which we resist all their attempts to drive us away: the ancestral love for and duty to protect everything which grows on Palestinian soil. Palestine is our mother, and we will never abandon her.

After 1948, Israel mass planted invasive species like the European pine to erase the memory of destroyed villages, financed from the gifts of Jews around the world into the Jewish National Fund via the familiar blue tin. As temperatures rise, their close planting makes them susceptible to forest fires.

The control of water resources by Israel severely impairs agriculture in the West Bank. Israel steals 87% of the mountain aquifer that lies equally under Israel and the West Bank, and the military prevents people from harvesting rainwater and sinking new wells.

Destroying, polluting, contaminating

The deliberate eradication of food growing capability in Gaza has been intense. By March 2024, Israel had destroyed nearly half of tree cover and farmland. Following aerial bombardment, ground troops dismantled greenhouses and tractors, while tanks uprooted orchards and fields of crops.

Water has been polluted by 130,000 cubic metres of sewage discharged into the sea every day, made immeasurably worse by the bombing of infrastructure and cutting of fuel for water and sewage treatment. Groundwater and soils are contaminated by toxins and munitions. Gazans survive on 2-3 litres of water a day, and this is often contaminated.

Bombing has created 37 million tonnes of debris and hazardous material, much of which contains human remains. The air has been polluted by smoke and particulates. Much of Gaza has become a wasteland, unable to sustain life independently. Genocide and ecocide have gone hand in hand with systematic eradication of the means of survival for Gazans.

Global impacts

The global military industrial complex is a major contributor to climate emissions, more than aviation and shipping combined. The first months of the war on Gaza produced more greenhouse gases than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year. Emissions from US cargo planes in support of the war are almost as big as those from Israeli fighter jets. Those generated by the Hamas war machine are minuscule in comparison.

Rebuilding Gaza will warm the planet even more. Globally, the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are USA and China; after them, come the concrete and cement industries. The destruction and rebuilding of Gaza will contribute more than the total annual greenhouse gas emissions generated by 135 countries.

Finally…

Environmental breakdown is the greatest of modern plagues affecting humanity and much of life besides. If we are to fully recognise the plight of Palestinians, we must connect the genocide and ecocide taking place in Gaza and the West Bank to the global ecocide of the Capitalocene. If we do that, we may see the need to incorporate environmental concerns into our socialism and forms of activism.