When Genocide Equals Ecocide: Climate Justice and Earth Day 2024

By Benay Blend

As Earth Day approaches, it is important to remember how Zionists developed myths regarding the land.

“Since October 7, Zionists have used atrocity propaganda to justify genocide,” writes Mary Turfah, “while Palestinians have provided testimony of the atrocities they have witnessed. The difference is not only in the truth of these stories, but also in their function.”

Defined as “information about the crimes committed by an enemy, especially deliberate fabrications or exaggerations,” this form of misinformation has been the subject of rebuttals since the beginning of the war on Gaza. However, Zionist hasbara (propaganda) has a long history, starting with the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.

As Earth Day approaches, it is important to remember how Zionists developed myths regarding the land. As Alan George notes, before 1948 Zionists tried to justify unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine by claiming that it was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

In America, too, European invaders perpetuated the myth of technical superiority to exterminate the country’s original inhabitants. By reappropriating the idea of ​​a manifest destiny, the Zionists staked their claim on what they falsely said was a barren wasteland whose native inhabitants were unable to make the desert flourish.

“Every Zionist accusation is a confession,” notes Dina Elmuti, a worldview that relies on “lies, propaganda and manipulation,” ensuring that “all that is ‘bad’ is projected outward” onto others. When Zina Rakhamilova says that “anti-Israel ‘activists’” are using Israel’s Independence Day to “hijack the narrative and try to rewrite history,” she is projecting what the Zionists themselves have done.

It is a common myth that Palestine was once wasteland. In fact, it was once home to a thriving agricultural economy in which Palestinians produced grains, melons and olives, to name a few. When the Zionists razed the land for highways and settler homes, it was declared a military zone for the Palestinians, reducing a once-thriving people to poverty.

Co-founder and CEO of Social Lite Creative, Rakhamilova repeats the myth that when Jewish immigrants returned to their “ancestral lands,” they encountered “an arid land that was sparsely populated, with few natural resources and a limited water supply.”

She might even have copied these words directly from Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (1950), a seminal American Studies text that ironically falls into the trap of mythologizing the West as a wasteland, while at the same time noting the region’s mythologies that are part of the American psyche.

As a child, I attended Sunday morning classes at our shul, where we donated money to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Not knowing then what I know now, that the JNF, disguised as an environmental NGO, was planting over the ruins of former villages, I didn’t think anything of it. As the Zionist state continues to uproot olive trees, a symbol of Palestinians’ rootedness, they are replaced by non-native pine trees, which have become the “quintessential symbol of Zionism.”

The Israeli armed forces are not only deployed in cases of violence and displacement, but also in cases of environmental damage to the country. By replacing long-rooted olive trees with non-native, fast-growing pine forests, Zionists hope to sever Palestinians’ relationship with the land. This not only destroys people’s livelihoods and kinship with the earth, it also causes ecological devastation.

“These foreign trees often cannot adapt to the local soil because they require a lot of water, which causes drought,” writes Taya Amit. They also “acidify the land, making the soil inedible for Palestinian herders to graze their flocks on; and the trees are vulnerable to forest fires,” creating a situation that should be highlighted on Earth Day.

These fires, like those in other parts of the South, are the product of settlers trying to put their own stamp on the land.

On this Earth Day, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the JNF labels itself the leader of “eco-Zionism – the movement of the Jewish people for the Earth,” wrongly equating Zionism as a political movement with Judaism, a religion. While it touts the many trees the JNF has planted since its inception, it neglects to mention the many olive trees it has destroyed in perhaps as many years.

By telling only half the story, JNF creates a cover for Israel’s abuse of the Palestinian people and their land. For example, JNF claims that the entity instructs other countries on how to deal with issues related to water pollution and waste management, but glosses over the reality that the current siege of Gaza is crippling water systems so that clean water and sanitation are unavailable to most people .

Other organizations have contributed to this support for colonialism through means that are less obvious but equally damaging to Palestinians. In the past, the Sierra Club has promoted tours titled “Wings Over Israel: Birdwatching, Nature and Culture.”

These trips focused on the region’s biodiversity and historic sites and were ultimately challenged by members of the Sierra Club unit of the Progressive Workers Union (PWU), who passed a resolution in 2011. solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Dated June 26, 2023, their rack recognized that colonialism not only contributed to the climate crisis, but for years oppressed Palestinians in their struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation. While the Sierra Club’s administration seemed content to “greenwash” the entity’s abuses, its employees apparently were not.

Friends of the Earth, on the other hand, defines ‘environmental justice’ as ‘fighting for the planet and also for its inhabitants’. To meet the challenges of climate change and the climate crisis, they argue that strength comes from solidarity, even if that means losing donors.

April is also the Month of Arabic Food, writes Morgan Cooper Totah in her blog. While living in Ramallah with her Palestinian husband, American-born Morgan is raising her two children to be good stewards of their land. In keeping with Earth Day, her most recent column highlights not only the importance of food sovereignty, but also the impossibility of achieving it due to checkpoints that make it difficult to reach locally grown produce from one city to another.

For Palestinians, food is at the core of the history, identity and rituals that hold communities together. Because Palestinian food is a cultural symbol that connects the people to the soil, the appropriation of Palestinian cuisine is also a tool of the Israeli occupation, denying Palestinian indigenous identity by claiming that their dishes belong to Israeli national identity belong and not to the Palestinians who have lived a long time. on the land.

Accordingly, food always has a political purpose. For example, Rama, a Chicago-based political organizer, explains that Israel bans the harvest Za’atar under the guise of environmental protection, but in reality to criminalize Palestinian herb gathering practices. Known for its medicinal benefits, harvesting the herb became an act of defiance.

“We will stay as long as possible Za’atar and there remains olive oil’, a phrase that, according to Rama, indicates the anchorage in the land for herbs and trees, but also for people.

If Earth Day is about training others to be good stewards of the land, then the role Israel has played in the destruction of the landscape and indigenous people needs to be told.

Code Pink offers a template: “Earth Day 2024: War is not green! Genocide=Ecocide.” In contrast to the Sierra Club’s capitulation to Zionist demands, Code Pink calls out the Israeli war machine for the country’s destruction: “Destroying the Earth is just another tactic to accelerate the genocide, as now almost all agricultural land Gaza’s energy and water infrastructure has been destroyed. destroyed or polluted.”

The group also draws attention to the US Congress for its equivocation: while US lawmakers express “shallow sentiments” about their love for the environment, their “virtue signaling” is offset by sending weapons to Israel that “both damage and destroy the Earth” the important bond between indigenous people and the environment, effectively killing both.”

At the recent COP28 in Dubai, Israel praised its climate technology industry in areas such as carbon capture and storage, water reclamation and plant-based meat alternatives. However, these so-called climate solutions are offset by the entity’s role in warfare.

Ultimately, an end to Israel’s green colonialism (exploiting the banner of environmentalism while causing harm), as well as colonialism itself, requires the dismantling of colonialist structures to return stewardship to its rightful owners.

By recognizing the connections between environmentalists, climate change activists and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, this Earth Day could be a turning point for the future of the planet.

– Benay Blend received her PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither homeland nor exile are words’: ‘Situated knowledge’ in the works of Palestinian and Native American writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.