The catastrophic climate crisis is fueled by global inequality and engineered by complicit governments and corporations that put profit before people and planet. Everywhere, the least powerful are the most affected.
Indigenous Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid, with no control over our land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the climate crisis. With Israel monopolizing resources, rising temperatures are exacerbating desertification and water and land scarcity, and creating climate apartheid.
Multinational corporations like AXA and HSBC, that invest in fossil fuels, are complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. They invest in companies arming Israel, financing its illegal settlements and pillaging Palestinian land and natural resources.
Israel’s blockade of and wars on Gaza poison life there
- Sewage has infiltrated Gaza’s aquifer and is flowing into the sea.
- 97% of Gaza’s scarce water is unfit for human consumption.
- Polluted water is a leading cause of child mortality in Gaza.
- Israel prevents Palestinians from using 20% of Gaza’s arable land and targets Gaza’s farmland with herbicides.
- The UN says Gaza will be unlivable by 2020, if not so already.
Israel is stealing and destroying Palestinian land and water
- Israel has seized control over exploitation of all the land illegally appropriated from Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed and dispossessed in 1948, and of at least 60% of the land in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory (OPT).
- In the OPT, Israel’s illegal settlements consume six times more water than Palestinians.
- Since 1967, Israel has uprooted 800,000 olive trees, some ancient.
Israel “greenwashes” its image, while destroying the environment
- Israel’s racist and false claim, “making the desert bloom,” is intended to hide its violent destruction of Palestinian society and its unsustainable agricultural and water use practices.
- 97.7% of Israel’s electricity production comes from fossil fuels, including natural gas extracted in part by illegally exploiting Palestinian gas resources.
- Israel is seeking to export energy to Europe to create dependency upon its fossil fuel-based and illicitly generated energy sources.
- Israel generates wind and solar energy in illegally occupied Palestinian and Syrian land.
- Warfare, a pillar of Israel’s economy, is one of the world’s most polluting industries.
The struggles against colonialism, racism and militarization, and for climate, economic and social justice are profoundly interconnected. Palestinians, like people worldwide, seek climate justice by holding governments and corporations to account. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is one powerful nonviolent means to pressure Israel to end its regime of oppression.
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To me it seems trivial and distracting to “intersectionalize” “climate justice” with Israel’s decades-long and on-going campaign of military occupation, oppression, colonialism, supremacism and (war) crimes.
The fact that the rapist doesn’t conscientiously “reduce, re-use and recycle” is really quite irrelevant in the scheme of things.
From the Atlantic Council: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/israel-s-problematic-role-in-perpetuating-water-insecurity-for-palestine/
Israel’s problematic role in perpetuating water insecurity for Palestine…States like Israel are well-equipped with technologies to deal with climate change, while the territories it occupies—namely Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights—are deprived of both their resources and the technologies necessary to protect them….The ongoing Israeli occupation, now in its fifty-second year, enables the Israeli state to both exploit Palestinian and Syrian resources (notably water and arable land) and prevent occupied Palestinians and Syrians from pursuing measures to support climate change adaptation….
But, but, but … drip irrigation and cherry tomatoes.