The Sierra Club’s Palestine Exception to environmental justice 

On March 15th, 2022, an online chorus of jubilation quickly soured as the U.S.-based environmental non-profit, the Sierra Club, reversed a celebrated, principled decision in the online equivalent of the blink of an eye. 

Initially, the organization decided, following activist pressure, to cancel its trips to Israel. Organizations involved in the campaigns emphasized how the Zionist entity uses a false veneer of environmental progressivism to conceal its colonial treatment of Palestinians, a process known as green washing. The announcement made sense given the organization’s seeming embrace of racial justice principles. According to an August 2020 blog post from the organization’s website, 

“The work to conserve nature—a staple in the mainstream environmental movement’s history and considered the Sierra Club’s legacy work—is ongoing and urgent, but it’s also evolving. It must continue to evolve to finally reflect the realities of our society and the consequences of our wrongdoings, and acknowledge the injustices communities are facing in a world in the midst of a climate, extinction, and human rights crisis. A movement once defined by preservation for the few must continue to transform and focus on saving nature to benefit and protect all.”

So far, so good. These words reflect a careful attention to how racism is not simply a matter of harmful assumptions, but a system of oppression that factors into all aspect of socio-political being–including the environment. Indeed, the Sierra Club even denounced the anti-Black/anti-Indigenous racism of its founder, John Muir, and the white supremacy that undergirded his particular vision of environmental conservationism. Canceling trips to the Zionist colonial state that weaponizes faux-progressive bona-fides to dispossess the Indigenous Palestinian people is the perfect extension of this contemporary sensitivity.

But the momentum was short-lived. Following pressure from anti-Palestinian organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)  (both of which have recently pushed to censor California ethnic studies programming, and the latter of which has surveilled anti-racist activists for decades,) the Sierra Club did a rapid about-face and reinstated the trips. The timing of the reversal was so swift that celebration from organizations that had been raising awareness about the broader implications of Zionist greenwashing trips was rapidly dated. In fact, in contrast to their earlier messaging that suggested the need to grapple with difficult truths, a statement from Sierra Club Acting Executive Director, Dan Chu, regarding the trips defaulted to the laziest excuse for wilful obliviousness to injustice: ignorance. 

“Let me be clear: the Sierra Club’s mission is to enjoy, explore and protect the planet, and we do not take positions on foreign policy matters that are beyond that scope. We do not have a deep understanding or knowledge necessary to do so, nor is it our place to do so,” Chu wrote. 

Of course, the statement did not mention Palestine or Palestinians. Some people’s lives and struggles, it seems, are too “foreign” for US-based organizations that supposedly care about racial justice in any capacity beyond engaging the latest fad need to think about. As the Adalah Justice Project writes, 

“Not only did Sierra Club recommit to taking nature trips to Israel, but astonishingly, the statement from Chu is written as though Indigenous Palestinians do not exist and fails to apologize for the anti-Palestinian racism of its past tours. 

Chu’s statement names Israel five times. It does not mention Palestine once. It condemns antisemitism – when there is nothing antisemitic about withdrawing one’s complicity in Israeli apartheid. It does not mention anti-Palestinian or anti-Indigenous racism once.”

In a 2015 joint report, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights coined the phrase “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech” to address the flagrant violation of free speech concerning Palestine that predominantly impacts US universities. Now, the Sierra Club seems to be happily practicing its own “Palestine Exception” to its brand of racial justice-conscious conservationism. Apparently, critiquing your founder for being a white supremacist means your work is done and it’s okay not only to ignore settler-colonialism playing out in real time, but also to proudly boast of trips to a colonial state that’s using your seal of approval to legitimize its genocide of an Indigenous population.

If there’s one silver lining to this whole mess, it’s that it has highlighted the inherently politicized nature of travel when it comes to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Within this context, travel is not simply about “going;” organizations that participate in normalization with the Zionist colonial state often present travel as an end-in-itself, one that can lead to an idealistic intellectual maturity concerning the “conflict.” When I was in graduate school, the Olive Tree Initiative was aggressively promoting “apolitical” trips that allowed for participants to “make up their own minds”–meaning, they ignored the inherent imbalance of power that defines Palestinian colonial disposession and the inherent privileges of being a Zionist colonizer. Nowadays, an organization called Mejdi Tours ridiculously employs what it term a “dual-narrative” approach to such trips.  

But travel can never occur in a vacuum, and to pretend it does is to feed into the very negligence that allows the Zionist state to mete out its colonial violence with no substantial action on the part of the international community. 

In 2015, the Florida-based Dream Defenders participated in a delegation to Palestine alongside activists from Ferguson, Missouri, Black Lives Matter and BYP 100 that drew connections between Black and Palestinian resistance to state-sanctioned oppression. This delegation remains a monumental testament to the enduring power and ongoing necessity of joint struggle and co-resistance across the globe. 

In 2018, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) led an Indigenous delegation made up of Indigenous activists and organizers from Turtle Island  and the Kingdom of Hawai’i (the so-called “United States”) to Palestine. Through a series of reflective posts, delegates made important connections between the violence and mechanisms of settler-colonialism from Turtle Island & the Kingdom of Hawai’i to Palestine.

And at Eyewitness Palestine, we plan delegations rooted in an intentional theory of change that holds that travel must be the beginning of a lifelong commitment to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation. We engage in intensive racial justice and equity trainings before delegates leave, and coordinate with Palestinian partners on the ground to ensure as ethical and accountable a presence as possible. And because we know that there are many layers to Zionist colonization and Palestinian resistance, we make sure to give our delegations topical framing themes: our upcoming delegations include an Environmental Justice delegation as well as a Racial Justice themed one.  

These are only three examples of options for engaging the political nature and possibilities for a more ethical ideal of travel that does not ignore Zionist settler-colonialism and apartheid. 

Organizations like the Sierra Club may only pick and choose from racial justice frameworks in a cosmetic fashion, using the buzzwords that make them look good in the moment without feeling the need to substantially meet that image with practice, but organizers, activists and organizations pushing for real, substantial change and freedom in Palestine and globally won’t be duped. An organization for which appeasing pro-genocide and pro-apartheid constituents who oppose Palestinian freedom is more important than a genuine commitment to comprehensive racial justice and liberation is, for all of its fancy talk, merely engaging in liberal opportunism. 

Despite some superficial tongue lashings, the legacy of John Muir seems to be doing quite well.