In the world’s only settler-colonial apartheid state, forcible transfer and climate adaptation denial are the name of the game. In a region where climate futures promise to be especially dystopic the ensuing crisis will either accentuate inequity and conflict, or prompt solutions for once and for all for everyone’s benefit.

Climate change is a human rights issue. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), where land and natural resources required for climate adaptation are controlled by Israel, and systematically denied to Palestinians. Of all these resources, none are more vital than water.

In pushing the case in Canada to have settlement wines labeled as such rather than products of Israel, David Kattenburg was identified as a wine lover, educator, publisher, and child of Holocaust survivors. The last designation — CHS — has caused howls of outrage, but Kattenburg’s parents’ experience helped him to set his moral compass.

David Kattenburg gives an update on his effort to prevent wine from Israeli West Bank settlements labeled “Product of Israel” from being sold on Canadian store shelves.

Six months after I complained that wines labelled “Made in Israel” in Ontario stores were the products of illegal settlements, the Canadian food inspection agency ruled that the wines were falsely labeled and instructed the Ontario liquor board to cease imports of the wines. Within hours B’nai Brith Canada had posted it on its Facebook page, stating confidently that the outrageous directive would be quashed by day’s end. It soon was.

“[Palestinians] have been living here for ages. Like, forty, fifty, some of them one hundred years here,” says activist Guy Hircefeld in the Jordan Valley. “And suddenly, fucking Jewish settlers are coming and saying ‘That’s mine, you don’t allowed to come here anymore. And the army protects them.”

David Kattenburg attends the weekly Friday protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, whose spring and adjacent agricultural lands were stolen by the Israeli settlement Halamish. 16-year-old protester Ahed Tamimi tells him, “We have to be strong because if we are not like this they will kill us, and they will destroy our land. When I go to the demonstrations I feel I’m more strong.”

David Kattenburg reports from “Jerusalem Day” where ecstatic Zionists celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem were greeted by equally passionate Jewish-American and Israeli protesters intent on blocking the zealots’ march through the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s old city, into the heart of the Arab quarter.

Israel has been itching to run its Separation Wall across the occupied valley of Battir for years, a move that would surely destroy that valley. But Battir has UNESCO status because of its agricultural traditions, including terraced irrigation and heirloom apricot and cucumber, and this has put Israel’s plans on hold for the time being.

In a historic move, delegates at the Green Party of Canada’s national convention in Ottawa this past weekend adopted a policy resolution supporting the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The resolution places Canada’s Greens in frank opposition to the Canadian House of Commons, which voted overwhelmingly in February to condemn BDS, on the grounds that it “promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel.”