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 their land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the climate crisis.
Robert Cohen writes, “There are parallels between how the Extinction Rebellion has analyzed the politics of climate change and where we now stand with Israel/Palestine within the Jewish world. Both situations have those who deny the facts, look to others to blame, or think minor reforms will fix things.”
Robert Cohen writes, with the global climate emergency upon us, “Zionism is one of many obsolete ideologies which needs to be ditched if we’re to build a sustainable future for all of us. In contrast, Judaism itself, shorn of its Zionist overlay, has plenty to offer as we look for radically different ways to relate to each other and the planet.”
The struggles against racism and militarization, and for climate, economic and social justice are profoundly interconnected. Join climate week actions in your area, and take action to end Israel’s climate apartheid against Palestinians.
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.
If the United States goes to war with Iran, you are unlikely to hear the word “oil” uttered by top Trump administration officials, but make no mistake: that three-letter word lies at the root of the present crisis, not to speak of the world’s long-term fate.
The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’, and it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
From a cooking gas shop to a women’s collective making toys from recyclables, meet Gaza’s entrepreneurs who are adapting to a crumbling environment that the UN says will become “unliveable,” in less than a year.
The rise of populism in both its rightwing and leftwing manifestations, and the more general political polarization in our societies, are the symptoms of a breakdown in trust, a collapse of consensus, a rupture of the social contract. Jonathan Cook says today we desperately need the populism of Extinction Rebellion, of Greta Thunberg and the school strikes, of politicians prepared to stand by a Green New Deal and declare real climate emergencies.