This week members of the Sierra Club unit of the Progressive Workers Union (PWU) passed a resolution pledging solidarity with the Palestinian people. The resolution passed with 86% of the vote.

Despite criticism from human rights groups and Palestine advocates, the Sierra Club has scheduled educational trips to Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Jaffa for next spring.

The Sierra Club claimed to embrace racial justice principles in its environmental advocacy, but its decision to continue trips to Israel shows the organization is practicing its own “Palestine Exception” when it comes to racial justice-conscious conservationism.

In response to backlash from pro-Israel groups the Sierra Club has reversed its decision to cancel a series of educational trips to the country.

There are conflicting reports whether the Sierra Club has canceled plans for educational trips to Israel that were supposed to begin this month. It was originally reported that the environmental organization made the decision to cancel the trip after discussions between members of its board and a coalition of Palestine advocacy groups. But now, the Times of Israel is reporting the environmental organization has buckled under pressure from the Israel lobby.

H.R. 2748 is the Israel Relations Normalization Act of 2021. It just passed the House of Representatives and the Senate last week. It expands the Abraham Accords, Trump-era weapons and business deals between apartheid Israel and other authoritarian regimes. These deals bribe Arab countries in the region to both ignore Israel’s settler colonialism and constant human rights violations. When we hear the phrases Normalizing and Israel, we should always read Normalizing Israel’s impunity and violence.

On the sidelines of COP26, Israel’s Prime Minister met with Bill Gates to discuss forming working group to study potential cooperation around combating climate change. Gates’ obsession with ‘innovation’, however, might have blinded him from addressing other issues that Israel is also ‘known for’ – namely, being the world’s leading human rights violator and the destruction of the Palestinian environment.

The Jewish National Fund is a linchpin of the system that enforces superior rights for Jews over Palestinians, whether inside Israel or in the occupied territory. A recent JNF decision to start publicly funding projects in the West Bank just makes that role more clear. Now the question becomes — will its international supporters stand by the organization?

By refusing to acknowledge a Palestinian perspective and giving individuals such as Shlomo Shoham such a prominent platform and role in their event, the organizers of the Sustainable Global Leadership Academy have become complicit in Israel’s well-oiled efforts at Greenwashing the country’s abysmal human rights record.

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.