The televised genocide in Gaza is intended as a subconscious lesson from the ruling classes to all oppressed people around the world, warning them that their resistance to eco-apartheid will be met with a military onslaught that has been in preparation for many years. This departure from any policy of reconciliation has immense implications that social movements have not yet comprehended. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: it should only strengthen our resolve to build both a strategic and expansive resistance. This means that while we uplift the anti-colonial fronts fighting against military and economic imperialism in the Global South, and the South-South solidarities now emerging in our increasingly multipolar world, we must also fortify the ability of people on the ground to resist. We also have an important battle to wage in the imperial core against capitalist imperialism, via our social movements and organisations. These are already in motion; we need to strengthen and make connections between them. In the paragraphs below, we discuss some of the ideological obstacles facing our movements, and what a united ecological strategy against eco-apartheid might look like.
Amidst this genocide, as the bodies of Palestinian martyrs have piled up, the Western climate movement has continued to focus its advocacy on the impact of the Israeli aggression on the natural world: the loss of olive trees in Palestine, the carbon emissions of the bombs, the disruption to non-human life. Even when extending solidarity to anti-colonial struggles, the climate movement tends to consider violence against the natural world as somehow separate from violence against humanity. This is climate reductionism because it sees the crisis as the loss of natural life in itself, rather than a crisis that results from the loss of the socio-ecological fabric that sustains human and non-human life, in Palestine and elsewhere, and which amounts to both ecocide and genocide.
What should the climate movement do differently? Firstly, it must entirely abandon reductionist approaches to the ecological crisis that reduce it to the issues of carbon emissions and impacts on the natural world. Climate reductionism is often manifested in the hierarchisation of urgent struggles, with climate change at the top. Not only does this approach separate the ecological crisis from its political-historical drivers, it also suggests that the extreme weather events brought on by climate change will be felt purely in an environmental sense, unrelated to gendered, racialized, and classed stratifications or how climate change effects will be leveraged by far-right groups to victimise themselves and enact new forms of violence on already marginalised groups (Seymour, 2024). “Climate justice” organisations too often only identify themselves with a narrowing niche of struggles related to matters having to do with the natural world. The false distinction made between “nature” and “people” is a continuation of colonial and settler environmentalism, in which people and unwanted natures are subdued and subjugated for the purposes of beautification, recreation, and — ultimately — economic activity. As conservationist Fiore Longo writes, in this approach, “nature” is viewed as separate from the vital and diverse human societies that it has produced, and which have continued to protect it since time immemorial (Longo, 2023).
One class of climate reductionism that separates the protection or restoration of an abstract environment from people, and its subsequent violent consequences, is the growing interest in large-scale tree planting schemes to supposedly respond to habitat loss, increase carbon sequestration, or protect soils. Tree-planting has, in some cases, fit perfectly within the intersection of the ecocidal and genocidal outcomes of eco-apartheid. The use of “trees as soldiers” to facilitate ethnic cleansing, as Rania Masri of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network puts it, when discussing Israel’s planting of trees in the West Bank is one example. She argues that Israel plants trees to whitewash its crimes and to violently dispossess Palestinians of their generations-old plots, presenting itself as a “green” saviour, even as the homogenous tree plantations it is creating become fodder for climate-induced wildfires. For instance, for decades initiatives of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) have involved planting trees atop depopulated Palestinian villages and using trees as a weapon to annex and enclose more land in the West Bank and the Naqab. This afforestation drive criminalises Palestinian residents and their diverse ecologies of carob, olive, and fruit, replacing them with exotic European pines that demand significant groundwater, increase soil acidity (making it impossible to grow anything else), and immobilise and guard the territory from return by its dispossessed communities. Indeed, JNF Chairman from 2020-2022 Avraham Duvdevani explicitly stated that JNF’s aim with tree planting is to “seize the open spaces near Bedouin settlements through afforestation, designed to block land takeover.” As Rania stresses: “the very ecological model of the Zionist project is one based on homogeneity, as much for the same tree as with their model of statehood and politics: one politic, one nation and we’ll erase everyone else.”
For Nadya Tannous, co-director of Honour the Earth and a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement, the answer is “not to dismiss environmental movements”, which in many instances have been a powerful progressive force in the West and an entry point for young people with anti-establishment sentiments. Nadya argues that if we fail to push the climate movement to adopt more anti-imperialist and internationalist currents, we risk handing it over to ideologically liberal institutions who will use it to further strengthen their normalisation of the status quo, including through effects on the psyche and consciousness of young people.
Mainstream environmentalism’s take on progressive politics merely expands the diversity of the ecocidal and genocidal order, and increases acceptance of it, instead of doing something to change it. When the moral high standard of pretense to care and have empathy for people and ecology is displayed publicly, while doubling down on the violence of the military industrial complex, a particularly devious and deceptive form of fascism emerges, one that differs from outright fascism only in the fact that it does not openly and explicitly announce its racist, misogynist and violent rhetoric. It is therefore of paramount importance to present a strong liberatory framework that can cut through the myths of liberal environmentalism and climate reductionism.
While mainstream narratives continue to push for the isolation of climate issues and to exceptionalise the climate crisis as one of singular horror, we must emphasise the fact that the ecological dimension has always been a constitutive part of national liberation movements, and that anti-imperialism must be the compass guiding our struggle. The end of the imperialist capitalist system will deliver justice, and that includes land justice and a transition towards more ecologically sustainable forms of living within planetary boundaries. On this point, Nadya Tannous of Honour the Earth gives the example of environmental leftists who condemn Morales' extractivism in Bolivia, without accounting for the country’s internal needs for development, and the protection of their national socialist project in the face of US military and economic imperialism. Tannous stresses that “national liberation of Global South nations must be the north star” of our current movements. This does not imply defending the nation state, but rather defending liberation from colonial extraction, oppression, and violence, as the first step towards building a world in which many worlds fit.
It is also the duty of social movements in the imperial core, amongst them the Palestine movement, to understand that their own fight constitutes ecological resistance, and is one thread in the tapestry of freedom-making and liberation from ecocide and genocide. This does not involve reinventing the wheel. Ecological anti-imperialism is a rich and generative tradition that we must bring to the forefront of our movements and draw on in order to highlight the limitations and contradictions in liberal environmentalism. For example, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso in the 1980s who was assassinated in a foreign-backed coup d’état, was a champion of political ecology. During his four years in power, he rolled out a feminist, socialist development programme that liberated millions from illiteracy, patriarchal customs, and medical underdevelopment. In an impassioned speech given at the First International Silva Conference on Trees and Forests in Paris in 1986, Sankara located the roots of the ecological crisis in imperialism, stating: “The struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.” Unlike planting trees in order to dispossess others of their land, or to compensate for carbon releases taking place elsewhere, Sankara’s tree planting schemes sought to protect the land from resource imperialism and racial capital, through applying embodied cultural knowledge of the territory involved.
There are other examples of liberation ecologies. One is the marooning practices of once-captive slaves on colonial plantations, who grew food and sustained their communities by drawing on the intimate relationships they had with the land (Stennett, 2020). Another is guerilla warfare, which is a mainstay of many anti-colonial liberation wars. In guerilla warfare the native fights on ecological terrain, using their knowledge of the territory to outsmart the settler, who is only capable of relating to the land as another objectified substrate to manage, manipulate, or conquer. In Palestine, collective steadfastness involves maintaining the connection to the land, not for sentimental reasons alone but to assert one’s presence or existence (wujud) on the land, as a form of resistance in itself (Taher, 2024). Even in the belly of the empire, the creation of social and solidarity economies that are outside the control of both the market and the state offer new environment-making possibilities. In all of these cases, the practice of making freedom collectively and outside of colonial and imperialist systems of oppression generates new ecological relationships that replenish and restore the conditions for life.
While acts of collective resistance can generate alternative ecologies that can liberate humanity and our non-human relations from the violence of “sustainability” solutions being sold to us, an anti-imperialist politic must also demand the rebirth of a united anti-war movement. Imperialism is nothing without militarism, as theorised by the late Arab Marxist Samir Amin (2017), who said that imperialism walks on two legs: economic (through a globalised neoliberal policy that is forced upon the countries of the world) and political (including military interventions against those who resist). Equally, the military industrial complex is one of the largest emitters, polluters, and drivers of climate change — a wasteful industry that produces no value vis-à-vis human life. The Pentagon is the most carbon-intensive institution in the world, responsible for more annual emissions than most countries (Crawford, 2022). Ali Kadri emphasises, war is not an unintentional side product of capitalism; rather, the waste and destruction produced by war stimulates the capitalist economy, and likewise, environmental degradation is the “structural waste” of capitalist imperialism (Kadri, 2023). The US empire requires a constant state of war to reproduce itself and impose its interests on the populations of the Global South. Thus, the military industrial complex simply has no place in a future free from eco-apartheid. Understanding this is of crucial importance amidst climate and ecological breakdown because the capitalist green transition is also a war of extraction. This is true not only in the Global South, but also in the North, where sacrifice zones for lithium extraction are created in areas where Indigenous and racialised populations live.
In parallel, we would add that one of the greatest ecological risks occurs when racialised and Indigenous people side with the oppressor to become ambassadors of the Euro-American colonising imaginary, and submit to the dominant cultural ideologies of individualism, meritocracy and a nihilistic attitude towards social transformation. White supremacy, which is necessary for planetary eco-apartheid to take shape, is increasingly being represented by diverse multicultural faces. Those who take part in this process are throwing members of their own communities under the bus to “make it” to appear positively for the white gaze of approval. Their actions also embolden the centre-right and far-right alike, by bringing more diverse faces into their ranks, precipitating an ever-faster plunge into the abyss. Pulling the brakes on this demands an anti-imperialist anti-war movement that leverages cultural diversity to empower a shared humanity against the ecocidal and genocidal ravages of racial capitalism. At this juncture, in the face of impending catastrophe, “thinking ecologically” cannot afford to involve anything less.
Even if solar panels and wind turbines are erected on an unprecedented scale, it is likely too late to stop the catastrophes that will be unleashed by runaway climate change. As the Covid pandemic showed, the crises will always be experienced through the very social processes that concentrate harm on poor and Indigenous peoples, who desperately require reparative justice, rather than once again being scapegoated as collateral damage. As Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte claims, climate change only intensifies the effects of colonialism — expanding its violence to new populations across the planet (Whyte, 2020). Unless colonial power is tackled, climate change can never be addressed. This bears repeating, and it has direct relevance to the obliteration of Gaza, which is supported by the same governments that are charged with addressing climate change, and which continue to propose “green” solutions that line the pockets of oil companies and Big Tech firms, who bankroll arms shipments to the Zionist entity. If the constant bombardments, white phosphorus attacks, cultural erasure, and refined AI-targeted destruction of Gaza are “mirrors” of an immediate future rooted in eco-apartheid, the liberation of Palestine is the north star in imagining reparative, ecological modes of living.
How so? First and foremost, the call to “Free Palestine” reclaims the humanity of billions of people who are engaged in resistance, not only in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen, but also elsewhere across the Global South, whose lives do count, as real human beings with values and dreams, imaginations, fears, joys, and flaws — equal to anyone in Western Europe, North America, Israel, Australia, and the rest of the Western world. Reclaiming the humanity of this huge share of the world’s population is a bare minimum demand for a just and liveable world. The words and especially (in)actions of those who still need to be convinced of this basic truth of our shared humanity, and who continue to privilege some human lives over others, will forever be anti-ecological, no matter the nature of their climate analysis. Only by stopping the dehumanisation of people and their subjection to decades of repression and overt violence can ecological relationships of reciprocity and respect be restored, nurtured and made to thrive.
While the rise of solidarities across movements that put Palestine liberation at the heart and soul of their efforts is just beginning, this is a crucial first step that is absolutely necessary to prevent an eco-apartheid future. In spite of attempts to ignore its recommendations, South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ has sent shockwaves around the world, forging global solidarities across working class and grassroots efforts in sometimes unexpected places, and across the North/South divide. These solidarities include dock workers in Belgium, Italy, Greece, and India refusing to ship arms to Israel; consumers in Malaysia and Indonesia engaging in boycotts that have caused major financial losses for Western companies with ties to Israel; and students on university campuses around the world refusing to give an inch in their efforts to expose the hypocrisy of their institutions until their demands are met. Beyond these fronts, our challenge is connecting the struggles of brutalised workers across the world with the resistance of the Palestinian people against common systems which disregard life everywhere. Our challenge is organising workers from all domains to strike for Palestine, to prevent more shipments of arms and hard-earned tax dollars going to murder innocent people. It is this ecology of resistance that will liberate working people everywhere.
Like all indigènes who suffer at the hands of oppressors, the Palestinian people and all colonised people will continue to resist the demolition of their homes, the occupation of their land, the redirection of rivers, the poisoning of soils, the killing of their non-human kin, the erasure of their culture, and the genocide of their communities. This represents an existential truth: there is something deeply ingrained in the human spirit that refuses to be dominated perpetually. Facing the reality of our apocalyptic conditions does not mean that we have lost: rather, it gives us the vision we need to fight back. Make no mistake: resistance against imperialism and its Zionist proxy represents the strongest ecological force of our times. Building an anti-war, anti-imperialist and ecological mass movement is our duty, in order to extend the resistance of the Palestinians to all corners of the world. The coloniser believes that with enough brutalisation they can lock us into an indefinite state of repression, but history has always bent towards justice: not by chance, but as a result of the inevitable and relentless resistance of people against the forces of genocide, for dignity for everyone on the earth. The liberation of Palestine represents the linchpin of our collective survival in the face of ecological collapse, it pulls forth a bright light from the black hole of a looming eco-apartheid future.
Vijay Kolinjivadi is a professor teaching community economic development. He is also a writer and researcher of political ecology and ecological economics. He is based in Tio'tià:ke (or Montreal). Asmaa Ashraf works in community energy, and is a writer and researcher of political ecology. She is also an organiser based in London within both the Palestine and climate movements.
