[News] Palestine against an eco-apartheid world

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/palestine-against-an-eco-apartheid-world/>
Palestine against an eco-apartheid world By Vijay Kolinjivadi
<https://mondoweiss.net/author/vijay-kolinjivadi/> and Asmaa Ashraf
<https://mondoweiss.net/author/asmaa-ashraf/> November 17, 2024
------------------------------
[image: 020424_Gaza_ZU_0031.jpg]

Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth in a series of articles
co-published by *Mondoweiss* and the Transnational Institute
<https://www.tni.org/en/article/sustainability-fantasiesgenocidal-realities>
that places Palestine in the long trajectory of anti-colonial struggles,
from Haiti to Vietnam to Algeria and South Africa.

Gaza is currently experiencing the largest slaughter of men, women and
children in decades and a destruction rate that has produced over 40
million tonnes of rubble that will take over a decade to clear. The near
100,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 2023
surpasses
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/amount-of-israeli-bombs-dropped-on-gaza-surpasses-that-of-world-war-ii/3239665>
the World War II bombings of London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined. Gaza is
the site of one of the largest engineered mass starvations
<https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-HUNGER/myvmakwxrvr/>
this century. For over a year, a day has not passed by in which a child has
not been dismembered by the US-backed Israeli army. Gaza has seen its
hospitals, universities, markets, and essential services blown to pieces,
and its waterways, air, and soils polluted to highly toxic levels by
chemical residues from carpet-bombing. The destructive force with which the
Gaza Strip has been bombarded is equivalent to several times that of the
nuclear bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/israel-gaza-bombing-hamas-civilian-casualties-1.7068647>.
And yet, the tens of thousands of Palestinian children dying due to
mutilation and incineration, and from infection resulting from amputation,
count for absolutely nothing in the eyes of the West, in stark contrast to
how it reacts when an Israeli is held hostage, or an ultra-wealthy American
is trapped in an undersea submersible on a pleasure trip to view the
*Titanic*. It is breathtakingly clear that Palestinian lives do not matter
to Imperial powers and their interests.

The complete dismissal of entire populations as sub-human, or not
equivalent to European or Euro-American bodies, is a stark reminder that
the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial genocide of
indigenous populations by Western empires have never left us. It is also a
frightening reflection of the priorities of the world’s rulers as we watch
the planet’s life-support systems erode due to ecological collapse. The
ruling class’s desire to preserve a liberal democratic society that is free
from ecological breakdown extends only to a future reserved for themselves
– an ever-decreasing minority of multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Meanwhile, what we are witnessing in Gaza is a sign of what is to come in
an era of growing ecological breakdown brought on by a capitalist world
order that is no longer fit for purpose – if it ever was. As Colombian
president Gustavo Petro declared at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai
last year: “*Gaza is the mirror of our immediate future*”.

The word genocide is woefully insufficient to describe the deliberately
engineered annihilation of people and of the ecological relations that
sustain their life. What we are witnessing in Palestine is the monstrous
intent to do away with an entire people and a whole environment in order to
consolidate US-led imperial interests in the face of anti-colonial
resistance, and to capitalise on oil and gas projects and “waterfront
property” on Gaza’s shore. With a rising mobilisation of demonic far-right
factions and a general shift towards authoritarian capitalism around the
world, the future might very well see more such instances of the
annihilation of the social and ecological fabric of places, in a last ditch
effort to continue to extract profit and to remove “surplus populations” –
but with less of a liberal and progressive pretence regarding morals, human
rights, and “win win” solutions. These acts of annihilation will instead be
framed as situations in which “civilised” victors conquer barbarian “bad
guys” (in the words of erstwhile US Democratic vice-president candidate Tim
Walz) – dehumanising innocent populations whose sacrifice will be deemed
necessary in order to maintain a dying and utterly catastrophic world
order.

The combined ecocide and genocide in Gaza is an expression of eco-apartheid
– a violent racialising phenomenon that advances the colonial frontier of
land occupation and resource plunder to funnel wealth to a privileged few
at the expense of the vast majority of people.

In this essay, we explain why the combined ecocide and genocide in Gaza is
an expression of eco-apartheid – a violent racialising phenomenon that
advances the colonial frontier of land occupation and resource plunder to
funnel wealth to a privileged few at the expense of the vast majority of
people. Within the racial imperialist order of eco-apartheid, the
destruction of the “wretched of the earth”, of brown, black, and Indigenous
people, and the erasure of their environments, cultures, and knowledges, is
seen as completely banal, a system that functions as it is supposed to. It
is for this reason that genocide and ecocide should be considered two sides
of the same coin. Both are defined by an attempted annihilation of an
entire people and the living environments they are a part of. Climate
change is the outcome of centuries of colonial occupation and exploitation
of racialised people and their lands as “resources”. What distinguishes
genocide from ecocide is the pace of the murdering – fast in some places,
slower in others.

The process of funnelling wealth to a handful of people involves the
creation of both geopolitical and geophysical sacrifice zones of varying
severity. These sacrifice zones can occur both in the Global South and in
the heartlands of the empire. For instance, while working class Americans
in parts of North Carolina received no more than $750 in relief funds after
the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene, which was super-charged by
climate change, the US government has given over $22.7 billion in aid to
Israel to bomb Gaza and Lebanon (equal to over $2,300 per
<https://www.instagram.com/sahatenglish/p/DBMqkbJtzCZ/> Israeli citizen)
since 7 October 2023.

While the consequences of the ecocide-genocide nexus are deadly for
humanity, we argue in this essay that eco-apartheid is necessary in order
to maintain the capitalist imperialist system for decades to come, and to
secure a white supremacist settler future. In this future, the niceties of
a liberal rules-based order will be done away with: the myths of
multilateralism, multiculturalism,  international law and human rights will
no longer be expedient for the ruling class in the face of overwhelming
economic and ecological contradictions. As Nesrine Malik writes
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/28/lesson-israel-unfathomably-cruel-war-might-is-right>,
the unfathomable assault on Gaza without moving a hair on the head of
Western political leaders is an indication that our world is still one
where might is right. The “look the other way” attitude of Western powers
who are actively supporting and encouraging the genocide of Gazans, and the
orchestrated silencing of voices in opposition, foreshadow the coming
normalisation and collective gaslighting of unimaginable violence as
climate catastrophe continues unfolding.

In the following sections we highlight some facets of the regime of
eco-apartheid, in which increasing numbers of people are dehumanised and
deliberately cast out to face the wrath of climate change and social
precarity, including through violent military occupation. At the same time,
the elite will continue to deflect responsibility and shield themselves
through so-called “sustainability”-branded living. In preparing this essay,
we talked with anti-imperialist land defenders and community organisers who
offered advice on building the power needed to organise and fight in an
historical moment in which dependence on existing institutions is glaringly
futile.
*Palestine in the world ecology*

The Zionist project is but a modern iteration of the West’s savage settler
colonial history. Starting from the British Balfour declaration and violent
repression of the 1936–1939 Great Arab Revolt, to France’s heavy arms
supply in the mid-twentieth century, and now the United States’ unceasing
military aid, Israel has always been viewed as the central bulwark for
imperialist domination in the region. It is considered an outpost of
Europe’s civilising mission among the “backwards” Arabs and their arid
landscapes, and the antidote to expressions of Arab self-determination and
progressive Arab movements.

Like the British empire before it, which legitimised and facilitated the
Zionist project, the US empire is not interested in democracy, human
rights, or fighting anti-Semitism. These, like marketable “sustainability”,
are merely convenient narratives that serve to leverage social concerns for
the purposes of re-branding  the US empire’s military and economic
projects. The intent of these projects is to subdue territories and people
and push them into circuits of accumulation around labour, land, and new
forms of debt. As a consequence, already wealthy people maintain and
enhance their water- and energy-intensive lifestyles through eco-modernist
automation that is branded as climate-resilient. In essence, ecomodernist
lifestyles are nothing but the top 10% making a killing (literally and
metaphorically) on their investments. The colonial quest for resources also
gives the white supremacist coloniser exalted status, especially when it is
Arabs, Muslims, and lower-income brown or black people who suffer – upon
the whims of Western interests whether in Haiti, Lebanon, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Sudan, or domestically within the United
States or other Western countries.

Israel is the most important outpost of the US empire, not because of
inter-religious conflicts or the influence of the “pro-Zionist lobby” in
North America and Western Europe, but because of the Middle East’s central
position in the capitalist world system.
<https://www.tni.org/en/article/framing-palestine> After the 1967 war with
Nasser’s Egypt, in which Israel proved itself as a dependable partner of US
imperialism, the US assumed the position of the primary sponsor of the
Zionist regime, supplying arms and financial support to the settler state.
The US’s interests in the region focus on the fossil fuel oil economy and
guaranteeing the stable supply of oil, within the US hegemonic global
order. This involves a vicious positive feedback cycle, in which
petrodollars beget more petrodollars, by way of military campaigns,
resource exploitation, wars and ecocide. Only Israel, with its
strategically situated settler population, vulnerable borders, militarised
society and repressive forces can be wholly relied upon by the US to help
entrench the US-based order in the region.

The Zionist lobby’s brandishing of anti-Semitism as a geopolitical moral
weapon does play a role in propping up Israel and its exalted status for US
interests. Meanwhile, the extreme-right Zionist entity is also entirely
dependent on the US for survival: financially, militarily, and politically.
In fact, Israel’s survival is key to the survival of the global capitalist
order, which is based on US imperialism and Western European hegemony.  A
threat to Israel is therefore a threat to US imperial domination. It is
only through this dialectic that we can understand both the unconditional
support afforded to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the absolute
normalisation of genocide in Western society. It also explains the scale of
the tyranny and holocaust perpetrated by Israel in response to Palestinian
acts of resistance: a holocaust that is rationalised and rebranded as
“routine” or as constituting a series of “limited ground operations”.

Palestinian resistance is the stone lodged in the throat of US imperialism.
Well before October 2023, outgoing US President Joe Biden’s Middle East
strategy had been very clear: normalising ties between Israel and Saudi
Arabia, opening new formal investment markets in the region, and further
stabilising imperial relations. With a Saudi–Israeli normalisation deal on
the cusp of being announced as winter 2023 approached, the question of
Palestinian national sovereignty was brought back into sharp relief through
popular resistance. And so, we must remember that the US-backed Israeli
obliteration of Gaza is not simply a way to open up new real estate markets
or to seize land for capital. Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen are being
punished for their role in thwarting uneven capital accumulation and value
drain from the Middle East. The Palestinian resistance is currently
articulating the clearest expression of anti-colonial dissent, of a
national liberation movement that refuses to have its humanity cancelled,
and its populations erased and sacrificed for the imperial core.

This scale of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, where the social, ecological
and political fabrics are torn apart by megatons of military arsenal that
leave limbs scattered will become increasingly commonplace as crises of
global capital accumulation intensify, under the stresses of an altered
climate, severe geopolitical tensions, and social and economic inequality.
The bulldozers devastating Gaza’s ecology are no different from the
bulldozers that rip apart primary rainforests for agri-business expansion,
precipitating the sixth mass extinction. The artificial intelligence (AI)
technologies that refine weapons used to murder civilians in Gaza’s
hospitals and schools are the very same AI technologies that require new
energy sources like coal, oil and gas, renewable, and even nuclear power.
This appetite for energy of Big Tech overlords like OpenAI, Microsoft,
Alphabet, and Meta, among others, not only cancels out environmental gains
from renewable energy use, but also reinforces ecologically devastating
extractive practices and toxic waste dumps on communities of people
considered unworthy and sub-human elsewhere. What we are witnessing is a
vicious cycle of genocidal and ecocidal violence.

In his speech at the COP28 summit in Dubai, Colombian president Gustavo
Petro stated:

*“The unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian  people is
what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate
crisis.” *

Those who dissent in the North will be gaslit and repressed. Those who
organise to resist in the South will be met with violence and barbarism.
The history of modern Western civilisation has been one of savage
colonisation, dispossession, enslavement, and genocide, but this fact has
been obscured by recourse to high morality. This brutality characterised
the Euro-American colonisation of the “New World” from the period in which
European settlers killed over 55 million
<https://globalnews.ca/news/4924534/little-ice-age-death-55-million-indigenous-people-colonization-study/>
Indigenous people in North, Central and South America over a 100-year span,
to the “civilising period” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
during which the West carried out the most brutal and savage mutilation and
extermination campaigns across the world under the banner of modernity and
development – including within its own borders. Brutality has also
characterised the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, an era
marked by the wars waged by US imperialism, involving the brutalisation of
populations in Vietnam, Angola, Iraq and Afghanistan and US support for
tyrannical proxy leaders in places like Chile, Argentina, and Indonesia –
just to name a few. These massacres across the last several centuries are
not footnotes or case studies: entire life-worlds were exterminated for the
survival of the colonial order. In short, they are fundamental to
understanding the ecological crises we are experiencing today. They show us
that, though all civilisations throughout history have had their wars and
conflicts, only the white supremacist Euro-American empire, with its
racialising technologies, has so sharply perfected a social and ecological
infrastructure premised upon genocide and ecocide. While the massacres in
Gaza and Lebanon have shaken the sleeping conscience of the masses, they
are an unsurprising and highly consistent reflection of the West’s moral
character as demonstrated over the past 500 years.
*For the ruling class, climate change just means more bodies to sacrifice *

What then is new in our current conjuncture? What characterises this
renewed era of US imperialism that we have entered? The answer is the
abandonment of even the most modest pretences to a rules-based
international order: a situation in which the rules apply to everyone  *except
*the colonial powers that have inflicted 500 years of violence on the
planet and its people, and whose  *modus operandi* of fragmenting humanity
to extract labour and resources is based on the idea of white supremacy.
Historian Enzo Traverso argues that this state of exception for the
colonising powers is an  implicit admission of immorality
<https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-genocide-holocaust-memory-democracy>. It
implies the selective transgression of laws, in which all civil liberties
and freedoms, as well as basic rules of law and order, can be dismantled in
the name of safeguarding the future of the empire as it counteracts its own
decline.

The implications of this selective exercising of immorality is absolutely
terrifying in an era in which the earth’s life-support systems are at risk
of crumbling due to ecological collapse.  *And therein lies the key to
understanding eco-apartheid, as we witness the horrors unfold in Gaza.  *Long
gone is the era of Western claims to humanity, sustainability and civil
rights (if they were ever valid): instead we see an acknowledgement that
those rights only belong to a few, and that the “other” must be sacrificed
to save this dying order.

Gustavo Petro and others who have drawn parallels between the ongoing
genocide in Gaza and an unfolding global system of “eco-apartheid” are not
making a simplistic comparison. The summer of 2024 saw unprecedented global
heat records, crossing the 50°C mark in large parts of the Global South,
including Egypt and Mexico. Floods and fires have ravaged vast portions of
the world, including in the heart of the empire in the US South,
disproportionately harming those racialised, as well as white working
class, people whose lifetimes of labour have been exploited with little in
the way of compensation or safety nets. A world in which large amounts of
people are      displaced by climate change      is not a distant
hypothetical but is our “immediate future” (in the words of Gustavo Petro)
if fossil fuel production continues unabated, as per the wishes of the
Saudi energy minister, who has promised
<https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/02/21/every-molecule-of-hydrocarbon-will-come-out/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Saudi%20energy,and%20QatarEnergy%2C%20no%20doubt%20agree.>that
“every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out”. The scale of exodus of
people as a result of extreme heat, droughts, and famine has led some
scientists to raise the clarion call between social and ecological
breakdown (Xu et al., 2020). These climate-displaced people are already
being met with anti-immigration laws by an emboldened right-wing agenda
across the world, from Turkey to India, and from the Philippines to the
United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. These laws are
materially enacted via militarised borders that are designed to kill, let
drown, let starve, and then scapegoat migrants and refugees for all the
ills of capitalism.

The violence of this immediate future is already underway, and is
increasingly being legitimised by discourses that frame climate change as a
matter of national security. As Western nations continue to fortify their
borders against migrants and climate refugees, they simultaneously continue
to exceed their fair share of the carbon budget. If the global carbon
budget were to be divided equally among the global population, then the
United States, considering its historically high per capita emissions,
would have exceeded its fair share by a factor of 4 to 10 (Fanning and
Hickel, 2023). Meanwhile, the poor nations of the Global South will likely
never even reach 100% of their national carbon budgets. Yet it is upon
their bodies that the most barbaric impacts of climate change and
scarcity-imposed ecological policies will be felt.

No population, rich or poor, chooses refugeehood over sovereignty and
autonomy over their lands, their culture, and their way of knowing the
world. The pressure to leave one’s home due to war, forced dispossession
during agricultural land grabs or mining projects, or other climate-induced
crises is a condition forced upon those viewed by the colonial powers as
“surplus populations” of the world. They are trapped within sacrifice zones
and super-exploited as a reserve army labour (if they are lucky). But when
colonised nations form a front of anti-colonial resistance, when they
attempt to delink their economies from the imperialist world system, when
they express their right to resist the exploitation of their labour and
natural resources, the West “is ready to respond with death” as Gustavo
Petro stated. We see this in Palestine, across Abya Yala,  in Lebanon, in
Iran, and throughout the African continent, where national liberation
struggles are demonised and undermined. In the case of Palestine,
resistance has been met with more than a year of carpet-bombing.
*A nail in the coffin of Western “morality”*

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a
provisional ruling ordering Israel to take measures to “prevent acts of
genocide” after a robust case had been put forward by South Africa. Almost
one year on, the ruling has become a symbol of the subordination of all
institutions of multilateral governance to the interests and will of the
United States. It has demonstrated their abject failure as instruments of
global democracy. The United Nations’ position and efforts amidst the
genocide have been woefully insufficient at best. Fifty eight days after
the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza began, Antonio
Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN, invoked Article 99 – a tool that
has not been used since 1989 – to call a meeting of the Security Council
“to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”. Notably, Gutierres continued
to frame the situation as a humanitarian catastrophe, rather than a
deliberate genocide by a Western-backed occupying force against a native
population. Since October 2023, the United States has vetoed four ceasefire
resolutions at the UN security council. The first two of these actually
fell short of calling for a full ceasefire and simply called for pauses in
the fighting to deliver humanitarian aid. The ability of a single state,
due to its military and economic hegemony, to veto ceasefire resolutions
that aim to – at least symbolically – condemn an ongoing genocide
demonstrates clearly the utter impotence of the UN, and, by extension,
shows the categorical failure of multilateralism in a world system defined
by US-led imperialism.

Even starker is the way in which UN General Assembly Resolution No. 3103 of
1973, regarding people’s right to resist occupation and oppression, is
ignored and denied. After 76 years of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and
dehumanising and sustained conditions of violent apartheid, Palestinians
are expected to be docile and subservient in the face of their oppressors.
Similar to the expectation that those living in deprived ghettos and
subjected to religious or racialised pogroms, or those forced onto slave
ships or reservations, plantations, or concentration camps, should never
aspire to overcome the shackles of their oppression, Palestinians are
expected to surrender to the “*mission civilisatrice*” and accept their
fate as “human animal” barbarians
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/south-africa-appeals-to-the-international-court-of-justice-stop-israels-genocide-in-gaza/>.
In May 2024, the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court filed
applications for arrest warrants for both Hamas leaders and Israeli war
criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The equivalence inherent in
comparing Israeli colonial violence with Palestinian resistance to decades
of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, repeated bombings, land grabs, water
restrictions, and murders with impunity invokes a false sense that the law
is neutral. It completely masks the scale of continuous death and terror
that the Zionist state has imposed on Palestinians since – and even before
– 1948. And yet, even this *attempt *at false neutrality, with all its
unspeakable flaws, has failed to lead to the arrest of the Israeli war
criminals (as at the time of writing, the Court has not issued arrest
warrants for them).

The brutal slaughter of tens of thousands of people in the course of a
year, in what is the most televised and recorded genocide in human history,
is simply seen as the cost of doing business as regards maintaining the
terrorising regime of US and Western European-sponsored apartheid,
ecological devastation, and genocide, represented by the state of Israel.
The combined normalisation of genocide *and* the criminalisation of
protestors in universities and institutions around the world demanding
divestment from the genocidal war machine renders *null and void* any
redeeming effect of Western societies’ action on other moral and social
causes – whether relating to human rights, justice, feminism,
sustainability, or equality. In other words, it is impossible to make
claims regarding supporting diversity, equity or inclusion when you are
developing AI technology that enables snipers to more accurately target the
bodies of children and when you are shipping weapons to murder 100
Palestinians a day. The false conflation of criticism of a state’s policy
with criticism of a people or a religion, amplified by  the
instrumentalisation of the historic pain and trauma of Jewish people as a
result of the Western European Holocaust to permit genocide in Palestine,
are grotesque tactics of manipulation that justify the utterly demonic
pretense that murdering Palestinian people by the tens of thousands is
somehow self defence. Meanwhile, the white supremacists and far-right
fascists in Europe and North America who perpetuate acts of anti-Semitism
are having a field day, having found their perfect ambassador in the
Zionist project to shield them from accusations, while deflecting the blame
on Palestinians and Palestinian supporters.

The acceptance – and encouragement and support – of the present genocide in
Gaza crucially and painfully showcases how the untold pain and suffering
from bombing schools, hospitals, murdering children en masse, among other
depravities are viewed as badges of honour for Team America. The
implications are significant. If the depravity we are seeing in Gaza is
accepted – and even glorified, including by those who claim to be
“progressive”  – it is very unlikely that the much longer and slower
violence experienced by the global majority as a result of ecological
collapse and climate change will invoke any kind of sympathy from the
ruling class. Oil and gas companies, Big Tech companies, weapons
manufacturers, and real estate speculators stand to make windfall profits
from new claims and sales in and around the Gaza Strip. It is precisely
these interests that form part of the backbone of a global economy that is
trashing the planet to sell the spoils to the highest bidder. In this
context, the refusal of Western countries to accept the ICJ’s ruling on the
risk of genocide in Gaza demonstrates that nothing will stand in the way of
profit and domination – certainly not human rights, ecological breakdown
and climate catastrophe.

Gaza has therefore driven home the eternal truth that international law and
Western morality can never be called upon to relieve our crises –political,
socio-economic or ecological. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), its Conference of the Parties (COPs), and agreements advanced by
the major global economies, have long been framed as the sole legitimate
avenues for addressing climate change at a global level. But the era of
Western claims to democracy, multilateralism and international
collaboration is over: their complete failure to halt the slaughter of the
Palestinian people, and to make crucial links between genocide and ecocide,
have terminated it. The world is bearing witness to the myth of an
international rules-based order going down in flames, eradicated by
Israel’s destruction of Gaza and in the face of the Palestinian people’s
insistence on their own humanity.
*The settler future of eco-apartheid *

The annihilation of the population of the Gaza Strip as the banal backdrop
to business-as-usual productivity and vacation plans for North Americans,
Western Europeans, those in Gulf countries, and others who profit from the
Euro-American imperial order offers a taste of what is to come in a
situation of global ecological breakdown. We have already seen this deeply
blasé attitude during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, when millions of
poor and racialised people were deliberately put in harm’s way both
internally in Western countries and in the Global South to provide the
essential services for white and white-adjacent middle classes and elites
in order to maintain their comfortable lifestyles and to provide them with
their dream vacations in the post-pandemic period. The planet is reeling
from the impacts of the ever-accelerating global orchestration of resource
extraction and labour exploitation, aligned to lightning-speed computer
clicks, linked to machine learning that increasingly dictates global supply
chains. The Global Circularity Report 2024 highlights
<https://admin.circl.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CGR-Global-2024-Report.pdf>that
between 2016 and 2021 alone, the global economy consumed 582 billion tonnes
of materials,  roughly 75% of all the materials it had consumed in the *entire
*20th century (740 billion tonnes)! Rather than tempering this gargantuan
acceleration of material and energy use to halt ecological breakdown for
the benefit of humanity, the ruling classes are framing the consequences of
this completely untenable growth as multiplying “security threats” that
need managing, including movements of unskilled migrants and asylum seekers
and geopolitical invasions by the enemies of Western imperial order. They
will do anything to funnel this enormous acceleration of material
consumption to themselves at all costs.

In recent years, climate scientists have increasingly made reference to the
consolidation of *polycrisis* – a conjuncture of economic and
socioecological contradictions that converge and are difficult to
disentangle.  The polycrisis is being framed by the ruling class as a
security risk, in which the various threats that disrupt the status quo,
and upon which financial growth forecasts rest, are mutually amplifying
each other. Together, threats that are often understood as being “external”
to economic activity, or unintended negative consequences of growth – such
as the over-exploitation of soils and underground aquifers, extreme income
inequality, zoonotic spillovers leading to pandemics, rising sea levels,
and worsening droughts, floods and fires – are at risk of disrupting the
uninterrupted operation of business-as-usual. Yet, these consequences are
never perceived as warning signs about the system itself. Instead, they are
only viewed as threats to be managed by a political and economic order that
has zero intention of modifying course or adequately responding to its own
contradictions. These include runaway climate change associated with the
illusion that growth can be decoupled from environmental impact on a global
scale, permanently rising costs of living, and an emboldened far-right.

Yet global ecological breakdown – ranging from a sixth mass extinction to
the melting of the Arctic permafrost, to the depletion of soil organic
matter that is crucial for food production, to the enormous changes in
ocean temperature and acidity, and of course climate change on a scale that
previously took more than a million years occurring in just a half-century
– all reflect the culmination of five centuries of funnelling resources and
exploiting labour to benefit an elite few. This ecological fallout is what
scholar Farhana Sultana has termed “climate coloniality” (Sultana, 2022).
If we can imagine 500 years of colonial conquest sucking out the vitality
from exploited human bodies for labour and from the land as extractable
resources that are transferred to a privileged few, leaving only barren
land, bones, and limbs strewn across the generated wastelands, we might
imagine climate change as an ultra-concentrated raining down in geologic
time (or perhaps vomiting up) of these consequences, burning, flooding and
suffocating those very lands and those people whose vitality was initially
sucked up by this process.

While it might appear that the so-called “progressive” elite within the
ruling class is at odds with an emboldened far-right on how to manage this
vomitous rainfall of polycrises, the two are much closer in attitudes and
approach than they might appear to be. The ruling class defends the
interests of capital and settler colonialism, regardless of whether the
outcome is authoritarian fascist or feel-good and fuzzy branded fascism. It
doesn’t care. From the perspective of sustaining the structure of the US
imperialist order, centre-moderate liberals and the far-right alike have
systematically dismantled democratic decision-making and planning through
financialisation, fuelled global militarism and war-mongering, and
empowered sociopathic billionaires to run society. They differ only in the
political branding or packaging they sell to the public through the circus
of electoral politics. The loss of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in
the US election is the outcome of a smug and decrepit liberal order that
lauds having a “lethal” military force, incarcerating black and immigrant
children, and telling people to just accept the equivalent of mindfulness
sessions as they are robbed of affordable food and housing in a world of
ecological collapse- *all *while claiming to be the morally upstanding
murderer of Palestinian children. The hypocrisy has ultimately become too
much to stomach.

Both centrists and the far-right  promise populations the ability to avoid
the worst of the impacts they have created, as perpetrators and progeny of
the civilisational project that has created volumes of unspeakable
violence. Crucially, though, these promises are actually assured only for
the elite – regardless of the party in question. To ensure that the public
goes along with the idea that benefits will be for all citizens, they are
told that they need to accept certain sacrifices – including the removal of
civil liberties, shipping migrants to other countries, drilling for more
oil, controlling women’s bodies, price gauging of food, inflated real
estate costs, and accumulating debt to support commodity futures and other
forms of speculation (that generate further rounds of debt). In contrast,
the very wealthy experience none of these sacrifices.

For the ruling class, renewable energy is an opportunity to sustain their
primary business operations. They continuously convince the public that new
energy solutions are welcome, because they provide a kind of niche top-up
to ever-expanding oil and gas extraction and because they create new
marketable goods and services (i.e. false climate solutions) like climate
resilience bonds, carbon offsets, and geoengineering technologies.
Enormously water and energy-intensive machine learning is given *carte
blanche* in the name of economic efficiency, despite its existential risks
to the last lifelines of democracy, human rights, and life-support systems.
Similarly, the public has to accept that billions of dollars of investment
in militarisation is needed to “counter terrorism”, while private security
and more funds to the police are needed to “remove criminal agents” – a
category which can be extended to anyone opposed to the murder of surplus
populations and who stands in the way of eco-tourism resorts, international
airports, and waterfront property.

One of the most perverse responses to the polycrises facing the planet is
the intersection between the “green” and “sustainability” discourse and the
expansion of settler colonial and resource imperialism around the world.
By window-dressing the genocidal erasure of populations through, for
example, new solar panels, eco-tourism resorts that allow visitors to get
closer to wildlife, wind turbines, and “climate-smart” buildings (which are
essentially surveillance experiments), those with the blood of empire on
their hands get to present themselves as lovers and protectors of the
natural world. In actual fact, their sanitised “ecologies” are real
aspirations – it is just that they are not meant for ordinary people.
Indeed, ordinary people are to be forcibly removed, left to deal with
increasingly ferocious hurricanes, excruciating droughts and crop failures,
burned up in wildfires (just as the children of Gaza are burned to death by
Israel), or made to work outside in temperatures rarely seen on this planet
(among other forms of torture). In short, they are discardable, burnable,
drown-able, and bomb-able – whether resulting from climate change or white
phosphorus munitions – as part of the process of erasing populations to
make way for “green” and “climate-smart” real estate or for other
speculative land grabs.

Sanitised “ecologies” that discard unwanted people and nature are nothing
new. Heavily fortified white spaces in cities across the United States were
built on the backs of black, brown, and Indigenous urban labour, while
systematically denying those labourers a living wage, a say in public
affairs, and control of land. As black abolitionist scholars Ashanté Reese
and Symone Johnson write, the resources that could have provided public
services, decent schools, food, transport, and housing for these people
were re-routed to inflated police budgets and prisons institutionally
designed to surveil and oppress black bodies (Reese and Johnson, 2022).
Elsewhere, as The Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native
activists, educators, students, and community organisers describes, whole
countries, like so-called Canada, were brought into being by invading and
occupying the land of Indigenous nations, who were then forced to give up
their languages and knowledges through brutal residential schooling, until
the racialised “Indian” in them was erased and made palatable to the
Euro-American coloniser  – with disastrous effects (The Red Nation, 2021).
Apartheid, in the United States, South Africa, Israel, and elsewhere,
created and continues to entrench a legalised institutional order of
segregation that privilege certain people, based on racial or other ethnic
and religious lines of perceived purity, over others – who were
deliberately subjected to physical and psychological oppression, violation,
and exploitation.

As political ecologist Kai Heron writes, eco-apartheid makes it permissible
for certain people to die  “so that capitalism may live.”

*Eco-apartheid*  leverages imaginaries like “sustainability” and
“eco-friendliness” to buttress the future of a minority, while
institutionalising a legal, political, and economic structure built around
the idea of “national security”. It does this in the face of the collapse
of life-support systems on earth, with the aim of deliberately casting out
unwanted people and nature, or putting them directly in harm’s way. As
political ecologist Kai Heron writes, eco-apartheid makes it permissible
for certain people to die  “so that capitalism may live” (Heron, 2024).  It
feigns innocence by taking actions that are discursively framed as
“difficult decisions” that need to be taken in order to secure society from
threats that are of its own making.

Eco-apartheid mimics the enclosure of unwanted people through ghettos,
townships, plantation plots, or reservations that reflect the legacies of
colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide of Indigenous peoples.
However, what is specific about eco-apartheid is that it leverages
imaginaries of “nature” – like conservation, tree planting, solar and wind
energy, and electrification – as status symbols to funnel the remaining
food, water, transport, and other resources to a few, while depending on
climate and ecological disasters and war to manage surplus populations.
Together, this form of apartheid, which separates the ruling class who live
in elite enclaves from the vast majority of the population, in the face of
increasing climate dislocations, is framed in terms of national security
interests – it is said to be in “everyone’s best interests.” Gaza, as a
site of anti-colonial struggle that has ruptured and exposed the enduring
violence of racial capitalism, brings into sharp relief the extent to which
so-called progressives in the West who espouse concepts like equity, human
rights, sustainability, and diversity, normalise mass slaughter when the
systems that uphold their privileges are at risk. There is no limit to the
kinds of violence that are possible when language and cultural moves to
innocence fail to secure strategic geopolitical interests.
*Greenwashing, gaslighting, and repression *

As new forms of class fragmentation separate the worthy from the unworthy,
middle class people will need to obtain sufficient access to capital (both
financial and social) to avoid falling into the category of disposable: for
example, white working class workers, and especially brown and black
migrant workers, whose main “value” for capital is the cheapness of their
labour. In a world of growing inequality and ecological fallout,
maintaining the status quo will require ever more fantastical illusions of
“sustainability”, to justify the genocide-ecocide nexus. These illusions
will continue to maintain “peace of mind” for those living in
“climate-resilient” condos in luxury zones, characterised by lush greenery,
retail and commerce establishments, and 24-hour private security. The gap
between these fantastical dystopias of “sustainable” lifestyles and the
miserable lived experience of the vast majority of humanity will require
absurd levels of myth-making about the planet we all live on.

The upcoming host of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, for instance, is allowing
delegations and the private sector to tour its “liberated” territory in the
recently ethnically-cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh region for new speculative
renewable energy projects. It is an exemplar <https://cop29info.com/>of the
ecocide-genocide nexus that is unfolding, in which “green” and
environmental discourse is co-opted from the bodies of undesirable people
and their natural environments viewed as unsuitable for capital investment
in (greenwashed) oil and gas exploration. If the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) can be met by ethnic cleansing compensated by
attractive investments of solar panel farms and eco-tourism resorts, there
is something rotten at the core of what sustainability has come to mean.

In an eco-apartheid future, the notions of “national security” and “climate
emergency” will be deployed to justify a race to the bottom.

Another example of these absurd myths of sustainability is Netanyahu’s
vision <https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-799756> for Gaza
laid out in a 3-step plan to be achieved by year 2035. The plan aims to
“green” death and destruction with what Ognian Kassabov calls
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/7/28/gaza-is-the-fate-of-humanity>an
“urban dystopia built on mass graves”: a futuristic free-trade zone with
public relations focusing on sustainability and modern civilisation. As
upwards of 1 billion people face climate disaster, famine, rising storms
and deadly heat waves, making vast areas of the planet unliveable, such
projects, marked by gross negligence as regards the rest of humanity, as
well as glaring contradictions, will continue to trample the earth to dust
with complete impunity. With all possibilities for aspiration and social
mobility defunct, these dystopias built on mass graves will continue to be
violently defended, with militarised border walls that serve to fence off
the unwanted and preserve the interests of the ultra-wealthy. The ruling
class do not believe that their charade of maintaining and growing their
power amidst ecological collapse is going to end anytime soon. Their aim is
maximising profits even as the planet burns. But in a context of declining
birth rates, increased migration, and serious climatic effects that are
creating chokepoints in supply chains, they remain anxious about certain
wild cards: increasing labour shortages, declining labour productivity, and
the closure of avenues for investing their liquid capital. They are
compensating by rushing to grab vast areas of potential agricultural land,
mineral deposits, fossil fuels, and other so-called critical resources. As
soils are eroded, prime agricultural land is destroyed in fires and floods,
and populations are displaced by war and climate disasters, new rounds of
resource imperialism await. The ruling classes need “excuses” to justify
these resource incursions. Such excuses are frequently found in
geopolitical narratives of security – security against those who resist the
continuous incursions – and in strategic normalisation, in which “peace” is
defined as obedience to capital. The Arab Gulf States provide an example of
this, in their relationship with Israel. Thus, in an eco-apartheid future,
the notions of “national security” and “climate emergency” will be deployed
to justify a race to the bottom, in a mad dash to accumulate geopolitical
power through the extraction of “green” minerals for low-carbon
technologies.

One casualty of this deployment of national security threats will be what
is left of democratic spaces in society. As the unwanted (asylum seekers,
Indigenous peoples, pastoralist communities, smallholder farmers,
forest-dwelling communities, and working class people in their billions)
are ghettoised, bussed away, or simply murdered, those still left to
criticise this violent spectacle will also be treated as a security risk.
And as they continue to protest, the spaces for dissent will be sanitised
through “inclusive dialogues” that are blind to the power dynamics between
oppressor and oppressed. The perpetrators of crimes will continue to be
cast as victims, or at best “stakeholders.”

The second Nakba we are witnessing in Gaza demonstrates just how extreme
gaslighting can be: journalists and human rights defenders who
painstakingly document the unthinkable violence taking place are either
disregarded by the ruling classes, or blamed as part of the problem, and
even killed. The strategy is to “shoot the messenger.” Hundreds of
thousands of ordinary citizens who stand up against Israel’s blatant
disregard for international law and order are rebranded as anti-nationals
or terrorists, and as creating “unsafe” environments on campuses, while
their administrations continue to invest in murdering innocent people and
hiring private security guards to wield batons and target students with
tear gas. In the eco-apartheid world in the making, “freedom of speech” is
only reserved for those who defend the empire, not for those who voice
their dissent against it.

In short, the eco-apartheid world is one that has no room for morality. It
involves grotesque justifications for the dehumanisation of vast portions
of humanity so that the ruling classes can proclaim they are serving the
public interest by defending against national security threats they are
wholly responsible for generating. Security and the creation of public
“safe spaces” are the excuses used to justify their horrendous crimes while
they double down to ensure the world is liveable only for a privileged
minority.
*Ecological strategy in an eco-apartheid world*

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.

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
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/30/richard-seymour-on-far-right-environmental-crisis-disaster-nationalism>
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
<https://jacobin.com/2024/03/israel-afforestation-jnf-naqab-displacement>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
<https://ejatlas.org/print/greenwashing-by-the-jewish-national-fund-and-trees-as-a-weapon-of-dispossession-israel>
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
<https://www.972mag.com/israeli-right-palestinian-citizens/> 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
<https://www.e-ir.info/2022/04/24/decolonising-politics-and-constructing-worlds-in-the-everyday-through-zapatista-autonomy/>
.

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.

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
<https://mronline.org/2023/08/26/speech-imperialism-is-the-arsonist-of-our-forests-and-savannas-thomas-sankara-february-5-1986/>
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
<https://grijalva.house.gov/tribes-face-an-uphill-battle-to-defend-their-sacred-land-against-lithium-mining/>
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
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
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.
------------------------------
*References*

Amin, S. (2017). Contemporary imperialism. In Mapping a New World Order
(pp. 181-195). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Crawford, N.C. (2022). *The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the
Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions*. The MIT Press.

Fanning, A.L., and Hickel, J. (2023). Compensation for atmospheric
appropriation. *Nature Sustainability* 6: 1077-1086.

Heron, K. (2024). Capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid. *Geoforum *153:
103874.

Kadri, A. (2023). The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of
Systemic Destruction, Volume 3, Brill.

Longo, F. (2023). Decolonizing Conservation. In: Decolonizing Conservation:
Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in
Common. A Dawson, F. Longo, and Survival International (Eds.) Common
Notions.

Reese, A.M., and Johnson, S.A. (2022). We All We Got: Urban Black Ecologies
of Care and Mutual Aid.  *Environment and Society: Advances in Research*
13: 27-42.

Seymour, R. (2024). *Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal
Civilization*. Verso, London.

Stennett, L. (2020). An exploration of agency within Maroon ecological
praxis: Unearthing the histories of Maroon ecology in Jamaica and Brazil
from 1630 to 1780. *Decolonial Subversions*: 99-119.

Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. *Political
Geography* 99: 102638.

Taher, T. (2024). Practicing wujud: A Constellation of sumud in the
Fragmented Palestinian Present. *Middle East Critique* 33(2): 263-281.

The Red Nation (2011). *The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth*.
Common Notions.

Whyte, K.P. (2020). Chapter 4: Against crisis epistemology. In: Handbook of
Critical Indigenous Studies (Eds: B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L.
Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, and S. Larkin). Routledge.

Xu, C., Kohler, T.A., Lenton, T.M., Svenning, J-C., and Scheffer, M.
(2020). “Future of the human climate niche.” *Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences* (PNAS) 117(21): 11350-11355.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20241117/cd46fca8/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 020424_Gaza_ZU_0031.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 976660 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20241117/cd46fca8/attachment-0001.jpg>