A call from Palestine to the global climate justice movements: Ending #GazaGenocide is a climate issue

First published at BDS Movement.

Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza have been enduring a horrific genocide. Israel’s pace of killing of Palestinians has had “few precedents in this century”. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened; hospitals targeted; 1.7 million have been displaced; and starvation has been used as a weapon of war. Instead of holding apartheid Israel accountable, the West has continued to arm it and provide political cover for its genocide. 

Israeli leaders have been vocal about their genocidal intent. At the onset of the genocidal war on Gaza, Israel’s minister of war declared that Palestinians in Gaza are “human animals and we will act accordingly”. Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza comes in the context of 75 years of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and settler-colonialism. Palestinians have endured decades of displacement, and denial of access to their land, livelihoods, and water resources. The vast majority of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip are refugees ethnically cleansed from their homes and denied their right of return.  Israel has rendered Gaza uninhabitable. Water from Gaza’s aquifer is unsuitable for human consumption, with Israel denying Palestinians access to potable alternatives. Even before the ongoing genocide, the 16-year-long siege has meant bare minimum access to food, fuel, construction material, or any essential supplies. Israel has carried out acts of herbicidal warfare- spraying toxic chemicals over Palestinian farms to destroy the crops.

Israel’s impunity for its crimes and genocide, its ongoing regime of settler-colonial apartheid and control of resources poses a serious threat to weaker nations and communities worldwide that in seeking liberation and justice dare to defy and resist systems of Western domination, oppression, and subjugation. 

It is crucial that we join hands with the climate justice movement to ensure that Israel’s regime of oppression does not become a model for a new world order of unmasked brutality and extreme violence. 

We cannot allow for our lands to be made uninhabitable, and for black, brown, and indigenous peoples to be made dispensable, dehumanized, displaced, and killed to serve the projects of colonial, racist, and capitalist interests. Not in Palestine. Not anywhere.  

Israeli companies like Mekorot, Netafim, Haifa Chemicals, Adama, and the racist and colonial Jewish National Fund (JNF) steal resources from Palestinians. This has been the case throughout historic Palestine since the onset of Israel’s settler colonial regime. Similarly, complicit international corporations, such as Siemens and Chevron, fuel the climate chaos and Israeli apartheid. 

The COP28 is slated to be yet another opportunity for Israel, the UAE and the West to greenwash their crimes against indigenous peoples and oppressed communities around the world. Palestinian civil society has collectively decided to boycott this year’s COP28. The UAE is not only one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers but maintains even throughout this brutal genocide a close military-security alliance with Israeli apartheid. It is a police state that is also responsible for horrific war crimes in Yemen and for racist and brutal treatment of migrant workers.

We call on people of conscience around the world to join us in buildings intersectional alliances to end the genocide in Gaza, to dismantle Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime, expose companies that greenwash Israeli crimes and impose false solutions to the climate crisis. 

Land, indigenous, and climate justice movements around the world have been mobilizing to end this genocide, linking their struggles with ours. Global grassroots struggles for indigenous land and resource rights, sustainability, and against the climate catastrophe brought on by corporate greed are intrinsically linked with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There can be no end to climate colonialism without an end to settler colonialism. There can be no climate justice without justice for Palestine. 

On December 9th, the day of action for climate justice, we call on land, indigenous and climate justice movements to raise their voices for Palestine.

• Join/organize actions, marches and sit-ins and call for an immediate permanent ceasefire, the end of the siege in Gaza and of Israel’s #GazaGenocide. Highlight that there is no Climate Justice under genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism.

• Endorse or initiate solidarity statements addressed to policymakers, demanding urgent action to enforce a ceasefire, lifting of the siege, and accountability for Israel’s genocide, apartheid and war crimes.

• Build and escalate intersectional boycott and divestment campaigns against complicit corporations that harm Palestinians, fuel Israeli apartheid and the climate crisis, and export false and exploitative solutions around the world.