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How Palestine’s climate apartheid is being depoliticised

By:   []

Date: 2022-02 

At the core of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is its theft of Palestinian natural resources, including land and water, which exacerbates the climate crisis. Palestine’s struggle is also a climate and environmental struggle and, for decades, Palestinian civil society organisations and their global partners have been fighting to achieve justice on these issues.Yet the climate crisis is progressing at a rate faster than many governing bodies around the world can handle and with Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestine, Palestinians are doubly unable to mitigate much of its effects.

But Palestine is unique for another reason. Its leadership, the Palestinian Authority (PA), has been complicit in obstructing real successes in climate and environmental justice.

That is, since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian struggle has been reduced to a state-building project that is doomed to fail so long as the status quo of military occupation and corrupt Palestinian leadership persist. Through its participation in the UN’s COP climate conferences and other international forums on climate change that promote collaboration between states, the PA continues to delink climate and environmental issues from Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, effectively depoliticising and normalising it.

True environmental justice, which would include restoring Palestinians’ rights to access to their natural resources by ending the Israeli occupation, is rarely addressed in these international forums and conventions. As a result, the fight for climate and environmental justice in Palestine continues to be funded by international donors who, along with the PA, seek to manage Israel’s climate apartheid rather than pushing Israel and its allies to end it.

Normalising Israel’s climate apartheid in Palestine

The framework of peacebuilding through negotiations, exercised and promoted by the Western world in mediation with Israel and the PA, is nothing more than a set of ‘colonial practices’ that benefit colonisers at the expense of the colonised. This framework has shaped initiatives and policies aimed at addressing climate crises in Palestine for decades. As a result, environmental and climate issues are continually disconnected from the political reality of military occupation, so the programs fail to disrupt Israel’s settler-colonial practices.

For example, donor-funded initiatives like EcoPeace and the Arava Institute have for years used slogans such as ‘the environment knows no borders’ and ‘bringing people together’ to promote collaboration between Israel and Palestine around climate and environmental justice. Palestinian environmental organisations and their allies have long criticised these initiatives for normalising and legitimising the Israeli occupation under the guise of sustainable development, trust-building and greening the environment. Fundamentally, these schemes serve to disregard what is clearly a situation of climate apartheid, and to promote the climate crisis as yet another arena where cooperation and dialogue are the answer instead of radical political change.

Technological fixes depoliticise apartheid

Many of these collaborative initiatives and donor-funded programs also promote the idea that climate-related issues can be solved with technology, without addressing the underlying political realities. The climate crisis, however, is not a natural phenomenon; it is human-made and compounded by political and economic decisions. In the case of Palestine, the effects of climate change are influenced and exacerbated by Israeli settler colonialism and theft of natural resources.

For example, rather than advocating for putting local, national and international pressure on Israel to commit to adhering to Palestinians’ water rights, the EU and other donors have emphasised the potential for technology to solve what they have framed as ‘water scarcity’ in Palestine. This donor-led development scheme obscures a fundamental political reality: ‘water scarcity’ in Palestine is linked to Israel’s military occupation and its theft of Palestinians’ natural resources, including water.
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