The unholy trinity of apartheid, genocide, and ecocide in Palestine

Although many of the Palestinian Arabs living in Palestine sympathised with the plight of the European Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Russia in the first and second Aliyah, this sudden immigration resulted in lasting undue hardship on the country’s Arab population.

In an Amnesty International report the cruel system of domination upheld by the Israeli authorities in Palestine was declared an apartheid in 2022. This includes unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship.

Despite Palestine’s predominantly Semitic Arab (Muslim and Christian) population, Zionist movements have sought to “reclaim” Palestine as an ancestral Jewish Promise Land through destructive efforts.

As well as the physical razing of land in the occupied territory, this also includes denying the majority of Palestinians both citizenship and stateship since taking over the control of the population registry in 1967.

Checkpoints in Gaza manned by Israeli military impose spatial limitations through physical parameters as well as the literal “slowing down of Palestinian life”.

The tangibility of these points of impasse which, as Jasbir K. Puar writes, are implemented depending on “the mood of the soldiers” serves as a symbol of the precarity of Palestinian life under the oppression of the ongoing Israeli occupation.

It also represents the deprivation of the benefits awarded by  “time-space compression”, inversely withheld from the Palestinian population who are not only subject to totalitarian and draconian economic and temporal limitations, but also to “a neoliberal politics of exceptional responsibilization” for not being unable to contribute to the state from which they’re excluded.

This is, in every sense of the word, an apartheid regime.

As we’ve seen, and continue to see, in the horrific events taking place in Palestine, the plight of the Palestinian people has grown ever more desperate as entire civilisations are being destroyed in what has become the most documented genocide in history, according to Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour.

What remains by comparison relatively undocumented, then, is the mass ecocide committed by the Zionist established Jewish National Fund (JNF) throughout much of Palestine, both as part and in addition to this mass genocide.

This is evident in the razing of strawberry fields, olive trees and lemon trees by more than 80,000 tons of bombs dropped by Israel since October 7th 2023.

David R. Boyd, the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment, has also noted that Israel’s military operations have caused immense carbon pollution.

As a result, water, air and soil in Gaza has been contaminated with toxic substances, with nearly all drinking water in this part of Palestine now made unfit for human consumption.

Devastatingly, the situation is so dire that many civilians are still forced to risk collecting this water with no alternative.

The effects of Israel’s violatory use of banned munitions in the Gaza strip, such as white phosphorus, are likely to have lasting negative health impacts including cancer, blindness, and severe burns.

On both a humanitarian and an environmental level then, as Moayyad Bsharat, Director of Palestinian Agricultural Work Committees Union has noted, “these substances also poison the soil and the crops grown on it”.

This is an example of not only sinister, but plainly spiteful ecological warfare as Israeli militia continue to weaponise the environment itself by carrying out irreparable damage to the land they lay claim to – as well as to existing, necessary, infrastructure.

This ecocide exists perhaps more overtly in the ecological colonisation of large parts of Palestinian land, resulting in displacement and dispossession, and completely altering and erasing the local ecosystem and biome in the first place.

JNF does this largely through the organisation of annual tree planting ceremonies to promote “aforestation”, as well as by providing schools with cash boxes to fund this project. As a result, Israeli children and families are made complicit in this act of environmental terrorism.

Further, thanks to the denial of building permits to Palestinians, many are forced to build illegal homes which are subjected to repeated demolition. The unhoused people themselves suffer enforced dispossession and displacement.

The emptied sites are then considered “absentees” and repossessed by the Israeli state which transfers them to JNF for “aforestation.” For instance, the planting of the Yatir forest, which began in 1964, displaced communities of Palestinians from their homes to the town of Hura.

JNF is now the largest landowner in Palestine, whilst Palestinian identity – and the resources needed for this population’s survival – is being erased from the very landscape and ecosystem.

Of these displaced villages, 71 have been transformed into European-style tourist attractions, bringing in further funds for the JNF whilst preventing refugees from returning to their homes.

In parts of the Jerusalem forest, planted in villages such as Al-Qabo, Allar, Soba, and Ein Karem, demolished Palestinian homes can even be spotted amongst the Aleppo pines.

Other large areas have been turned into nature reserves or military firing zones, “Judaizing” sites in order to deprive Palestinian people of land on which they can and have lived.

In the 1950s the JNF planted large quantities of the Eucalyptus tree (known by Palestinians as the “Jewish” tree), in order to drain Lake Hula since they consume large amounts of water. Aleppo pines are also planted for this reason as well as to prevent the cultivation of more local varieties like the oak, carob, and strawberry tree.

However, Aleppo pines have been declared an invasive species by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel thanks to the danger they pose to biodiversity and their propensity to spread disease and wildfires.

Especially in the high densities they’re planted in monocultures – which far exceeds the historical range of the Aleppo pine – leaves that fall to the ground from these trees can stop other plants from growing because they’re too acidic. The highly flammable leaves’ chemical composition also causes the seeds released when heated to catch fire and help spread the blaze.

In 2010 the Carmel fire, which killed more than 40 people, reignited a new wave of criticism for the use of these trees in Israel’s “aforestation” efforts. As Yaakov Franco, a landscape legislation lawyer has commented, these pines are an invasive species with each tree acting “like a gallon of petrol” in a forest fire.

The JNF has denied criticisms, claiming instead that their choice of Aleppo pine is not only in terms of efficiency, but also reminds the organisation’s leaders “of their homelands in snowy Europe”.

Indeed, the Zionist movement which utilises tree planting as a way to make the country more acceptable to the “European Gaze,” the very Europe many Jewish people fled from during the first and second aliyah, is ironically undeniable.

The hypocrisy of the Israeli state which bombs – or else Europeanises – the land it claims as sacred, must be called out. These grave acts of inhumane injustice and ecological terrorism pollute the very air that Palestinians breathe.