Global Climate Justice and Palestinian Liberation

At the COP 28 Climate Summit held in Dubai in December 2023, Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared: “Genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people are what await those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis…What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal for the future.”

He is right. The genocide in Gaza may be a harbinger of worse things to come if we don’t organise and fight back vigorously. The empire and its global ruling classes would be willing to sacrifice millions of Black and Brown bodies as well as White working-class people so they can continue accumulating capital, amassing wealth and maintaining their domination.

Shifting costs to nature

Capitalism has always been a system of unpaid costs. The costs are systematically externalised and shifted somewhere else: to women and carers in terms of social reproduction that is largely unpaid; from urban to rural areas; from North to South where sacrifice zones are created, a dynamic facilitated through dehumanisation, othering and racism; and externalising costs to nature and treating it for centuries as an entity to dominate and plunder, if not to commodify, and also considering it as a sink for waste. This has led to the ecological and climate crisis.

The impacts of the global climate crisis we are going through are differentiated along class, gender and racial lines, as well as between urban and rural areas, and Global North/imperial cores versus Global South/peripheries. They are also distinguishable along coloniser–colonised lines.

Palestinians and Israelis inhabit the same terrain but there is a huge disparity in impact and vulnerability because Israel settler–colonialism has grabbed, plundered and controlled most resources from land and water to energy and has developed, on the backs of Palestinians and with the active support of imperialist powers, the technology that will help to relieve some of the impacts of the climate crisis.

Global climate justice and Palestinian liberation

It may feel misplaced or even inappropriate to talk about climate and ecological issues in the context of genocide in Gaza, but I would argue that there are important intersections between the climate crisis and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. In fact, there will be no global climate justice without the liberation of Palestine: Palestinian liberation is also a struggle to save the earth and humanity. This is not mere sloganeering, as I explain in the paragraphs below.

First, Palestine today perfectly demonstrates the ugliness of the current system and brings together its deadly contradictions. It also shows the tendency of moving towards the use of outright cruel violence on a large scale. Gramsci once said: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Second, what is taking place today in Gaza is not just genocide. I am not sure we have the right terminology to describe all the destruction and death unleashed today on Palestinians. Notwithstanding this observation, what is also happening is ecocide or what some have described as “holocide,” which is the annihilation of an entire social and ecological fabric.

Third, the genocidal war in Gaza, together with other wars, also highlights the role of war and the military–industrial complex in exacerbating the ecological and climate crisis. The US army on its own is the single largest institutional emitter in the world, larger than entire Western countries such as Denmark or Portugal. In the first two months of the war in Gaza, Israel’s emissions were higher than the annual emissions of at least twenty countries. About half of these were due to weapons transportation by the US to Israel. The US is not only an active player in the genocide but also a significant contributor to the ecocide taking place in Palestine.

Fourth, and this is my main argument (based on the work of Adam Hanieh and Andreas Malm), we cannot dissociate the struggle against fossil capitalism and US-led imperialism from the struggle to liberate Palestine. Israel, as a Euro-American settler-colony in the Middle East, is an imperial advanced outpost. Alexander Haig, US Secretary of State under Richard Nixon once said it extremely bluntly: “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”

The Middle East and the global fossil regime

The importance of the Middle East in the global capitalist economy cannot be overstated. Today, not only does the region play a major role in mediating new global networks of trade, logistics, infrastructure and finance, it is also a key nodal point in the global fossil fuel regime and plays an integral role in keeping fossil capitalism intact through its oil and gas supplies. In fact, the region remains the central axis of world hydrocarbon markets, with a total share of global oil production standing at around 35% in 2022. Israel has also been seeking to play a role as an energy hub in the eastern Mediterranean (through newly discovered gas fields such as Tamar and Leviathan): an aspiration bolstered by the EU’s attempts to diversify its energy sources away from Russia in the context of the war in Ukraine. The genocide that Israel is carrying out was no obstacle when granting licences to various fossil fuel companies to explore for more gas in the first weeks of the war.

Two main pillars form the edifice that is US hegemony in the region today: Israel and the oil-rich Gulf monarchies. Israel, as the number one regional ally, plays a fundamental role in maintaining the domination of the US-led empire in the region (and beyond) as well as the empire’s control of the vast fossil fuel resources, mainly in the Gulf and Iraq. It is within this framework that we need to understand the efforts made by the US and its allies in politically and economically integrating Israel into the region from a dominant position: pioneering technology, weaponry and surveillance material but also water desalination, food production through agribusiness, energy, etc.

The normalisation deals between Israel and other Arab countries go back to the Camp David Accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt and to the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel in 1994. A second wave of normalisation, the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, took place in 2020 with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

Before the 7th October attacks, it was expected that Saudi Arabia and Israel, under the patronage of the US, would sign a similar deal cementing US imperial designs for the region. This would have liquidated, once and for all, the Palestinian cause. The Palestine liberation struggle is thus not merely a moral and human rights issue but is fundamentally and essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and global fossil capitalism. There will be no climate justice without the dismantling of the deeply racist Zionist settler colony of Israel and without the overthrow of the reactionary Arab regimes, chiefly the Gulf monarchies.

Palestine is a global front against colonialism, imperialism, fossil capitalism and White supremacy. It is incumbent on all of us from climate justice activists to anti-racist organisations and anti-imperialist agitators to actively support Palestinians in their liberation struggle and uphold their undeniable right to resist by any means necessary!

The task in front of us is very challenging but as Fanon once exhorted us to do, we must, out of relative obscurity, discover our mission, fulfil it, and be sure not to betray it.

Hamza Hamouchène, Transnational Institute, The Netherlands <hamza.hamouchene@gmail.com>

This is a lightly edited version of a speech that Hamza Hamouchène gave in a panel at the Black Lives Matter Liberation Festival, held on July 13, 2024 in London.