The fallacy of adaptation and mitigation under Israel’s climate apartheid
Part I in a series on genocide, climate injustice, and eco-colonialism in Palestine
This is the first in my series on eco-colonialism and genocide in Palestine – you can read the introduction here. Thanks so much to Stephanie Noren, James Williams, Emily Pinckney, Brittney Miller, and Neiko Alvarado for your collaboration and invaluable feedback on this series. I wish we had been able to publish it where we originally wanted to, but either way, I feel honored to work and share space with you all. (That said, I have made some changes to this series since the folks I mentioned last saw it, so if there are any errors, I am responsible for them.)
To start, I want to make one thing clear: in talking about climate injustice in Palestine, I do not intend to argue that people should care about this genocide because it is worsening climate change for everyone else. People should care about this genocide because it is genocide, and because Palestinians deserve liberation, self-determination, and the right to return to their indigenous lands. But I do think that understanding further dimensions of this genocide, including its vast environmental injustices, are important in helping us fight it. And that includes looking at the dynamics built up over decades of Israeli occupation and slow-cooked genocide, even before Israel’s current escalation in genocidal violence towards Palestinians.
So to begin with, let’s talk about how climate change impacted Israel and Palestine before October 7, 2023.
Pass me this hazy bit of sky
hung
above a sea that’s been dead since forever,
though no one knew it.
Pass me this pit in the earth
from which the singing of a hopeless people rises.
from "Pass It" by Najwan Darwish
Translated from Arabic to English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation
Israel and occupied Palestine are in an intensely climate-vulnerable region that already experiences hot, dry summers and months without rainfall. These conditions are only likely to worsen as our climate changes, with temperatures expected to go up between 2.2 and 5.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and precipitation expected to decline 20% just by 2050. These precipitation changes can be volatile, leading to unexpected periods of flooding or drought. Israel and Palestine’s Mediterranean coastline also makes the region – and its fishing industry – vulnerable to sea level rise and ocean acidification.
A key factor of climate injustice is that climate impacts are experienced unequally. This is true for Israelis and Palestinians because, despite living in the same region, Palestinians lack vital resources, infrastructure, and sovereignty, a direct result of Israel’s colonization and apartheid. Per the United Nations Development Program:
“So pervasive are the effects of the Israeli occupation on the climate vulnerability of Palestinian communities that the occupation – in and of itself – is considered here a ‘risk’, alongside environmental risks such as sea-level rise and altered rainfall patterns.” (p. 18)
Palestinians in Gaza experience numerous different axes of vulnerability. An area almost exactly the size of my hometown of Seattle, Gaza is home to over 2.3 million people (compared to Seattle’s 750,000), making it one of the most densely populated places in the world. Even prior to October 7, 2023, 70% of present-day Gazans were from families who were originally refugees from other parts of Palestine prior to the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”). Israel has also maintained a land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza since 2005, restricting exports and movement of people in and out of Gaza. Due to this history and continued Israeli occupation, the unemployment rate in Gaza prior to October was 46%, and 53% of Gazans lived below the poverty line. Gaza’s population also skewed very young: before October 7, 47% of Gazans were under the age of 18.
In addition to the severe climate risk Palestine faces, Israel’s colonization diminishes the potential for climate adaptation by Palestinians. As Zena Agha wrote in a policy brief for Al-Shakaba in 2019:
“The restrictions imposed by the decades-long Israeli occupation are the greatest challenge Palestinians face, both economically (lack of free movement of goods and people) and politically (absence of Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty), destabilizing the already climate vulnerable population. The clearest path to resilience requires an immediate end to he occupation and the lifting of the siege in Gaza, as well as concerted efforts to integrate the [Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)] into the wider Palestinian body politic. The increasingly extremist position of the right-wing coalition in the Israeli Knesset make these suggestions unrealistic in the short term, particularly because the occupation is a financially profitable enterprise that allows Israel to dominate the OPT’s natural resources while destroying or preventing the construction of necessary Palestinian infrastructure.”
As with everything related to Israel’s colonization, these dynamics have only worsened exponentially since October 7.
Spotlight: Water and Climate Vulnerability
There are too many factors of climate vulnerability to go into them all, but I wanted to spotlight one here as an example of how Israel’s colonization results in a multiplier of climate vulnerability for Palestinians: lack of access to clean water for drinking, cleaning, sanitation, and agriculture. Under international law and the Oslo II agreements signed in 1995, Israel, as an occupying power of Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Golan Heights, is obligated to provide these jurisdictions with water. However, Israel has since reneged on its Oslo II commitments for allowing Palestinians direct access to the groundwater resources and the Jordan River.
The Israel Water Authority controls how much water can be pumped, and Palestinians cannot dig for new wells on their land without permission, or even collect rainwater. Palestinians must also purchase water from the Israeli Water Authority. Some Palestinian communities are not connected to any water infrastructure and have to travel miles to buy water. Meanwhile, prior to October 7, 96% of the water from Gaza’s only aquifer was unfit for consumption, so water is purchased and piped in from Israel, or must be desalinated at great expense.
As a result, occupied Palestine has some of the lowest per capita water availability in the world. And infuriatingly, Israeli households consumed three times the water that Palestinian households do; this number is even more appalling for Israel’s 600,000 illegal settlements, which use six times more water than the three million Palestinians in the West Bank.
And of course, since October 7, all water resources in Gaza are either shut down or severely limited during the current war on Gaza, playing a key part in the genocide.
Climate mitigation
There is a huge gap in emissions responsibility: the world’s biggest and richest economies have caused the lion’s share of emissions globally, while the impacts and harm are acutely experienced in poorer ones. Israel and Palestine demonstrate a textbook example of this issue. In 2021, Israel’s per capita carbon emissions from fossil fuels and industry were 6.1 metric tons per person. (This does not include military emissions, nor emissions from land use changes, both of which will be explored in future posts.)
Israel’s energy relies almost entirely on fossil fuels, and despite reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 and 2021, emissions rose significantly again in 2022. As such, Israel is not on track to meet its goal of 27% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (relative to a 2015 baseline). Current projections are that only 19% of Israel’s energy will come from renewables by 2030, instead of the official target of 30%. While Israel plans to address these gaps with carbon pricing, no policy has yet been implemented by the Israeli parliament.
Meanwhile, Palestine’s per capita carbon emissions in 2021 were 0.6 metric tons per person—meaning that the average Palestinian’s energy use leads to less than 10% of the carbon emissions of the average Israeli’s. Yet despite Palestine’s low share of the global climate burden, the Palestinian Authority (PA) became party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015 and was one of the first government bodies to ratify the Paris Agreement.
The PA’s most recent Nationally Determined Contributions, submitted to the UN in 2021, include two mitigation commitments: reducing 17.5% emissions by 2040 under status quo governance, or by 26.6% if they achieve independence and self-determination. This only highlights the fallacy in expecting Palestinians to mitigate and adapt to climate change under Israeli occupation without sovereignty over the land, especially given the current escalation in genocidal violence that Israel is reigning down not only on Gaza but on the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights.
Next week, I’ll look at energy colonization and the impacts of Israel’s fossil fuel industry on the region.
Mutual Aid Request
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Fatima Abdelhadi was born in war, and now her baby Tamim was born in another iteration of Israel’s war on Palestinians. She and her family, including her husband, two daughters, and newborn, are in danger and lack food, water, and milk. Please help them escape genocide.