On Earth Day, we mourn all that has been destroyed and lost in Palestine.
Whenever we talk about the climate crisis without addressing the root cause, well then you’re just being a liberal. You know, those liberal vegan women who claim to care about the planet by thrifting clothes and drinking from paper straws but never actually talk about the fact that capitalism is killing our planet? Those are the same people who used to idolize young Greta Thunberg because of her climate activism but suddenly never brought her up once she started talking about Palestine. Yeah those same fans who never once came into support of her when she was arrested (multiple times) for speaking against a genocide AND an ecocide. Recycle and plan trees in your neighborhoods all you want, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because Israel is decimating our planet to a degree that will take an immeasurable amount of time to fix at the rate that it is currently going at.
For the past 18 months, Israel has been orchestrating an ecocide on Gaza by wiping out farmland, polluting the environment, and producing millions of tonnes or debris. More than 70% of all of Gaza’s farmland has been damaged or destroyed not to mention the killing of more than 90% of all cattle as of only November, 2024. Carbon emissions I’m sure you can already predict are very high from the intense, non-stop, carpet bombing that Israel has been committing in Gaza for about a year and a half now. While I wasn’t able to find a recent analysis on how many tons of carbon emissions were caused by Israels bombs, maybe this will help you visualize it: more than 281,000 tons of carbon dioxide were released in only the first two months of the genocide. Additionally, water sources have been contaminated with debris, radioactive elements, and carcinogens.
To focus specifically on the effects the genocide has had on the Palestinian people for a moment, it is important to remember that not only are they being physically affected, but their history is being actively destroyed. To close up this article, let’s talk about olive trees. A prized plant in so many Palestinian families and a sacred symbol of Palestine has been a target of the Israeli military. An article from October, 2013 estimated over 800,000 olive trees in Palestine have been uprooted since 1967. With the usage of internationally banned and disgraced white phosphorous between October 8th, 2023, and April 22nd, 2024, 60,000 olive trees were burnt to the ground in Lebanon. There are numerous videos online recorded by native Palestinians of their occupiers burning down their trees right infant of them.
We won’t have an Earth Day anymore if Israel destroys the earth. Your climate activism means nothing if it doesn’t include Palestine because the Palestinian struggle is quite literally intertwined with the climate crisis.