Branching out: What do Israeli atrocities have to do with climate change?

For me as a researcher studying the Middle East’s environmental crisis, this year has been both confounding and clarifying. On one side, it’s become increasingly difficult to focus on anything but the Israeli onslaught that has raged for a year and finally reached us in Beirut last month. This speaks to a broader challenge: In a region plagued for so long by so much violence, problems like water scarcity and industrial pollution fall by the wayside, even as war makes them worse. A case in point: On September 17, I was moderating a panel in which Maya Gebeily noted that her team at Reuters has had zero bandwidth to cover environmental topics since October 7, 2023. A few minutes later, she dashed out of the Q&A session to take an urgent call: Thousands of booby-trapped pagers were exploding just a few kilometers away.

With time, though, I’ve grasped that Israeli atrocities are not a distraction from the climate crisis: They’re part of it. It’s not just that Israel is inflicting enormous, often intentional environmental harm, or that my government is spending our tax dollars supporting genocide rather than helping vulnerable Americans survive hurricanes made worse by our world-leading emissions. It’s that this is a war of colonization, enabled by countries—chiefly the US but also Germany—whose worldview is inseparable from our own colonial inheritance. And colonialism, along with its corollaries of military expansion and rapacious capitalism, is at the very heart of the climate crisis. (For more on this connection, check out Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.)

All of which is to say: This year has expanded my view of what it means to work on climate change and environmental degradation, particularly as an American in the Middle East. Along with my fieldwork within the region, I’ve been reading widely on the history of colonization, militarization, and racism. These further intersect with topics our team at Synaps is tackling, notably migration and economic exploitation. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be adapting my newsletter to reflect this more intersectional approach. I’ll keep exploring the Middle East’s environmental predicament, but I will also fold in analysis, fieldwork, and reading recommendations on these other themes.

Olive tree in Palestine. Hammam Fuad, via Unsplash.com.

For today, I’ve compiled my own analysis and some excellent books on a question that has been nagging me:

What explains the depth—indeed, the ferocity—of American support for Israel, even as the rest of the world increasingly calls out Israeli crimes for what they are?

Some explanations are obvious enough: War on Terror politics, a booming weapons trade, and aggressive Israeli lobbying, to name a few. But there are also deeper, more revealing aspects of this relationship. Historically, culturally, and psychologically, the US and Israel are tightly intertwined. That has little to do with religion, and everything to do with racism, colonization, and militarism. Take, for example, the following connections:

• Both societies cling to similar myths about our national origins: plucky, freedom-loving settlers forging a nation from wild, sparsely populated lands. We mostly downplay or justify the ethnic cleansing this entailed, although our own historians have thoroughly documented it. At my liberal California elementary school, we studied Native American history and celebrated “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” rather than Columbus Day; but I was an adult before I truly grasped the nature of our founding genocide.

• That genocide itself has deep parallels with Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians. The Israeli state and settlers, like European colonists in the Americas, have waged war not just against indigenous people but against the lands and livestock that rooted them: bison in the Americas, goats and olive groves in Palestine. Yet the Israeli state, like the American one, presents itself a champion of nature conservation; both, indeed, have invested massively in nature reserves, after emptying them of their original inhabitants. That is little comfort to the communities being uprooted, or whose lands are poisoned by white phosphorous supplied by the US and deployed by Israeli forces, or for that matter who point out that the US military is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

• These colonial echoes were not lost on our forebears. At the time of Israeli independence, both Israeli and American leaders drew explicit connections to the colonization of the Americas. The US was the first country to recognize the fledgling Israeli state—notwithstanding our leaders’ own antisemitism and refusal to accept Jewish refugees from the holocaust.

• Our historical mythology feeds a contemporary one. Americans and Israelis alike hold fast to our self-image as beacons of democracy and humanity, even as our actions render this notion grotesque. If anything, we cling to this story with greater ferocity the more obviously absurd it becomes. This is increasingly awkward, as the rest of the world sees us far more clearly than we see ourselves. This contradiction is a hallmark of colonial regimes, which often earnestly believe they are “civilizing” the natives by brutalizing them.

• The myth of democratic excellence is tightly linked to the myth of tech-savvy, freedom-loving capitalism. Israel’s “start-up nation” trope mirrors the American fetish for “up by our bootstraps” entrepreneurship. Both ignore the degree to which our wealth flows from violent dispossession and the maintenance of racialized underclasses. Proponents of this myth also get touchy if you point out how much of their own wealth flows from government handouts: Israel has long absorbed a constant spigot of American aid, while US corporations reap the benefits of a broken tax system and legalized corruption.

• US government largesse feeds into Israel’s booming industry of weapons, prisons, surveillance, and border security. That infrastructure of repression then bleeds back into the US: We send our police to train with the Israeli military and deploy Israeli-made tech to harden our southern border. We are, not coincidentally, two of the world’s most intensely militarized nations. Israeli society is organized around its army, with gun-toting teenagers visible anywhere you look. Most Americans, by contrast, have little interface with our gargantuan armed forces. What we do have is a globally unique culture of mass shootings, the world’s highest rate of civilian gun ownership, and an epidemic of police brutality. Both countries lean heavily on mass incarceration, which functions as a tool for subjugating Palestinians, Black Americans, and immigrants.

• This culture and infrastructure of violence is particularly troubling as our politics lurch toward authoritarianism. In the US, Trump obviously has a more dictatorial streak than his rivals. But Biden, Harris and co are chasing him in that direction: militarizing our borders, endorsing police violence against unarmed protesters, silencing internal opposition, and gaslighting voters who have the temerity to ask why so many of our tax dollars should be invested in killing children. On both the Israeli and American right, authoritarian impulses mingle with messianic religious politics. This is ironic, given that the same people insist they are waging war against Muslim fanatics who can’t be reasoned with.

There are, of course, important differences. One relates to our respective brands of racism. The US is a deeply racist society, and Trump has eroded the taboo on articulating that racism publicly. But that taboo still shapes much of our public discourse. If Trump dropped the N-word on television, he might not lose many voters, but he would certainly enrage his foes. In Israel, by contrast, it has become ordinary for civilians and politicians to endorse the killing of Palestinian children, and for soldiers to film themselves committing atrocities. It evokes the celebratory aura around public lynchings in the Jim Crow South, to which white families sometimes brought their children. Or to put it another way: In the US, police brutality against Black Americans has triggered a broad-based mass movement demanding police reform. In Israel, credible allegations of sexual torture by Israeli soldiers prompted an angry mob defending the alleged torturers.

This relates to a second distinction, which is at least as important—and, I hope, at least slightly hopeful. In Israel, we see a society that is profoundly divided on many fronts, yet broadly supportive of continued—or intensified—violence against Palestinians. If anything, the past year appears to have hardened that position. The US, by contrast, is in the midst of a serious reckoning. Although our leaders (and plenty of voters) still cling to a vision of America rooted in colonialism, militarism, and white supremacy, a growing swath of society now recognizes this vision for what it is—and rejects it accordingly. That awakening is slow, incomplete, and mostly not reflected in national politics. But it’s increasingly visible in the streets, on campuses, and beyond. So let’s hope that, if nothing else, our role in this ongoing genocide can at least help us begin to see clearly and, eventually, build something better.

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There’s a wealth of excellent scholarship and journalism on the topics covered above. But I’ve found a few books especially useful in linking between colonialism in Palestine and in the US:

• Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, and his newly released companion podcast.

• Irus Braverman’s Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel.

• Angela Davis’ Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.