ECOCIDE IN PALESTINE RESOURCE GUIDE
Every Crisis is the Climate Crisis — Free Palestine
(by XR BOSTON volunteer sophia pinto thomas***This document is incomplete, and under constant revision. Readers are encouraged to dig deeper & learn more about this vital content)
Destruction in the Gaza Strip, after roughly 2 years of bombardment:
- 60,000+ known* deaths, experts estimate as many as 300,000 deaths
- 100% of hospitals & schools & universities destroyed
- Between 50-90% of all agricultural land, gardens, & tree cover destroyed
- 40+ million tons of debris, creating pollution and devastated infrastructure
- 300,000+ tons of carbon emissions, just between Oct 2023–Jan 2024
- The equivalent of 3 atomic bombs worth of artillery has been dropped on Gaza!
- Water sources, food production, vegetation, necessary infrastructure all severely damaged
- 150+ journalists & aid workers known to be killed.
- As of summer 2025, stage-four famine has broken out across the Gaza Strip.
More figures from Occupied Palestine
- some estimate that 1 million Palestinian olive trees have been killed in recent decades
- 100,000+ families in Palestine rely on olive trees for primary source of income.
- Late fall is the harvest season in Gaza. 40-50% of Palestinian agriculture is devoted to olive trees, which have major cultural symbolism; they represent ‘sumud’, or steadfastness & deep roots.
- At least 50% of agricultural land, gardens, & olive groves have been destroyed in Gaza
- In 1967, Military Order 158 made it so Palestinians could not build new water installations without a permit from the IOF. Today in the West Bank, ‘artificial shortage’ is created by lack of equitable access to water; Israeli settlers use 3x the amount of running water as Palestinians.
- after Oct 7, Israeli forces cut off running water (+ food) from Gaza Strip
- In 2024, the average Gazan used only 1.5L of water per day for all needs -- this is one 10th the international minimum of 15L/day. (CSIS - The Siege of Gaza’s Water )
Palestine is a fight for Environmental Justice & Humanitarian Rights
Environmental Justice: A social movement that fights for justice for all communities, regardless of class or color, to ensure fair treatment when it comes to infrastructure, land use, resource access, and environmental policy. Climate Justice: a type of environmental justice[1] that focuses on the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized or otherwise vulnerable populations. In a climate-just future, everyone has what they need --- access to resources, community resilience, health, safety & human rights. This also entails opposing colonialism, capitalism, & other ideologies that oppress people. Oppression creates an unequal, unsafe world, the antithesis of ecologically-sound justice.
“Climate justice means a fair system that stays within the boundaries of our planet and that we are committed to a fair world for all people.” — XR Netherlands
“If we believe in climate and ecological justice, we must seek justice in all forms.” — XR UK
Back in 2021, XR Boston issued an article stating:
“In the United States, the Biden administration is currently spending $1.3 billion more on funding the Israeli government and military than they are spending internationally to stop the Climate Crisis. They are using our tax dollars to fund violence instead of investing our money into national and international efforts to transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and urgently act on the biggest existential threat that humanity has ever faced.”
Social Justice = Climate Justice. A dominating culture of exploitation, division, and extraction have created climate change, and the pervasive social inequalities we face today. A climate-just world is one in which everyone has access to what they need — safety, resources, community, food and water, and humanitarian rights.
Humanitarian Rights include (but are not limited to):
- the right to safety, freedom, self-determination
- the right to fresh food, clean water, safe infrastructure
- the right to healthcare
- the right to education and employment
All of these factors are being attacked and diminished by the Israeli-led genocide.
Peace & Climate Justice become impossible when groups of people are being unfairly killed, marginalized, persecuted, destroyed.
Sources & Articles about Gaza:
Conflict and the Environment: The Tragic Example of Gaza | AJPH | Vol. 115 Issue 7
“They catalog devastation of the water supply, sanitation facilities, waste management, agricultural lands, and the electric power grid. The housing stock and other buildings have been destroyed, leaving an estimated 40 million tons of debris to clear. The conflict generates noise and air pollution and has contaminated the ground and the water supply with chemicals. The inhabitants of Gaza face inadequate amounts of food and water and the threat of infection from microbial contamination of what they eat and drink.”
Palestinian Environmental grassroots & Civil Society Organisations to COP29: - PIPD
‘Protect the climate for whom?’: Palestinians highlight Gaza at Cop29
The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth – Middle East Monitor (2024 book by Andreas Malm)
Israel hit Gaza with 3 times more firepower than Hiroshima nuke | Daily Sabah
Interwoven struggles: The green paradox meets the Palestine paradox: October 5 2023
Destruction of Palestine's olive trees & orchards, + more recent stats as of 2024
Palestine is a cause of human rights and climate justice
How Israel’s War on Gaza Is Fueling a Global Climate Disaster
The Olive Trees of Palestine - JSTOR Daily
Israel destroys Palestinian seed bank facilities in West Bank
These maps and images show what's left of Gaza, 1 year into the Israel-Hamas war - NPR
Environmental impacts of Israel's genocide against Gaza: Ecocide in Gaza: The environmental impact of Israel's war
Key Documents — Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
The Earthquake Environmental Justice Advocates Aren’t Talking About | Common Dreams
Destruction of Palestinian olive trees is a monstrous crime – The Ecologist.Org
Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World - positions politics, by Naomi Klein (essay from her book “On Fire”)
‘no Traces Of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide In Gaza 2023-2024 ← Forensic Architecture
Ecocide in Palestine & Worldwide - Slideshow Presentation – (slideshow created and used by XR Boston during various teach in’s. Available for public access and use, with permission)
What can we do? How can we fight for people, Palestine, and the planet at the same time?
- Remember: All our actions can help. We must continue to fight for a free Palestine and a healthy, livable, equitable planet.
- Set 5% or 3% or 10% of your income aside towards donating to Palestinian families, or other mutual aid opportunities. Donating helps!!
- Boycott and Divest – withhold your money & your labor, wherever possible. Investigate BDS!
- Continue to spread awareness about why Gaza is worth our attention
- this is a humanitarian, a political, and an environmental issue!
- Take the time to read and learn more, expanding awareness of these issues.
- Listen to Palestinian and indigenous and climate-vulnerable voices.
- Reduce your carbon emissions, however it makes sense for you — & hold the megarich polluters and complicit corporations accountable!
- For example, reduce food waste, & compost!: composting is proven to reduce household emissions and creates healthier soil, and is one of the easiest habits to implement at home.
We did not create these crises, but we are responsible for recognizing them and stopping them.
Be brave. You are not alone.
Further Reading:
- The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi
- Poetry by Mosab Abu Toha & Mahmoud Darwish
- Hope in the Dark (Third Edition, 2016), by Rebecca Solnit
- A History of Modern Palestine, by Ilan Pappe
- Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, by Nur Masalha
- The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth – Leftwingbooks
- On Fire, by Naomi Klein (2017)
- Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World - positions politics (pdf excerpt from Klein’s book)
- It’s Not that Radical: Climate Action to Transform the World, by Mikaela Loach
- Mikaela Loach is Reframing the Climate Crisis in New Book-Atmos (comprehensive interview of 26 year old activist)
- Orientalism, by Edward Said
- Said-Introduction and Chapter 1 of Orientalism by Edward Said
- The Question of Palestine, by Edward Said
- Women’s Political Activism in Palestine, Sophie Richter-Devroe
- Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, (Revised Edition 2022), by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnson
- Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, book by Nada Elia (Jan 2022)
- Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death & Ecocide, by Damien Short
- Twenty Enemies, extended essay about political organizing, by James Foreman
More Resources:
An Environmental Nakba: The Palestinian Environment Under Israeli Colonization • SftP Magazine
START HERE: The Palestine Timeline (1770–Present)
Talking about Palestine at Thanksgiving
- Gaza Soup Kitchen
- eSims for Gaza
- @leiaslegacy | Linktree
- Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights (BCPR) — NENJP - New England Network for Justice for Palestine
- The People's Arms Embargo
- People’s Solutions Lens – It Takes Roots
- BDS Movement
- Wear the Peace
Quotes about Hope:
Resilience and Hope Amidst Crisis: Stories from Gaza - ActionAid USA (personal stories)
“It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act...“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen, and in the spaciousness of that uncertainty is room to act. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” – Rebecca Solnit, writing in 2016
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function… One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Inside the word emergency is [the word] emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.” — Rebecca Solnit
“Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope, as an ontological need, dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness… [which] can become tragic despair. Hence the need for a kind of education in hope.” — Paolo Friere
“Utopia is on the horizon. When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.” — Eduardo Galeano
“I believe in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows.” — Henry David Thoreau