Hiya,
I should have made this month’s video a long time ago. As the anniversary of October 7th and the fallout that precipitated it draws closer, I felt it was high time to dive in and talk about Israel and Palestine from an ecological perspective. I originally held off on making a video about Palestinian liberation because I was hoping to make a longer video about settler-colonialism and ecocide as a whole, with both Palestine and the United States as the primary case studies. That video, however, just became too big in scope so I decided just to dive in and talk about the urgent realities of Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people, and leave the Indigenous struggles on Turtle Island (United States) for a future video where I could give it some breathing room. You can find the video on Palestine below, alongside three quotes and three sources I found illuminating during my research process.
Three Quotes:
“Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.
As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element.”
— Patrick Wolfe
“As a settler colony, Israel has been crucial to the maintenance of Western imperial interests – notably those of the US – in the Middle East. It has performed this role alongside the other major pillar of US control in the region: the oil-rich Gulf Arab monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia.”
— Transnational Institute
“An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equalled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza. If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverise the living quarters of Palestine by mobilising the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”
— Andreas Malm
Three Links:
Framing Palestine: Israel, the Gulf states, and American power in the Middle East (Transnational Institute)
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth (Andreas Malm)
‘Ecocide in Gaza’: does scale of environmental destruction amount to a war crime? (Guardian)
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Hope you have a great day,
Solidarity,
Charlie