Many in the international community are finally beginning to accept that the Earth’s ecosystem can no longer support the weight of military occupation. Most have come to this inevitable conclusion, clearly expressed in the environmental movement’s latest slogan “No Climate Justice on Occupied Lands,” in light of the horrors we have witnessed in Gaza since October 7.
Although the correlation between military occupation and climate sustainability is a recent discovery for those living in relative peace and security, people living under occupation, and thus under the constant threat of military violence, have always known that any guided missile strike or aerial bombardment campaign by an occupying army constitutes not only an attack on the targeted people, but also on the capacity of their territory to support life.
At a recent hearing on “State and Environmental Violence in West Papua” under the jurisdiction of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, for example, it was heard that Indonesia’s military occupation, lasting more than seven decades, has facilitated a “slow genocide” of the Papuan people, not only through political repression and violence, but also through the gradual decimation of the forest area – one of the largest and most biodiverse on the planet – that supports them.
West Papua is home to one of the world’s largest copper and gold mines, a major BP liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, and Indonesia’s fastest-growing palm oil and biofuel plantations. All of these industries leave ecological dead zones, and each is under military occupation.
At the PPT hearing, prominent Papuan lawyer Yan Christian Warinussy spoke about the link between human suffering in West Papua and the exploitation of the region’s natural resources. A week later, he was shot and injured by an unknown assailant. The PPT Secretariat noted that the attack came after the lawyer described “past and ongoing violence against the defenseless civilian population and the environment in the region.” What happened to Warinussy has once again reinforced the indivisibility of military occupation and environmental violence.
In total, the world’s militaries are responsible for nearly 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. Our colleagues at Queen Mary University of London recently concluded that emissions from the first 120 days of this latest wave of killings in Gaza were greater than the annual emissions of 26 countries alone; emissions from rebuilding Gaza will be greater than the annual emissions of more than 135 countries, putting them on a par with Sweden and Portugal.
But even these shocking statistics fail to adequately illuminate the profound connection between military violence and environmental violence. The impact of war and occupation on the climate is not just a side effect or an unfortunate consequence. We must not reduce our analysis of what is happening in Gaza, for example, to a dualism of consequences: the massacres on the one hand and the effects on the “environment” on the other. In reality, the impact on the population is inseparable from the impact on nature. The genocide in Gaza is also an ecocide – as is almost always the case with military campaigns.
During the Vietnam War, the use of toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange, was part of a deliberate strategy to eliminate agricultural production and force people off their lands and into “strategic hamlets.” Forests, used by the Viet Cong as cover, were also cut down by the U.S. military to reduce the population’s ability to resist. Peace activist and international lawyer Richard Falk coined the term “ecocide” to describe this phenomenon.
In different ways, this is what all military operations do: they tactically reduce or completely eliminate the ability of the “enemy” population to live sustainably and maintain its self-sufficiency in terms of water and food supplies.
Since 2014, Israeli bulldozers have been destroying Palestinian homes and other essential infrastructure, but they have also used chemical weapons: the Israeli army has sprayed herbicides, destroying swathes of arable land in Gaza. In other words, Gaza is subjected to a strategy of “ecocide” almost identical to that used in Vietnam since well before October 7.
For many years, the occupying military forces have been working to reduce, and eventually completely eliminate, the ability of the Palestinian population to live sustainably in Gaza. Since October 7, they have been waging a war to make Gaza completely unlivable.
According to the findings of Forensic Architecture researchers, at least 50% of Gaza’s agricultural land and orchards have been completely destroyed. Many ancient olive groves have also been destroyed. Crop fields have been uprooted with the help of tanks, tractors and other vehicles. Large-scale aerial bombardments have reduced greenhouse production facilities in the Gaza Strip to rubble. All this was not done by mistake, but as part of a deliberate attempt to render the land unusable.
The massive destruction of water and sanitation facilities and the ongoing threat of famine in the Gaza Strip are also not unintended consequences, but deliberate tactics of war. The Israeli military has used access to food and water as a weapon in its relentless assault on the people of Gaza. Of course, none of this is new to Palestinians in the region, or indeed to those in the West Bank. Israel has used these same tactics for many years to maintain its occupation, pressure Palestinians to leave their land, and expand its illegal settlement enterprise. Since October 7, it has only intensified its efforts. It is now moving with unprecedented urgency to eradicate what little capacity the occupied Palestinian territory has left to support Palestinian life.
Just as in the case of the occupation of Papua, environmental destruction is not an unintended side effect but a primary objective of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The immediate harm that military occupation inflicts on the affected population is never separated from the long-term damage it inflicts on the planet. That is why it would be a mistake to attempt to separate genocide from ecocide in Gaza, or anywhere else for that matter. Anyone who wishes to end human suffering today and prevent climate catastrophe in the future must oppose all wars of occupation and all forms of militarism that help fuel them.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
