Did you know that Israel was responsible for the climate crisis? In this article, sociologist Sylvaine Bulle describes the strange juxtaposition of anti-Zionism and political ecology by Andreas Malm, the charming intellectual of radical ecological criticism.
“The first thing we said in these early hours consisted not so much of words as of cries of jubilation. Those of us who have lived our lives with and through the question of Palestine could not react in any other way to the scenes of the resistance storming the Erez checkpoint: this maze of concrete towers and pens and surveillance systems, this consummate installation of guns and scans and cameras – certainly the most monstruous monument to the domination of another people I have ever been inside – all of a sudden in the hands of Palestinian fighters who had overpowered the occupation soldiers and torn down their flag. How could we not scream with astonishment and joy? Same with the scenes of Palestinians breaking through the fence and the wall and streaming into the lands from which they had been expelled[1]”.
These words, celebrating the destructive act of Hamas on October 7, 2023, are those of Andreas Malm, a researcher in human ecology at Lund University (Sweden). Andreas Malm, a Swedish citizen, is a favorite author of eco-Marxism and one of the most influential thinkers in political ecology. Let’s be clear: for anyone interested in environmental issues, Malm has become a must-read over the past decade. Malm is a rigorous researcher, one of the most visionary on climate change, one of the most creative, one of those who inspire the younger generation of activists, but also the not-so-young, often Marxist or revolutionary. In particular, he has helped to transform ecological thinking considerably because of his metahistorical and foundational approach to the global fossil economy; this sheds light on the economic responsibility of industries and empires in the destruction of environments[2]. Only, Malm, and a new generation of eco-activists with him, place “Israel”, in a dubious critical gesture, at the heart of climate science and environmentalist critique. In his books, and especially in his public statements after the October 7 massacre, Malm repeatedly describes Palestinians as double victims of the Hebrew state: on the one hand because of the occupation, on the other because of Israel’s role in the climate crisis. Why such sweeping generalizations from an otherwise fastidious researcher?
Making Israel the precursor model through which we can understand the global climate crisis allows Malm to present the fight against Israel as a fight against global warming.
That the author, a Marxian, belongs to the camp of anti-Zionism whose affects are well identified[3], seems obvious, since the critique of Israel is part of the critique of the hegemony of the global North. But by linking “Zionism” and “the environment” and making Palestine the laboratory of climate resistance, a new field emerges: that of what we might call green anti-Zionism. What was the discursive modality behind this evolution? Here, we look at the argumentation behind it, while wondering whether a certain activist-oriented movement in political ecology isn’t in the process of acclimatizing to the prevailing anti-Israelism. Indeed, we need to grasp the content of Israel’s inclusion within the environmental question, for far from being an isolated event, it is indicative of the powerful extension movements of “anti-Zionism” and its updated form based on renewed paths.
The contours of green anti-imperialism
To understand (green) anti-Zionism or green “campism”, we need to start briefly with political ecology. Andreas Malm’s recent key positions are revealing here. Unlike other Marxian currents in political ecology, and following in the footsteps of key historians[4], he accurately describes the responsibility of fossil capitalism as an instrument of accumulation and dispossession, and calls for its abolition as a force for the exploitation of wealth and human labor. Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of climate science, Malm is skeptical about the effectiveness of the politics of life, terrestrial habitability and alliances between humans and non-humans. He has little sympathy for proposals from the communalist, alternative and utopian spheres, and even less for the green transition as a means of limiting catastrophe. Consistently, he defends eco-Marxism and a war communism, if not an “ecological Leninism”[5] backed (vaguely) by a strong, if not authoritarian, state. Any struggle to stabilize the climate must have as its starting point the demolition of the fossil economy, and therefore resistance and action against it. This is the successful thesis of disarmament, also known as eco-sabotage, inscribed in the history of workers’ and people’s revolts, and revived in particular by Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire and in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century[6]. The meaning given to the gesture of disarmament is inverted here: it is the energy equipment that causes damage that must be deactivated by the militant act of sabotage, the latter being an act of resistance, which presupposes abandoning non-violence. This political proposition is the mode of action carried by young movements like Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective)[7] or Extinction-Rebellion (XR). It was experimented with in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes zad<footnote>Sylvaine Bulle: “Irréductibles. Les zones autonomes comme conquête écologique” (transl.: “Irreducibles. Autonomous zones as ecological conquest”) in Écologies. Le vivant et le social, la Découverte, 2023.</footnote> and especially in the rally against the Sainte-Soline mega-pond in western France, in March 2023, which was heavily repressed. How does Israel fit into this coherent reasoning?
A green anti-Zionism?
Malm, as a historian of the Anthropocene, has described the phases of fossil energy accumulation in his seminal work Fossil capital[8]. We can very briefly summarize his demonstration on the Middle East. Based on the coal industry developed in the 19th century, the British wanted to create a fossil empire on the land of the Arab and Ottoman Levant (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt) by relying on the Jews of Europe, who, as Europeans, would have been in symbiosis with the fossil empire. This is what they would have done by setting up extractionist industries, establishing a Jewish national home and encouraging Jews to leave, or, later still, by transporting the Jews who had escaped from Europe, using boats on a massive scale – and therefore energy-intensive means of transport. Not only was this project of British imperialist modernity one of the most polluting, but it was also diluted by the Zionist yishuv project, one serving the other and both using fossil fuels that are destroying the Mediterranean and beyond. Following in the footsteps of the British Empire, it is the State of Israel that would have contributed to American domination of the Middle East and unlimited access to oil in the Levant, just as it would also have accelerated ecocide through the construction of its settlements and national territory[9].
By linking “Zionism” and “the environment” and making Palestine the laboratory of climate resistance, a new field emerges: that of what we might call green anti-Zionism.
Here, unlike anti-Zionist doxa, the argument is not based on anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism (with Israel in the firing line), but on climate. Indeed, as Malm explained in 2017 in an article entitled: “The Walls of the Tank: On Palestinian Resistance”[10]: “the relationship between Palestine and climate change […] represents more than an allegory or analogy. Fossil fuels have been an integral part of the catastrophe from the very beginning”[11]. This is why dismantling the settlements would not be enough to stop environmental disasters. For Israel as a whole, as the place whose existence makes fossil fuel extraction possible, would be responsible for the climate crisis for the whole planet[12]. The inflection point in the race for fossil fuels is, according to Malm, the second Gaza Nakba – i.e. the actual Gaza war after October 7, 2023 – supported by the Global North, which follows on from the creation of Israel and as a continuation of the imperial project[13].
This is the central reasoning. But how does Malm demonstrate Israel’s specific responsibility for the destruction of the planet? Let’s admit that Israel has a questionable project, with the artificialization of its soils and the destruction of its biodiversity[14] as well as through the tapping of water resources. But Israel does not produce oil, unlike the Arab countries, which are hardly favorable, if not hostile. Yet, according to Malm, October 7 is the result of the trajectory of the climate crisis following that of Israel. This trajectory follows, according to him, the following curve: extraction of natural resources, dispossession of land, climate refugees. Climate change, he tells us, is forcing “ millions ” of people around the world ” to follow the Palestinian axis “. “The whole planet is becoming Palestine”, writes Malm in The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth.
Making Israel the precursor model through which to understand the global climate crisis allows Malm to present the fight against Israel as a fight against global warming. The author, a geographer by training, rarely refers to Israel in his history of the Anthropocene. He prefers the “Zionist entity” (and sometimes the Jewish people), made up of settlers. This, without ever acknowledging the existence of the many utopian Zionist movements that inspired social ecology[15]. This refusal to designate Israel as a state is part of a well-identified critical gesture in anti-Zionism, which consists in denying Jews the possibility of being embodied in a stabilized state-form, and in casting doubt on Israel’s mode of existence by treating it as an abstract entity. Moreover, this vague denomination of “Zionist entity” has the advantage of not having to mention the relationship to the post-48 territory and its material and environmental components, nor the social forms of the state, or the social itself.
A fight to avoid planetary destruction: the authentic Palestinian land versus the abstract Jewish entity
Why, then, does an author like Malm, a historical materialist theorist yet so rigorous in his reasoning, allow himself to ignore that the “Zionist entity” has a tangibility, reducing it to an abstraction characterized only by its ecocidal and genocidal nature? It’s easy to see how a state with abstract contours, superimposed on Palestinian territory by Western hegemony, can easily be blamed for all the world’s ills. In this case, it’s easy to conflate different categories of radical critique (anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and environmentalist) into a single Manichean logic. This is where Malm’s critique loses its ecological specificity – and relevance: it is diluted into an ideological amalgam at the same time as the Israeli state is diluted into the American fossil fuel lobby[16], blamed for regional destruction. Is it a coincidence, Malm asks, that the “genocide” in Gaza (with no mention of the October 7 massacres in Israel) is taking place at a time when the State of Israel is more deeply “integrated than ever into the primitive accumulation of fossil capital”, notably ” with the Abraham Accords designed to introduce Israeli capital into fossil fuels” and intended to normalize relations with Israel for the benefit of fossil resource expansion?
Palestine, fetishized and fantasized in this way, is the only bearer of emancipation; it is a concrete people destined to be à̀ again reunited with its original and authentic land, against this “foreign, dangerous and destructive force” that threatens the entire planet.
Similarly, green anti-Zionism simplistically attacks Israeli Promethean technology, which exerts, more than coal and fossil fuels, a genuine fascination on many essayists, of which Malm is one[17]. Malm details, for example, the post-October 7 “techno-genocide” (or ” high-tech genocide”) and the “Israeli killing machine”, committing mechanized and automated mass murder (through the use of artificial intelligence), combined with the power of oil. However, the author doesn’t really address the environmental cost of the Gaza war, which has been particularly devastating for biodiversity and living organisms, both north and south of Israel. This damage will have to be documented and repaired. This omission is self-explanatory: what matters above all to Malm, in order to unify the different poles of his Manichean critique, is to bring ecocide and genocide together; the destruction of Palestine and the Earth converging on polluted and poisoned soil[18] by Zionist appropriation in Gaza, where combustible waste and the corpses of the Empire’s victims are entangled.
The important thing for this form of green anti-Zionism is to make the “Zionist entity” – described as abstract, globalized and alienated by technology – an existential threat to the values of authenticity of which the Palestinians would be the exclusive bearers, due to their connection to the earth, the land and the manual gesture of subsistence[19]. Consequently, everything that is authentic is Palestinian. As Malm points out in his text The Walls of the Tank, the true state that endures, against all Nakbah and dispossession, is that of Palestine, the only true state of the true “ people ” of the region. Palestine, fetishized and fantasized in this way, is the only bearer of emancipation; it is a concrete people destined to be à̀ again reunited with its original and authentic land, against this “ foreign, dangerous and destructive force ” that threatens the entire planet. And conversely, true ecology can only be Palestinian. As a project, Malm proposes Palestine as the ultimate political hope against global planetary catastrophe. That’s why it must represent the spirit of emancipation against all global ecocides, from the destruction of the Amazon to mega-fires, and more. To adopt the Palestinian position is, in the final analysis, to choose nature as one’s last and most powerful ally “, writes the author in The Walls of the tank. Within this flawed analogy of achieving the climate revolution by liberating Gaza and the Territories, it is important that the Palestinians first realize their right to return by ridding themselves of an ecocidal and polluting Israel. On this condition, Palestine will become authentic again, and CO2 levels will fall back below those of the 1980s. Because ” from the river to the sea “, CO2 emissions must be eradicated. But what kind of emancipatory gesture can emerge from such a Manichean critique?
The rise to generality: the uprising of the earth and of Hamas
For many eco-marxists and ecological activists of the 2020s, the Palestinian resistance has become a model to follow for the defense of the planet[20]. But what kind of resistance is it? Should infrastructures be disarmed, as proposed by European activism, particularly in England and France? Malm has in mind rather the episodes of sabotage during the Arab revolts of 1936, with resistance fighters attacking oil pipelines from Iraq[21]. However, the author does not hesitate to explore more recent avenues, notably when he enthusiastically celebrates armed struggle and encourages climate change activists to take the methods of Hamas as an example. Before October 7, for example, he wrote in The Walls of the tanks: “How do we express our admiration for the heroes of the resistance in Gaza, headed by Mohammed Deif? How do we learn the lessons from the Palestinian resistance and apply it as a model on other fronts?”[22]. After October 7, he captures the robustness of Hamas from its army of kites launched at the Gaza wall, an action that had no precedent in Palestinian history. He gives his vision in The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth: “The resistance still stands (…) and that’s why I think we should say it loud: we stand with the resistance. (…) Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Mohammed Deif and Abu Obeida and their comrades-in-arms from Jihad, the DFLP and the PFLP are still in the tunnels, still dispatching one operation after another – and this is what makes it possible to live another day“.
To sum up, for Malm, there can be no emancipation on a dead planet, but there is hope for a green revolution today, with Hamas as its vector. In this way, the pro-Hamas author’s affections are focused on the heroic victory of Hamas, without it being conceivable for Malm to believe in a common, plural project to care for the land and, simultaneously, to care for democracy, in the presence of Israel and its state-form.
Within this flawed analogy of achieving the climate revolution by liberating Gaza and the Territories, it is important that the Palestinians first realize their right to return by ridding themselves of an ecocidal and polluting Israel. For “from the river to the sea”, CO2 emissions must be eradicated.
Finally, a question arises. When Malm and, beyond him, certain proponents of green anti-Zionism proclaim their love for Palestine and their hostility to Israel, what knowledge of the reality of the two societies (which they strive to construct in mirror image) do they claim? For it is pure abstract Manichaeism that seems to extend anti-Zionism to a new field: that of green anti-Zionism, since “the Palestinian struggle is an integral part of global ecological politics” in the 21st century. Of course, there’s no question here of celebrating a mirrored “green Zionism”, nor of ignoring regional environmental damage, the artificialisation of land and gigantic expenditure of natural resources in Israel, or the highly questionable geopolitical agreements on gas reserves in Mediterranean waters. But from the land of the Global North, where so many activists are focused on the Palestinian tragedy[23] no one seems prepared to acknowledge that Israeli society also produces critiques of these issues. And yet, to reopen the horizon of diplomacy of the living and the earth, we need to bring together a variety of actors, both Israelis and Palestinians. The situation calls for a plurality of languages and practices, from the most anarchist to the most reformist, in which “democracy” and “land” are not dissociated. This was the project of the anarchist socialist Gustav Landauer, celebrated today by activist ecologists.
Collapse is recourse: that’s what the visionary Malm, the dark angel of climatic history, seems to indicate. Like Walter Benjamin, from whom he borrowed references in The Progress of This Storm[24], he plunges us into the ruins of Western and Middle Eastern industrial history, to better point to the urgency of two situations, one climatic and the other political, which are stacked on top of each other and are equally destructive. But what Malm probably doesn’t realize is that, in thinking he’s looking at the last snatches of humanity from the Palestinian ruins, he’s plunging his readers into a simplistic, binary way of thinking that only accelerates the chaos and tragedy. The background to this accusatory but above all phantasmagorical catastrophism can no longer be ignored.
Sylvaine Bulle
Sylvaine Bulle is a sociologist. Her work focuses on contemporary emancipation movements linked to ecology, in France and Israel. She has recently published: Sociologie du conflit (with F. Tarragoni, 2021); Irréductibles. Enquête sur des milieux de vie (2020) and Sociologie de Jérusalem (2020).
In K., she has published: “Jewish anarchism and its contemporary ecological resurgences”.
Notes
| 1 | Lecture at the American University of Beirut on April 8, 2024. |
| 2 | Fossil capital : The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso 2016. |
| 3 | See for example very recently: Julia Christ, “Anti-Zionism: a realistic option?“ |
| 4 | For example: Timothy Mitchell: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press. 2002 |
| 5 | See interview for Permanent Revolution |
| 6 | Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, Verso Books, 2020. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, Verso Books, 2021. |
| 7 | Note that Les Soulèvements de la Terre in their very recent opus Premières secousses (First quakes) (Paris, La Fabrique, 2024) never explicitly mention Malm. They merely mention the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) as a pioneering collective actor in eco-sabotage against Zionism. In 1969, the PFLP launched a campaign to sabotage pipelines in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Following in Malm’s footsteps, Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprisings), on the other hand, approach pipelines as facilities embodying the links between the State of Israel, the United States and reactionary Arab regimes. Sabotage is therefore, in their eyes, a tool of Palestinian national liberation. |
| 8 | Fossil capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London,Verso,2016. A. Malm has announced a second volume on the fossil economy, notably. based on the Palestinian case as well as the book to be published by Verso in 2024, with Wim Carton :Overshoot :How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. |
| 9 | In his blog devoted to the destruction of Palestine after October 7, he returns at length to the history of the Jews in Palestine, including in the Bible. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth, Verso blog, April 8, 2024. |
| 10 | Andreas Malm, “The Walls of the Tank: On Palestinian Resistance”, Salvage, 4/2017 |
| 11 | This point was particularly made by Mathieu Bolton: Climate catastrophe, the “Zionist Entity” and “The German Guy”: An anatomy of the Malm-Jappe dispute” (in The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century, edited by David Hirsh, Routledge, 2023). Bolton was one of the first to point out Malm’s criticism of Israel and the Jews. Published in French in Lundi.am in December 2023 |
| 12 | ”We should first consider the role of the State of Israel in the current fossil fuel frenzy.” (For Malm, Israel is involved in gas extraction and export platforms in the Levant), in “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth”, blog April 2024. |
| 13 | Idem. |
| 14 | See for example Tamar Novick, Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, MIT Press, 2023. |
| 15 | See in particular Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, 1949, as well as Gustav Landauer, For socialism. See also Sylvaine Bulle, “Jewish anarchism and its contemporary ecological resurgence”, Revue K, 2023 |
| 16 | ”The Walls of the tank” and “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth”. |
| 17 | Gunther Anders denounced the danger of a strict fascination with Prometheus, if technology is not first seen as an instrument of socialization. See, his The Outdatedness of Human Beings: On the Soul in the Era of the Second Industrial Revolution, 1956. |
| 18 | This brings to mind the accusation made against Jews in the Middle Ages of poisoning wells, recalled by Karsenti et al., in: “Un génocide à Gaza? Réponse à Didier Fassin”, Revue A.O.C |
| 19 | Moishe Postone has shown well how a particular form of critique of capitalism, which he describes as “truncated”, targeted the abstract dimension of capital in the name of naturalized “concrete” values (the authenticity of the land or of ethnic/racial belonging, the manual gesture of the worker, are celebrated insofar as they are grasped as prior to and opposed to the abstract logic of capitalism). And Postone has demonstrated the intrinsic link between this truncated critique and antisemitism. See Moishe Postone, Critique du fétiche capital. Le capitalisme, l’antisémitisme et la gauche, PUF, 2013. |
| 20 | See Malm in his blog: When does the fightback begin, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5061-when-does-the-fightback-begin (April2021). |
| 21 | In How to Sabotage a Pipeline? |
| 22 | Mathew Bolton, ‘Climate catastrophe, the ‘Zionist Entity’ and ‘The German guy’: An anatomy of the Malm–Jappe dispute’, in The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century is about the rise of antizionism and antisemitism in the first two decades of the 21st century, Routledge, 2024 |
| 23 | Malm, for example, has been heavily involved in the pro-Palestinian struggle through the International Solidarity Movement for Palestine |
| 24 | AndreasMalm,The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, published 2017 by Verso Books. |
