Partners in Crime: Ecocide and genocide in Palestine and beyond

Published 20 Oct 2026 by Tony Booth

JVL Environment Officer

Aerial drone footage taken during the ceasefire showing the scale of he destruction. (Credit tayifmukta, Shutterstock)

JVL Introduction

JVL’s Environment Officer, Tony Booth, gave this speech to the members’ meeting on October 18th. In this powerful presentation, he covers a number of crucial issues focusing mainly on how Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon constitute ecological as well as humanitarian disasters and on how clear the genocidal intent is and how disingenuous it is to deny that there is a genocide taking place.

This is not new and cannot be justified by any version of “self defence”. At the beginning of his talk he notes that “From the 1920s the combination of the colonial British Mandate rule and the work of the Jewish National Fund combined to change the nature of Palestinian land ownership and landscape. By the end of the Mandate in 1948, many millions of trees had been planted. These were overwhelmingly non-native species, such as Aleppo pines and Australian eucalyptus. They displaced native flora, reduced biodiversity, acidified soils and increased risks of wildfires. Subsequently forest planting was used to cover up Palestinian villages, depopulated during the Nakba, helping to erase the ecological memory of olive, fig, almond, carob and oak landscapes.” (my emph LL)

Tony has provided a number of helpful links to references within and at the end of the piece. The talk was recorded and a link will be added shortly.

In this short talk I will link two aspects of the destruction of Palestinian life: genocide and ecocide. They are connected in what has been called the genocide-ecocide nexus. Ecocide is commonly part of genocide and genocide is a form of ecocide. They have both been in action for more than a hundred years in historic Palestine.

Ecocide involves deliberate, widespread or long-term damage to the environment. Genocide as you will know, involves “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. It is a portmanteau term. It is constituted by many separate oppressive and brutal actions and interventions – land grabs, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, pogroms, massacres and so on, which accumulate to create genocide. The way colonial and Zionist ideologies produce the strands of genocide became evident to me, after listening to Martin Shaw’s excellent recent talk to JVL on genocide and genocide denial.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, the Palestinian medical and environmental scientist, who gave another excellent presentation to JVL a year ago, insists that ecocide and genocide are intrinsically connected. He sees the destruction of olive groves, the diversion of water, the poisoning of soil, the introduction of invasive species are used as weapons to make a land uninhabitable for its people.

From the 1920s the combination of the colonial British Mandate rule and the work of the Jewish National Fund combined to change the nature of Palestinian land ownership and landscape. By the end of the Mandate in 1948, many millions of trees had been planted. These were overwhelmingly non-native species, such as Aleppo pines and Australian eucalyptus. They displaced native flora, reduced biodiversity, acidified soils and increased risks of wildfires. Subsequently forest planting was used to cover up Palestinian villages, depopulated during the Nakba, helping to erase the ecological memory of olive, fig, almond, carob and oak landscapes.

Since 1967, approximately two and a half million trees, including one million olive trees, have been uprooted across the occupied Palestinian territories. Olive trees are a cultural and ecological symbol of Palestinian rootedness and continuity. It is food, income, shade, memory, inheritance and identity.

Today the combined ecocide and genocide is made crystal clear in Gaza through the air photography of a land laid waste. The United Nations Environmental Programme’s 2025 assessment described unprecedented environmental harm: polluted and severely limited freshwater, collapsed sewage treatment, contaminated coastal waters, destroyed vegetation, damaged soils, and tens of millions of tonnes of debris. Such infrastructure destruction creates burgeoning disease, early death and severely harms women’s reproductive health, a key feature of genocide.

Ecocide and genocide unconfined

Of course, the Israeli state and its military are not the only perpetrators of the ecocide-genocide nexus in Palestine. There are also the governments, corporations, and media institutions that provide the political cover, the weapons, and the narratives that make ecocide and genocide possible.

However, the effects of the destruction of nature and people cannot be confined to a single area or region. Ironically, Israel’s own water supply has been severely affected by its wrecking of Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure. A 100-kilometre rare algal bloom exacerbated by the nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, from thousands of tons of raw sewage pouring into the Gaza sea, spread northwards and caused the shut-down of five of Israel’s six major Mediterranean desalination plants.

The war on Gaza has been estimated to involve over 30 million tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, weapons development and use, and reconstruction. The Israeli military can be seen as a franchise of the US military, described in Abby Martin’s 2025 documentary as “the Earth’s greatest enemy”, with its 200 bases worldwide to Russia’s 10, and China’s 1. Its annual emissions are equivalent to those of 150 of the poorest countries. Emissions from the military, including from wars, remain uncounted in global targets for emissions reductions, making a mockery of international agreements.

The heartless racism involved in perpetrating genocide in Palestine is readily directed at others in other places. Nigel Farage has promised that any future Reform UK government would stop all asylum for five years whatever the level of need for sanctuary. Robert Kenrick has suggested that refugees in small boats could be shot at sea.

The brutal disregard for Palestinian lives is only one outcome of the hyper-capitalism of the 21^st Century, stripped of ethical constraint. It has brought much of life to the brink of extinction through its war on nature. It has given us the Capitalocene; the compressed geological period created by key operatives in oil corporations, petrostates, and their supporters and beneficiaries.

At CoP 28 the then Colombian president Gustavo Petro saw the mass killing in Gaza being repeated following the desperation induced by climate breakdown:

‘Genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the South because of the climate crisis. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.

And yet Palestine, reflected in the carrying of the Palestine flag, has become a symbol of resistance in brutally policed protests in France involving many young people demanding properly funded secondary education and a viable economic future.

Denial as part of genocide and ecocide

Genocide is aided by its denial. Denial is part of genocide. Sometimes it is called its last stage. Martin Shaw has said that any argument about whether or not genocide was happening in Palestine was settled by early 2025. After this point those who denied it were acting in bad faith, protecting Israel. In his talk to JVL he called 2026 “the year of defensive genocide denial”.

Bad faith actors amongst governments were also protecting themselves and their corporate allies from the requirement under the Genocide Convention to act preventatively, by ending arms sales, intelligence collaboration and trade arrangements and by introducing sanctions. The Dispatches programme, “Britain’s Gaza secrets exposed”, showed the tortuous lengths within the Foreign Office to provide the government with the answers they wanted so as avoid the necessity of action.

A group of us, Jews Against Genocide Denial, have been calling out prominent individuals and organisations for their denial of the genocide. These include the BBC and its journalists, the Chief Rabbi, Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Can anyone watch the film NAZA and still deny the genocide? NAZA – the number of civilians coded into the algorithm that directs how many civilians can be “acceptably” eradicated for one combatant – it can be hundreds. And we know from the film that there are often no combatants to justify the killing.

Denial is partner then to the crimes of both genocide and ecocide and works in similar ways for both. In Palestine, the deliberate targeting of nature, is disguised as a legal side effect of combat. Globally, the misinformation campaigns of the fossil fuel companies from the 1950s onwards are well known. The looming destruction wrought by the fossil fuel economy could and should have been prevented. Yet we watch on as our government gives the go-ahead for new oil extraction in the Falklands and we await the imminent decision on the oil and gas field of Rosebank and Jackdaw, which had been suspended until after the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

The compelling focus on genocide in Palestine can deflect attention from other genocides and the wider global crises that threaten life everywhere including the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. This region is warming almost two times faster than the global average, with increasingly severe heatwaves, droughts, dust storms, and flash floods. A focus on genocide can be part of ecocide denial and vice versa.

Concluding remark

Amidst all this gloom the final message remains the same as ever. Difficult as it seems we have to continue to amass support for those who are resisting ecocide and genocide in Gaza and around the world. We continue to march, and those who can engage in direct action. We scour our imaginations for new ways to protest. Finding new ways to combat denial has to be a key part of our strategies.