Climate Emergency, Zionism, Judaism
JVL Introduction
In this article from September 2019 Robert Cohen explains why the Climate Emergency has made Zionism obsolete. Extreme temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and water shortages, and desertification will make Israel as inhospitable a place for Jews as for Palestinians over the course of the century.
So, Zionism as a response to antisemitism experienced in other countries asks Jews to jump from the “metaphorical frying-pan into the literal fire.” The present “climate apartheid” or “climate barbarism”, which allows Israelis to continue to flourish and victimises Palestinians will be replaced by a hostile environment for all.
Robert Cohen believes that there are answers to climate breakdown in the Torah. He draws on Lamentations and Deuteronomy to represent the way the injustices of our world are hastening ecological catastrophe.
Whether one is religious or not there is no arguing with the fundamental restructuring of our ethics, our societies and ourselves that are needed to reduce the impacts of environmental disintegration in ways that foreground justice for all.
This article will be one of a growing number on our website that draws attention to the ecological emergencies as part of the efforts of the JVL environmental network.
This article was originally published by Patheos on Sat 21 Sep 2019. Read the original here.
The Climate Emergency makes Zionism obsolete, but Judaism could help save the planet
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Read Exodus for another side to the Biblical Message. In that book of the bible God told Moses that the Israelites must exterminate the Canaanites.
Excellent. The fight against inequality is part of the battle to rescue our planet. Without our natural environment none of us will exist. To retreat into enclaves reserved for the rich will inevitably mean the mass of people will be left out of this process but, more than this, catestrophically abandons any pretence of unity in slowing down and adapting to climate change and therefore means inevitable failure.
Zionism is racism. Climate change affects everyone, but it can be mitigated in some areas (eg by diverting and monopolising water resources) and accentuated in adjacent areas (eg by water deprivation, destruction of traditional modes of farming and the concentration of population into small areas without green spaces). The Zionist project entails denying the former occupiers of the land the right to manage their own resources and frame their own response to changing climate conditions. Zionism is not a side issue rendered irrelevant by climate-change: it deliberately renders the Palestinian population living in Gaza and the West Bank vulnerable to the ravages of climate change and to health emergencies like covid and overcrowding and environmental pollution. Zionism, as practised by Israel since its inception, is evil, pure and simple: genocide by a thousand cuts.
Thank you to Robert Cohen for this incredibly moving piece. My emotions swayed from full on anger to tears, from hope to despair and back again.
For years now I have prayed to God, asking for him to do something to stop the Evilness of the Wealthy and Powerful, those that are so selfish that if millions die or are injured by the wars that they create, is just collateral damage.
With so much Evil going on in the World by humans against other humans, I would ask God to put a disease onto the planet that only attacks and kills those I’ve mentioned, in the hope that they change their behaviour or they suffer and die. I have never told this to anyone in great detail, other than to say, we need a virus that attacks and kills these people.
Roberts’s piece has moved me to tell others what I pray for.
If the Leaders of Zionism don’t change their behaviour towards the Palestinians and work together to help stop Climate Change, the Palestinians will be collateral damage, they are likely to accelerate their ethnic cleansing, that will just delay the inevitable, the spread of deserts across the Middle East. My question is, is it possible for Robert, with the help of the JVL, to get this onto a TV channel, preferably the BBC, to get a broader discussion about the Climate Crisis and Israel?
Bernard Grant writes of asking God to put a disease onto the planet that only attacks and kills the wealthy and powerful. Anyone who follows the daily news of the abuse meted out on the Palestinian people can sympathize, but even if such a solution were possible, I doubt it would lead to the desired outcome. Cupidity is a severe error that leads to a dangerous imbalance of resources: the obscene wealth of a few is fueled by the abject poverty of the many. Racism is to my mind a greater evil, in that it encourages people to treat others as less than human, which is why racists typically resort to describing those whose existence offends them as ‘vermin’ or ‘cockroaches’ — pests that can be destroyed with impunity. My sense of Zionism is that the sufferings of the Jews of the diaspora led to a desperate need to create a safe place for Jews that had been homeless for far too long. The culmination of those sufferings was the Holocaust, after which the creation of Israel was inevitable. The frightful thing that troubles every honorable person, whether Jewish or not, is that in creating a Jewish homeland, the founders of Israel deprived the Palestinians of theirs, since when Israel’s efforts have been bent towards obliterating all traces of the culture it has replaced, including the latter day representatives of that culture. The ugly enormity of this task has led to a kind of general moral numbness, that of someone who crushes a cockroach under his boot so that he no longer has to see it and be reminded of what it represents. If we could conjure up a disease that would destroy the ones who carry out these abuses, we would only be perpetuating the process with a new tranche of victims.
Auden summed up the problem when he wrote:
‘Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.’
His resolution was not condemnation but affirmation of our common humanity:
‘We must love one another or die.’
(September 1st, 1939.)