In November 2023 climate activist Greta Thunberg made international headlines when she was interrupted during a speech to a Dutch climate protest, after stating that climate justice can’t happen without international solidarity against oppression.
Sharing the stage with Sahar Shirzad from Afghanistan and Sara Rachdan from Palestine, who spoke about the fight for climate justice as a fight for freedom from oppression, Thunberg was applauded by the 70,000-strong Amsterdam crowd. But a man cut her short by grabbing the mic and saying that he came for ‘a climate demonstration, not a political view’.1
The incident came at a time when thousands of innocent Palestinians were being slaughtered in the ongoing assault on the blockaded Gaza Strip, where people live in what is essentially an openair prison.
On top of decades of abhorrent human rights abuses, whole generations of Palestinians have experienced eco-apartheid, in which they are forced to suffer ecological harm caused by the settler colonial state. In 2020, UNICEF determined that only 10 per cent of Gazans have access to clean and safe drinking water.2 And in 2021, the UN documented how Israel usurped water in the West Bank, including for the luxury of swimming pools, while repeatedly blocking maintenance and upgrades to pipelines linking Palestinian communities in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.3
Meanwhile, Israel’s tech-savvy and modern energy transition, its innovations in ‘green’ technology,
