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Pro-Palestine protesters find solidarity with climate advocates [1]
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Date: 2024-05-13
In late April, state police arrived on The Ohio State University’s campus and charged two student protesters with criminal trespassing. One was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine; the other was part of Ohio Youth for Climate Justice. The two groups came together for a rally demanding their university divest from “corporations supporting [Israeli] apartheid [and] fossil fuel companies [operating] in occupied Palestine,” according to their social media.
Ohio State is far from the only school where students acknowledge the interconnected struggle of environmental issues and Palestinian freedom. At university encampments and demonstrations across the globe, protesters are pointing out how Israel’s destructive campaign results in climate devastation.
“I think there is no true environmental justice without Palestinian liberation,” said Jed Pacheco, an organizer with SUNY Albany’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
Pacheco’s group has been leading teach-ins about how Palestine is not only suffering from a genocide, but an ecocide as well. Ecocide is the intentional widespread destruction of an area’s natural environment. The term came into the public sphere during the Vietnam War when U.S. soldiers sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange and other harmful herbicides across South Vietnam. Vietnamese people—and U.S. veterans—are still dealing with health effects caused by exposure decades later.
Ecocide is not a crime under international law, but it is possible to prosecute environmental damage through the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Rome Statute lists “widespread, long-term, and severe” environmental destruction as a war crime, though there has yet to be a successful prosecution in the court.
“With Palestine, we see how the occupational forces are uprooting olive trees, destroying the land, and flattening it so that it will take generations to heal and generations to rebuild,” Pacheco, 21, said. “A lot of species are dying; a lot of native plants are gone.”
Students at the University of Michigan’s encampment are having similar conversations. One of their recent educational sessions focused on environmental militarism.
“We have a significant number of folks who study environmental issues and have been trying to educate folks,” said Ember McCoy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.
Solidarity between pro-Palestine students and climate activists began long before the University of Michigan’s encampment kicked off. McCoy thinks this is partially due to the school’s previous climate-related divestment efforts.
“There was already a lot of co-learning happening between the groups,” said McCoy, who was part of the fossil fuel divestment campaign.
The university officially divested from fossil fuels in 2021 after years of student advocacy groups putting pressure on the administration.
“I think the movements have been really connected from the divestment standpoint,” McCoy said.
This kind of partnership is spreading. Columbia University’s chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a climate-focused political action organization, penned an op-ed in the student paper, writing that they “stand in solidarity with calls to divest from Israel and corporations that sustain Israeli apartheid, and we are calling for a complete divestment from both fossil fuel companies and companies supporting the oppression of Palestinians.”
The national Sunrise Movement has continued to express support for Palestine. The group shared a message from a student at Brown University’s encampment, who said, “We’re the last generation that can make a difference about climate change and about the genocide that’s happening right now. As humans we have a right to live, and we need a Green New Deal to live, and we need genocide to end to live.”
Dr. Hatem Bazian, a founding member of Students for Justice in Palestine, has noticed a connection between climate activists and pro-Palestine advocates on the University of California, Berkeley, campus.
“We have people from city and regional planning, from the environmental program linking up with the encampment, and they’ve been providing educational sessions,” said Bazian, who teaches in the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley.
A local Native American tribe visited the Berkeley demonstration and spoke “about the environmental destruction and [put] it in a longer arch from 500 years of Columbus and the destruction in the Western world,” according to Bazian.
Bazian points out that Palestine’s environmental issues are not just limited to land destruction, but also scarce water access and pollution issues.
McCoy and Pacheco both think that environmental teach-ins have helped encampment visitors better understand the scope of the situation in Palestine.
“People have been very open and receptive to learning about these things,” McCoy said.
“I don’t think it really clicked for them until we were engaging in conversation about it,” Pacheco said. “I really emphasize how this is an environmental struggle.”
Bazian and Pacheco also discussed the uprooting of olive trees, a major crop in the region that has become a symbol of Palestinian identity.
“It’s breaking the Palestinian spirit because olive trees hold such a significance to Palestinian culture,” Pacheco said. “I think when people saw that, it really resonated with them and made them realize the environment is also a victim in this, as well as the people who are struggling.”
Moving forward, McCoy would like to hear more national environmental justice groups advocating for Palestine.
“First and foremost, I would like to hear an acknowledgment that the genocide is happening at all,” she said. “There are a lot of organizations that have stayed pretty quiet.”
Some influential climate activists have advocated for Gaza, including Greta Thunberg, who wore a Palestinian keffiyeh while leading chants of “no climate justice on occupied land.”
“I would like to see more organizations learning a lesson from her and others who are speaking out,” McCoy said.
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[1] Url:
https://prismreports.org/2024/05/13/pro-palestine-protesters-climate-solidarity/
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