Greenwashing 2

Greenwashing refers to when a state or organization appeals to environmentalism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

“We shall build you, beloved country … and beautify you … We shall cover you with a robe of concrete and cement.”-Song of the Homeland, Nathan Alterman, Zionist nationalist poet

There is perhaps nothing more fundamental to the Palestinian cause than land. So much of Palestinians’ oppression has been shaped by Zionists and their ideological backers determining who is allowed to remain on the land, who “deserves” sovereignty over Palestine’s natural resources, and as of late, who is best equipped to combat climate change and help lead the way for a green-tinted Utopia.

It has been a colonial staple to frame the environment as separate from humans, which exists only to be tamed and be used by a technologically advanced, “deserving” people, even as this has caused immense ecological destruction. Zionism was formulated within this philosophical context, as evidenced by early Zionist writings on the environment and the arrogance with which Palestinians’ land practices were written about (more on this later).

Zionist propaganda portraying Israel as an environmental steward to justify the subjugation of Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian land has since only evolved to be a bit more subtle. This article will delve into this discursive tactic, which has been dubbed greenwashing. Greenwashing is when an entity pretends to be environmentally friendly in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. In the context of Palestine, it is a form of environmental racism in which Zionists pay lip service to ecological preservation and ahistorically depicts Israel as “making the desert bloom”. All the while, Israel continues polluting Palestinian land, planting invasive species, building “ecological preserves” to cover  up ethnically cleansed villages, and presenting its theft of Palestinian water as a miraculous answer to the water scarcity, which Israel itself is actively contributing to. This propaganda serves to cover up and distract from the displacement and uprooting of Palestinians in service of the Zionist colonial project.

Greenwashing past

Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism, wrote a utopian novel by the name of Altneuland, or “Old New Land.” In the book, a Viennese Jew and a Prussian nobleman return from a twenty-year isolation on a tropical island, stop in Palestine and discover Herzl’s utopian vision for the future Jewish state. In Herzl’s wildest dreams -and due to Jewish ingenuity- Palestine is no longer a “neglected and desertified land” but suddenly a technologically savvy nation replete with fast trains to Europe, where in Herzl’s mind everything culturally and politically worthwhile is. Much of the novel drones on about what he perceives to be an “unforgiving arid climate” thanks to human-driven desertification as well as the idea that the biblical land of plenty has devolved into a feudal and largely subsistence economy.

Herzl wasn’t alone in this charged characterization of Palestinian land. In 1928, the Economic Board for Palestine of London recorded a Zionist bulletin declaring that:

Palestine was a poor and backward agricultural country. This is of course still the case to a large extent, but a remarkable development has taken place which is gradually modifying the traditional life”.

Ben-Gurion, another Zionist founding father and Israel’s first prime minister, described in a 1942 pamplet the Jordan Valley, largely known as the breadbasket of Palestine due to its fertile land, as a wasteland “..which knew not at all the pioneer passion that would come to fertilize it”.

Paired with Zionist rhetoric on the supposed desolation of Palestinian land is the manner in which Palestinian fellahin (farmers) and Bedouins are spoken of as having ruined the land with their incompetence. The Jewish Agency exemplified this rhetoric in its call for  replacing the “traditional” Arab farmers with better cultivators, matched by Ben-Gurion stating that “we do not recognize their [the Arabs] right to rule the country to the extent that it has not been built by them and is still awaiting its cultivators”.

They were in fine imperialist company with types like Winston Churchill, then British Colonial Secretary and overall genocide-engineering extraordinaire, who stated that “left to themselves the Arabs would never in 1,000 years take effective steps towards the irrigation of Palestine”, as well as with Laurence Oliphant, a British MP and intelligence officer and occasional collaborator with the Palestine Exploration Fund, who declared that:

 The Arabs have very little claim to our sympathy. They have laid waste this country, ruined its villages, and plundered its inhabitants, until it has been reduced to its present condition…the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes, who are confined to their ‘reserves’, and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population.” 

These statements and attitudes on Palestinian farmers’ inadequacy and the conditions of the land was service to the rather dubious claim, as recorded in Moshe Smilansky’s Jewish Colonisation and the Fellah , that the Palestinian farmer can only be saved from his misery and turned into a ‘real’ farmer through the aid of Jewish settlers. These absurd and racist claims were intended to legitimize the Zionist project, and put forward the idea that Zionist colonialism would not displace or otherwise harm the native Palestinians and would even benefit Palestinians. In reality, the settlers banned re-sale or lease of land to Palestinians and prevented their employment in their Jewish-only endeavors. A significant example of this is the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization founded in 1901 to acquire land in Palestine explicitly for Jewish-only use, and whose dispossession of Palestinians continues to the present day.

Despite the political usefulness of the claims that Zionists were improving conditions for all the inhabitants of Palestine, there is ample evidence that the British and Zionists alike frequently ignored the aspects of Palestinian agricultural practices which contradicted their ideologically-driven predispositions. Yitzhak Elazari-Volkani, one of the founders of the agricultural faculty at the Hebrew University, made a compelling argument in a piece written on Zionist agricultural practices, where he asserted that it was actually the Zionist agricultural practices which could be deemed “defective”, with money blown on expensive machinery only to gain comparable, if not lower income than Palestinian farmers. Furthermore, the British Hope-Simpson report on immigration, land settlement and development in Mandatory Palestine found that said expensive machinery actually risked damaging the soil, while Jewish farmers “had to be protected by subsidies from the JNF or other Jewish agencies in order to sustain their European standard of living.” Nevertheless, the Zionist and British stance was still that Palestinian agriculture was in need of “capital-driven improvement”, because neither could think in terms other than that.

To be clear, besides the agricultural expertise Palestinians had accumulated for generations, they already had a lot to work with naturally; in contrast to claims of barren Palestinian land that was “mostly desert”, most of  Palestine had been cultivated, and had supported agricultural populations for centuries. The lands of Palestine have long been written about as one of the most fertile lands in the decidedly aptly named Fertile Crescent. Renowned Roman historian Tacitus described Palestine in flowery terms, saying “the inhabitants are healthy and robust; the rains moderate; the soil fertile.”

In fact, Palestine, as later shown in a pioneering study by Alexander Schölch, produced large agricultural surpluses and was integrated into the world capitalist economy as an exporter of goods such as barley, sesame, olive oil, and soap during the 1856–1882 period. Consular reports on imports and exports such as through the ports of Acre and Haifa showed that exports not only closely shadowed shifting European demand but also exceeded imports of European machine-manufactured goods, which meant that Palestine helped the rest of Greater Syria minimize its overall negative balance of trade with Europe. Already, then, wide areas such as the coastal plain to the north and south of Gaza were cultivated, producing wheat crops, with the city of Gaza once having been a prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, and barley crops of the Gaza District before being cut off from its trade relations following the 1948 Nakba. Examples of this cultivation were not limited to Gaza, with watermelons and above all citrus being cultivated in the Jaffa area, olives and cotton in the Jabal Nablus region, grapes in Al Khalil region, and tobacco and watermelon in the Galilee among others.

To add insult to the injury of these arrogant claims, much of Zionists’ first agricultural attempts went as well as you would expect, seeing as large swathes of the first settlers had no agricultural experience whatsoever. A prominent example of this is the Bilu group, comprised of primarily Russian Jewish settlers who viewed their mission in Palestine as a pioneering one towards “the physical upbuilding of the land as contributing toward both a revitalization of the Jewish nation and the reemergence of Jewish masculinity and virility”. One of these early settlers, Chaim Chissin, himself admitted that this group was composed of students who had little to no experience in agriculture, though he appeared to view this as a minor detail. However, this lack of experience and familiarity with the land definitely impeded their progress; in describing the failure of their first harvest, Chissin acknowledged the condescending attitude of the Jewish pioneers towards the Arab peasants:

“Whenever the Arabs told us that it was already too late to sow barley, or that the land was unsuited for it, we never hesitated to tell the ‘barbarians,’ with considerable self assurance, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’ll plow deep, we’ll turn the soil inside out, we’ll harrow it clean, and then you’ll see what a crop we’ll have!’ We provided ourselves with big plows, sunk them deep into the soil, and cruelly whipped our horses which were cruelly exhausted. Our self-confidence had no limits. We looked down on the Arabs, assuming that it was not they who should teach us, but we who would show these barbarians’ what a European could accomplish on this neglected land with the use of perfect tools and rational methods of cultivation. The only trouble was that we ourselves knew about European methods of cultivation only from hearsay, and our agriculturalist, too, knew very little [about conditions in Palestine].”

Additionally, George Mansour, an active Palestinian trade unionist of the time compares Palestinian agricultural practices to the new Zionist settlers, writing that with regard to fruit trees other than citrus and bananas, government data actually showed that “the Arabs have, in recent years, very greatly increased their area of olives, figs and vines; while the Jews, in a disastrous rush to make quid profits by planting citrus, have decreased theirs…the present crisis of over-production is entirely due to the Zionists’ desire to develop everything unnaturally quickly, in order to facilitate Jewish immigration.”

It is no wonder then, that large portions of these settlers eventually moved back to Russia or migrated to the West. Even so, it does not appear that Chissin learned from this failure, going on to rationalize that the Jewish settlers could not rely on the advice of the Arabs, as they were untrustworthy and treacherous. These sentiments were echoed by Mark Twain, who also had abhorrent things to say about the indigenous Palestinians, Chissin described Arab peasants as “very ignorant despite all their experience”.

Ultimately, while  the dichotomy of Zionist environmental prowess vs. Palestinian carelessness towards the land has been shown to be nonsense, it is worthwhile for us here to emphasize the following: Even in an alternate reality where all the Zionist settlers had been the most talented farmers with the most efficient tools the world, and had all the Palestinians never heard of or seen a tree in their lives, it is an outrageous notion that a people’s, home, sovereignty, self-determination and dignity were all up for grabs through some contest akin to a reality TV show.

Or, as American Jewish philosopher Michael Neumann phrased it:

It does not matter if the Zionists achieved wonderful things or ‘turned the desert green.’ That I do wonderful things while acquiring the power of life and death over you hardly legitimizes my venture. It does not matter if Palestine was or wasn’t a poor, neglected area; this could not possibly give anyone supreme power over its inhabitants.”

Greenwashing present

Unfortunately, today the situation is not so different. This justification for colonialism per civilizational metrics continues to rear its ugly head in new ways, and with increased environmentalist concerns over resources with the advent of climate change. These concerns are driving the Israeli state’s green campaigns which reach a fever pitch every Earth Day.

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, described Israel as a hub for renewable energy research and development in the global initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) forum. He quoted one of Israel’s “sustainable energy pioneers” who waxed poetic about “the same sun that shines equally on all of us, is owned by none of us, and can supply energy in abundance, inherently promotes peace.”

As touching as this sentiment is, the reality is a bit less sunshine and rainbows. While Israeli and multinational corporations have been reaping enormous profits from the initiation and operation of commercial and residential projects in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinians living there are deprived from tapping into the potential of solar energy production. Instead the Palestinian economy has been de-developed and pushed into an expensive reliance on Israeli energy companies. The Jordan Valley alone, with its 3,000 hours of annual sunshine and high radiation levels, would be perfect for solar energy production to meet Palestinian energy needs. Instead, fields for Israeli commercial use are built, which provide uninterrupted electricity to illegal settlements while the neighboring Palestinian towns suffer under blackouts. 

To circle back to Prosor’s statement, the sun should belong to everyone. Instead, for years, Israel has destroyed with impunity even the solar panels that have been donated to Palestinians, deeming them “illegal” as permits for Palestinian infrastructure building are difficult to come by, while illegal settlements continue to expand. Solar panel donations from Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland have all been destroyed, with seven EU countries calling for the end of these cruel demolitions. 

Similarly, oft-touted are Israel’s assertions of ingenuity regarding wastewater recycling. For example, Israel and Israeli advocacy groups regularly boast about Israel’s recycling of wastewater, as proof of its environmental stewardship, with Israel reportedly being the first country in the world to make effluent recycling a central component of its water management strategy. However, this obscures how the wastewater Israel reuses for irrigation is an environmental and health hazard, given its poor pre-treatment, inadequate oversight, and leniency of standards. Sludge is also generated as a byproduct of wastewater treatment, which contains high concentrations of pathogens, heavy metals, and organic pollutants. Israel dumps about half (46%) of this byproduct directly into the sea, according to the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection. Israeli sludge is now highlighted as the major source of pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, significantly larger than all other sources combined. 

Israel supporters also regularly claim that Israel is a “water expert”, with a big song and dance on drip-irrigation and desalination measures. Common tropes again include the idea that water was scarce in Palestine before the Zionist project and would be scarce now if it was not for their ingenuity, and that neighboring Middle Eastern countries have a lot to learn on water technology. Of course, it is not hard to gain a water advantage when you have undertaken all measures possible to extract, steal and hoard the water in the first place. Palestinian environmental scholar Sharif S. Elmusa describes Israel’s water policy, as being a water sponge. A greedy sponge at that, with Israel using 73% of the West Bank’s water, diverting an additional 10% of it to illegal settlements, and selling to Palestinians the remaining 17%. It is also currently utilizing about 80% of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

Of note here as well is Israel denying Palestinian access to the vast majority of the water from the Jordan River despite only 3% of the river falling within the supposed pre-1967 borders. Israel has also diverted most of the water from the Jordan River and from Lake Tiberias (located in the North) to the central and southern parts of the country. This diversion massively reduced the Jordan River’s flow; the amount of water that historically flew into the lower Jordan River reaching the Dead Sea was nearly 1.1 billion cubic meters per year in 1900. Now, barely 50 million cubic meters reach the river, mostly consisting of sewage water from Israeli settlements in the upper Jordan Valley. The water levels are now so low that the Jordan River can no longer replenish the Dead Sea. This drop has led to the development of sinkholes and an increased groundwater flow from surrounding Palestinian aquifers towards the sea. Thus, surrounding aquifers have also become depleted. Meanwhile, the relatively saline waters of Lake Tiberias contaminated groundwater used for irrigation of the Naqab, salinating the soil.

The Israeli army also has the liberty to declare however many dunams of land a “closed military area” at will, as it did in the area of Susya, denying the villagers access to the 13 rainwater harvesting cisterns located there and making their water shortage worse still. Meanwhile, in the nearby illegal Israeli settlement, the Israeli settlers have ample water supplies. They have a swimming pool and their lush irrigated vineyards, herb farms and lawns – verdant even at the height of the dry season – stand in stark contrast to the parched and arid Palestinian villages on their doorstep. This is not an isolated incident: it has been found that overall, water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, the average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.

Another point of pride for Israel, a familiar policy of greenwashing across all settler-colonies, is the designation of certain areas as national parks, boasting of over 70 across the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. National parks put a green face on Israel’s colonial expansion; the declaration of land belonging to local Palestinian residents as a nature reserve, such as has happened in Wadi Qana, has meant an absolute ban on Palestinian farming, meaning the loss of an important source of income and way of life. Some Palestinian residents have resisted the ban by planting olive trees, but the Israeli government regularly uproots and confiscates these trees. Meanwhile, Israel turns a blind eye to illegal activities by settlers in the same nature reserve, such as massive construction, building roads, and discharging wastewater into the wadi (valley). Some 100 homes in the settlements of Yaqir, Nofim, and Karnei Shomron were constructed within the area of the reserve and, in 2014, master plans were submitted for them which include rezoning areas from a nature reserve to residential.

In east Jerusalem, some of these national parks completely lack any landscape, nature or national treasures or significance, making clear that their true motive is to prevent Palestinian construction, not protect the environment. This has led NGO Bimkon to dub these national parks “green settlements”.

As South African geographer Maano Ramutsindela wrote, even on its face, such national parks appeal to a widespread Western view of nature that people must be excluded from it in order to protect it. Furthermore, as has been the case in the U.S and in Apartheid South Africa, national parks remove and dispossess the Indigenous population and interrupt traditional foodways, ultimately causing more environmental harm than good; such preservation tactics to maintain a landscape in its existing state, is interfering with natural processes and can actually reduce biodiversity, degrading the health of the environment.

Zionism, like all settler-colonialism, does not take into account these natural processes, biodiversity and the overall health of the ecosystem. The delicate interdependence between humans and nature is secondary to atrocities being perpetrated against indigenous populations. This brings us back to the JNF, whose environmental “genius” led to them draining the Hula Lake and the surrounding swamplands, precipitating an environmental disaster that, among other consequences, wiped out dozens of fauna and flora unique to the region. In 1994, once the full impact of the Hula drainage project became apparent and after years of failed attempts to turn the valley into productive agricultural land, the JNF took the unprecedented step of partially reflooding the lake in an attempt to undo the destruction they had wrought. Naturally, this did this not stop the Zionist talking-point of how the settlers supposedly saved Palestine from its swamps. 

Most central to JNF’s masquerade as a charitable organization is its insidious tree-planting campaigns, which are cynically exploited for colonial ends. Trees are quite widely perceived as an incontrovertible good, the organization plays on this impression to garner political and financial support for its activities and to conceal their deeply ideological and political work. The trees themselves are used as proof that Zionism is “bettering” the land in ways Palestinians could not and as a symbol of an imagined Israeli past.  

The reality of the JNF, in addition to its barely covert mission to dispossess Palestinians, is that its work has also been environmentally destructive. Its manner of planting, its use of hazardous chemicals and its repeated planting of non-native trees, has been disastrous. For example, extensive planting of pine trees has killed off much of the native habitat and is implicated in massive forest fires, including one that killed 42 people

The JNF planted hundreds of thousands of trees…helping to establish the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed ‘Little Switzerland. Of course, the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.” 

Most sinisterly, the JNF’s trees are frequently planted over the remains of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the 1948 Nakba; the aforementioned pine trees, for example, were planted over the remains of the Palestinian village of Al-Trina. The purpose of this is to construct the physical invisibility of the Palestinians by literally obscuring evidence of their previous existence on the same land.

Israeli environmentall racism and destruction

In discussing Zionists’ latest greenwashing claims, we have touched upon the reality of Israel’s environmental destruction. This section will go into further depth on what this environmental destruction looks like and how it amounts to environmental racism against Palestinians.  

One prominent example is Al Mokatta River near the city of Haifa, which Israel renamed the Kishon. The river has been polluted for decades with acidic waste from Haifa’s petrochemical industry. This river which was “once the lifeblood of the region has turned to a stinking trench of poison”; it’s said if you put your hand into the river for long enough, the acid will begin to burn it. Not even bacteria can reportedly survive in the water anymore, and tests show that fish die in less than three minutes of being submerged. This river is now reportedly the most polluted river in Israel. However, as Shoshana Gabbay, editor of the Israel Environment Bulletin reports, it is certainly not the only polluted river. With the exception of the upper Jordan River and its tributaries, the prognosis for Israel’s rivers has long been gloomy: a slow and painful death. Whether as a result of industrial discharge, municipal sewage, overpumping or general abuse – rivers have either dried up or become sewage conduits. 

Not satisfied with polluting the Palestinian lands stolen in 1948, Israel also treats the West Bank as sewage and pollution dumping grounds. Taking advantage of old Jordanian law provides the West Bank significantly fewer labor and environmental protections than those offered by Israeli law, to the benefit of the Israeli economy. For example, as of 2014, roughly half of Israel’s environmental laws did not apply in the West Bank, encouraging Israeli polluting factories to set up in the West Bank. 

For instance, Geshuri industries, a manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers was ordered in 1982 by an Israeli court to move from Kfar Saba, inside the green line, to an area adjacent to Tulkarem, inside the West Bank because of the company’s negative environmental effects on Israeli land, public health, and agriculture. The health of Israelis was clearly deemed more important than that of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem, a blatant act of environmental racism. An empirical study showed that this polluting industry may have devastated the environment and health of the Palestinian residents of Tulkarem; Tulkarem residents were found to have some of the highest rates of cancer, asthma, and eye and respiratory health anomalies compared to residents in other districts in the West Bank. Chemical waste from the factory also harmed the farming land that surrounds Tulkarem, causing trees to lose their leaves and destroying the fertile nature of the soil. Vegetables to be sold in Palestinian markets, grew not far from the factory. 

The Gaza Strip has not been spared from Israel’s environmental destruction. Israel, as an arms exporter, has tested much of its weaponry on the besieged and blockaded area. Such warfare, besides the horrendous human toll it has taken, is also inherently ecologically damaging, with weapons manufacturing and testing generating tremendous pollution and hazardous waste. 

Palestinian environmental NGO, PENGON, published an environmental impact assessment of Israel’s 2014 War on Gaza. Gaza’s environment, the assessment recognized, was already devastated by Israel’s siege, with the war exacerbating these damages. Almost 95 percent of the water pumped in Gaza in 2010 was deemed unfit for drinking due to severe pollution, the water was polluted by both the over pumping of the underground water of the Coast Aquifer and Operation Cast Lead, which caused more than 600,000 tons of waste, including asbestos, oils, and fuels, to contaminate Gaza’s water. Unfortunately, there are no means to rehabilitate the water or treat wastewater, thanks to Israel’s 2007 decision forbidding the entry of the necessary equipment and materials. 

Thus, Israel’s 2014 war almost completely halted wastewater treatment. Millions of cubic meters of wastewater were consequently dumped completely untreated into the sea. This dumping deteriorated the marine environment, turning 70% of Gaza’s seashore unfit for recreational activities. The war also produced more than 2.5 million tons of demolition waste, causing particulate matter pollution throughout Gaza. The heavy bombing also sparked fires, which caused air pollution composed of soot, chemicals, and particulate matter. 

Moreover, Israel attacked the fuel stores of the Gaza power plant, openly igniting two million liters of diesel, which further contaminated the air. Meanwhile, water and soil infrastructure were damaged and farms, trees, crops, poultry, and livestock were destroyed. 3,450 hectares including more than 250,000 trees, mostly olive, citrus, and grape trees, and more than a thousand greenhouses and tens of thousands of open lands cultivated for the production of vegetables were directly damaged during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. 

While the information presented here barely scratched the surface of Israel’s environmental destruction and racist colonial practices vis-a-vis Palestinians which it hopes to conduct under a green-tinted shroud, it must be taken into account that Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are particularly vulnerable to the catastrophic effects of climate change. So much so, that the UNDP has deemed the Israeli occupation itself as an environmental risk in its own right due to its fragmentation of the Palestinian political landscape, the Apartheid wall, land grabs, settlement expansion and settler violence. We hope then that this has given you much to think and research about and will push you to not only be able to recognize greenwashing campaigns and talking points, but to take action to protect and defend Palestinian sovereignty over our land and resources.

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Further reading
  • Agha, Zena. Climate Change, the Occupation, and a Vulnerable Palestine. Al-Shabaka. March 26th, 2019. [Link]
  • Sasa, Ghada. Israel: Greenwashing Colonialism And Apartheid. York Space, 2017. [Link]
  • Palestinian BDS National Committee, Palestine is a climate justice issue – Israeli apartheid is not “green”, BDS Movement, November 21st, 2019. [Link]
  • Murphy, Joseph. “Environment and imperialism: why colonialism still matters.” Sustainability Research Institute 20, 2009: 1-27. [Link]
  • Cole, Camille, et al. Essential Readings: Environment and Politics in the Middle East. Jadaliyya. April 22nd, 2020. [Link]
  • LeVine, Mark. “The discourses of development in Mandate Palestine.” Arab studies quarterly, 1995: 95-124. [Link]
  • Long, Joanna Claire. (En) planting Israel: Jewish national fund forestry and the naturalisation of Zionism. Diss. University of British Columbia, 2005. [Link]
  • Kamel, Lorenzo. Imperial Perceptions of Palestine. IB Tauris, 2015.
  • Baroud, Ramzy. War on nature: How Zionist colonialism has destroyed the environment in Palestine. Middle East Monitor. February 11th, 2019. [Link]
  • Qato, Danya M., and Ruhan Nagra. “Environmental and public health effects of polluting industries in Tulkarm, West Bank, occupied Palestinian territory: an ethnographic study.” The Lancet 382, 2013: S29. [Link]
  • Abulhawa, Susan. Israel’s desalination miracle, Santa Claus and other fairy tales. Middle East Eye. August 12th, 2016. [Link]
  • Chaitin, Julia, et al. “Palestinian and Israeli cooperation in environmental work during the “peace era”.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17.3, 2004: 523-542. [Link]
  • George, Alan. ““Making the Desert Bloom” A Myth Examined.” Journal of Palestine Studies 8.2, 1979: 88-100. [Link]
  • Prager, Jonas. “The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation.” 1990: 417-419. [Link]
  • MacDonald, Robert. “A land without a people for a people without a land”: Civilizing mission and American support for Zionism, 1880s-1929. Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University. December 2012. [Link]