Genocide can never be green: Israel’s military and climate change

Part IV in my series on genocide, climate injustice, and eco-colonialism in Palestine

All impacts of genocide and war affect the environment and climate because of their harm to people. Even if there were somehow no direct greenhouse gas emissions from a military’s activity, genocide and war are fundamentally incompatible with climate and environmental justice; there is no such thing as an environmentally-friendly genocide or war. And the deaths of countless Palestinians – likely much higher than the official numbers, because of the obliteration of Palestinian healthcare systems and reporting – and the impoverishment and displacement of millions are, in themselves, climate catastrophes. My purpose here is to add to our understanding of those injustices by illustrating underlying and longer-term climate and environmental impacts that we don’t always hear about when we talk about militaries.

This is the fourth post in my series on eco-colonialism, climate injustice, and genocide in Palestine. Thanks so much to Stephanie Noren, James Williams, Emily Pinckney, Brittney Miller, and Neiko Alvarado for your collaboration and invaluable feedback.

You’ll notice I mentioned “direct” emissions from military activity in the first paragraph. What does that mean? The idea of direct vs. indirect greenhouse gas emissions (which you may also hear referred to as Scope 1 emissions vs. Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions) is one I didn’t cover in my Climate Justice 101, so let’s talk about it now.

Whether emissions are “direct” or “indirect” depends on perspective and on who is being identified as the emitter, so it’s easiest to understand by looking at specific examples. Take a house. Scope 1 and 2 emissions both have to do with the energy used to power that house, so let’s say this house uses both electricity and gas. The direct (or Scope 1) emissions from that house are from the gas that is being combusted for heating, water heating, and/or cooking. Then, the Scope 2 emissions are from any fossil fuels used to generate the electricity, which are being combusted by the electric company, not by the house, so are considered “indirect” emissions for the house.

But then you have even more sources of indirect emissions when you consider everything that goes into a house besides the energy to power it, which are the Scope 3 emissions. For example, what about the emissions that went into the creating the materials for building the house, such as steel, iron, concrete, and logging for wood? Those emissions are specifically known as “embodied carbon”. Other terms you might hear related to this idea are “upstream” and “downstream” emissions. Once again, this depends on perspective: if you’re looking at a source of emissions like a house, the upstream emissions are all the things that went into creating that house (like the embodied carbon), while the downstream emissions are from processes that leave the house, like solid waste generated by the people living there that is then transferred in a landfill, where it breaks down and emits methane.

Remember these concepts as we talk about an entity with a much, much bigger impact on the environment than a house: Israel’s military.

The scale of Israeli’s occupation forces

Firstly, let’s set some context by looking at the scale of Israel’s militarism. In 2022, Israel’s military expenditures were $23.4 billion USD, making Israel 15^th in the world in military spending (despite being 97^th in terms of population), and second in the world after Qatar in military spending per capita, higher even that the United States. All of this money pays for a great deal: Israel has 169,500 active military personnel, 465,000 reserve forces, and 8,000 paramilitary personnel; more than 2,000 tanks and 615 heavy infantry vehicles; five submarines and almost fifty other naval ships; 345 military aircraft and 142 helicopters; and a huge arsenal of bombs and explosives, including nuclear bombs. Israel also has a mobile air defense system called the Iron Dome that intercepts short-range rockets.

The United States plays a huge part in funding Israel’s military. Between 1946 and 2023, the U.S. sent around $300 billion dollars in foreign aid to Israel (which is almost double the amount of aid sent to Egypt, the second-highest recipient, in that same time period), more than two-thirds of which was for Israel’s military and was usually spent on American-made weapons. In 2023, the U.S. sent Israel about $3.8 billion in military aid before October 7th; it’s challenging to determine the increase in aid since October 7th since the Biden administration has deliberately kept that opaque, but Pentagon officials say that the amount has “surged billions of dollars”, including “an extraordinary flow” of bombs and other weaponry. The U.S. also heavily supports the Iron Dome system.

Unfortunately, under the Paris Agreement, countries are not required to include armed forces’ direct emissions in their climate targets, in large part due to lobbying from the U.S. government – despite estimates that the global military-industrial complex accounts for 6% of the world’s emissions. General secrecy about military installations and operations hinders other information-gathering as well: one of the papers I link to below talks about how the authors were not even able to look at photographs of Israel’s military bases. Researchers therefore have to use creative methods to estimate or understand the environmental impacts from Israel’s military.

Everyday militarism: Bases, borders, and barriers

In addition to the scale of Israel’s occupation forces, Israel’s military also controls a great deal of land – the most, proportionate to its size, of any country. In 2008, it was estimated that one-third of the land in Israel was under direct military control for bases and training grounds, but when also including areas that can be used as emergency military use or that have limited access for civilians due to being near military installations, that territory extends to half of Israel.

Israel’s military also occupies land in what are supposed to be, under international law, Palestinian territories. (Never mind that it should all be Palestinian land.) In the West Bank, which, at 2,180 square miles, is smaller than the U.S. state of Delaware, Israel has over 210 military bases and occupies over 20% of the land as “closed military zones” that Palestinians cannot access. This only accounts for the land directly held by the military, though most of Area C, which is about 60% of the West Bank’s territory, is effectively under Israeli military control, not to mention the 151 colonial settlements and 150 settlement outposts, where the illegal Israeli settlers are often armed by the government but are still considered “civilians” by Israel. Eco-colonialism is also used to justify military land grabs; in the Negev Desert, many of the areas dedicated as “nature reserves” are actually used as military training grounds!

The military presence is also made material by Israel’s border barriers. The Gaza border barrier runs 65 kilometers (about 40 miles) long and includes, at various parts, large concrete barriers, razor wire, a 20-foot-high metal fence, and monitoring and surveillance cameras. In the West Bank, the solid concrete apartheid wall, when completed, will be more than ten times as long as the Gaza barrier (712 kilometers, or 442 miles) and up to 26 feet high. According to Israel, the intention is to provide a separation between the West Bank and Israel along the internationally-recognized boundary called the “green line”, but instead of actually following that line, 85% of the wall is located within the West Bank, effectively annexing swaths of land for Israel.

Despite the wall being ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, 65% of the wall has nevertheless been completed, cutting through Palestinian communities (including dividing East Jerusalem, which is supposed to be Palestinian, from the rest of the West Bank), separating Palestinians from their farmland, and making it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to get to Israel for work, school, visiting family, or for any other reason. Even now, during Israel’s increased assaults on the West Bank as part of their genocide, further wall construction is being planned to swallow up more Palestinian land.

And then there are the myriad checkpoints and barriers that Palestinians are forced to navigate. We’ve been hearing a lot in the news about Gaza checkpoints that Israel has closed since October 7, 2023, but the West Bank also has hundreds of barriers as well. In early 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found that there were 645 “movement obstacles” for Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Hebron, including 77 constantly-staffed checkpoints and 139 occasionally-staffed checkpoints; 304 roadblocks, earth-mounds, and road gates; and 73 earth walls, road barriers, and trenches. OCHA reports that by mid-December 2023, that number had increased to 694; there may be even more now.

This highly militarized landscape facilitates the oppression of Palestinians and environmental harm even during times when Israel is not actively engaged in “combat” (though Israel’s occupation and settler colonialism creates a constant state of violence). There is not a lot of research estimating the climate harms of this militarization, but I did find a couple studies. Firstly, the construction of the Gaza border barrier is estimated to have produced 274,232 metric tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) in embodied carbon from the steel, concrete, and iron used in the barrier; this does not include the emissions from the construction processes for building the barrier, nor from the deforestation required to clear space for the barrier. Even so, the embodied carbon emitted is roughly the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions of either 65,268 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or more than 300 million pounds of coal burned.

The only other study I was able to find looked at how the “movement obstacles” in the West Bank lead to higher emissions from cars, trucks, and other vehicles, because Palestinians have to take highly circuitous routes get around the apartheid wall, checkpoints, or other barriers, sometimes doubling or tripling their driving time. These routes led to a 358% increase in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for diesel vehicles and a 275% increase for gasoline vehicles.

This leaves a huge gap in our understanding of the emissions from Israel’s everyday militarism; for one thing, I was not able to find any research on the greenhouse gas emissions from building the West Bank apartheid wall, which is far, far bigger than the Gaza border barrier, nor on the deforestation from Israeli land grabs and settlements, nor on the emissions from Israeli military training exercises, nor on “fugitive” emissions from fossil fuel leaks. However, there is no doubt that this militarization has climate impacts – and other major environmental impacts. A 2009 study found that the impact of Israel’s military on occupied Palestine included unexploded ordinances and land mines from military training exercises; radiation and pollution from nuclear producing facilities; high consumption and contamination of water resources; and more. The West Bank apartheid wall has also greatly harmed biodiversity.

A genocide of people and the environment

Active conflict and environmental vulnerability go hand-in-hand, as genocide and war cause mass death, mass displacement, destruction of vital infrastructure, and destruction of key resources and environments, including agricultural land and biodiversity hotspots. And Israel has waged so many wars: the 1948 Nakba; Israel’s 1956 invasion of the Sinai and Gaza; the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan heights; the Yom Kippur War in 1973; Israel’s 1982 occupation of south Lebanon and the subsequent decade and a half of warfare between Israel and Hezbollah; the First Intifada in 1987-1991; the Second Intifada in 2000-2005; the 2006 Lebanon War; the 2008-9 war on Gaza; the 2014 war on Gaza; the 2021 war on Gaza; and now the current genocide that impacts all of Palestine and parts of southern Lebanon.

A recent study tried to estimate the climate impacts of the first sixty days after October 7, 2023; the vast majority of emissions they looked at came from airplanes, including from Israeli aircraft missions and U.S. supply flights, but they also accounted for Israeli bomb detonation, Israeli artillery, Israeli tanks and vehicles, and Hamas rockets. The researchers note that their numbers are likely to be severe underestimates “as [they do] not account for the significant military aid Israel receives from the U.S. and European countries which has its own climate costs” (p. 4). This also didn’t include the upstream emissions from the war supply chain; as The Guardian noted, that would almost certainly make the true carbon footprint many times higher.

Even with all those caveats, the study’s conservative estimate is that 281,315 metric tons of CO2e were emitted just from those sources in the first two months, which is about equal to either the greenhouse gas emissions of 66,953 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or more than 310 million pounds of coal burned. Of those emissions, only 713 metric tons of CO2e came from Hamas rockets – less than a quarter of a percentage point of the total emissions calculated.

Israel’s active combat operations also have huge impacts even beyond greenhouse gas emissions, including pollution and fires caused by white phosphorus; the toxic effects of depleted uranium from ordnances; destruction of reservoirs, water infrastructure, and sanitation and sewage treatment facilities; soil erosion; direct damage to aquifers and streams; damage to agricultural areas; destruction of power stations, oil wells, and other energy infrastructure; and disruptions to ecosystems and biodiversity.

Restoring and rebuilding Palestine

The long-term impacts of Israel’s recent escalation in genocidal violence are vast and horrifying. A recent joint assessment by the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union found that after only the first five months of Israel’s bombing, ground invasion, and full blockade of Gaza, as well as Israel’s kidnapping, killing, and destruction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least five percent of the population of Palestine is dead, injured, or trapped under rubble (again, these are almost certainly vast underestimates due to breakdowns in reporting), and another 1.7 million have been displaced. More than half of Gaza is on the brink of famine, and Palestinians have less than half the daily rations of clean water that they need for survival. 72% of housing and 9% of commercial buildings had been destroyed or damaged in Gaza, creating 37 million tons of rubble and debris. Systems of health and education have been so obliterated that the human development index (which includes factors like educational attainment and life expectancy) across Palestine has been set back by twenty years, and in Gaza, it has been set back forty years.

We are now in month eight of Israel’s genocide, with no end in sight. It feels almost impossible to talk about what restoring and rebuilding Palestine will look like while we still don’t know the full dimensions that Israel’s brutality has taken and will continue to take. Still, some are trying to think through what it might look like – and what the climate impact will be. The same study that looked at the greenhouse gas emissions from the first two months of the genocide also made very rough and conservative estimates about the emissions from the future reconstruction of buildings destroyed in Gaza in the first two months, conservatively estimating that at 30 million metric tons of CO2e, equivalent to the annual emissions of New Zealand. The destruction is only greater now.

However, the costs of rebuilding should not, of course, stop Palestine from being rebuilt – rather they should be considered as part of the reparations that are owed to Palestinians for not only this current genocide but for a century of oppression and imperialism. Nor should rebuilding Palestine be confined to the boundaries of Gaza and the West Bank under the current regime of Israeli settler colonialism. When we think about true Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, we need to support the Palestinian right to return, and to follow the lead of Palestinians dreaming of solutions that do not only involve “costs”, because a liberated Palestine also involves restoring sovereignty to those closest to the land, and thus restoring ecological practices that truly benefit the environment and the people most impacted by climate change and other environmental degradation.

Next time, I’ll look at Palestinian eco-resistance and visions for the future.

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Mutual Aid Request

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Weam Abu Daqqa, a university student and young writer for the organization We Are Not Numbers, is raising money for her family of seven, whose home in Gaza was destroyed, and her father injured through this genocide. Please help Weam and her family rebuild their life.