26:55
Bombs fall with impunity in the Palestinian city of Akka. For three straight days, the people of Akka are shelled into oblivion. The final nail in the coffin comes on November 3rd, when an explosive connects with a munitions cache in the center of the city, exploding with devastating force. Thousands die. A city rich with trade, communities, and history, flattened to rubble over a bloody three days. One firsthand account describes walking through the aftermath, seeing "Corpses of men, women, and children, blackened by the explosion. and mutilated,
in the most horrid manner." On November 3rd, the bustling Palestinian port city of Akka fell to the indiscriminate bombardment of British steamships. This brutal leveling took place in 1840 and was one of the very first instances of fossil-fueled imperialist war. With the new might of the steam-powered warships that were unhindered by the whims of the weather, Britain dismantled a burgeoning empire in what's now Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine, forcing open their markets so surplus British cotton could pour down their throats. As scholar Andreas Malm notes: "Steam
allowed the admirals and captains to plug their boats into a current from the past, a source of energy external to the space and time of the actual battle, through which the ships could therefore shoot as though they had wings of their own." 184 years later, Palestinians continue to be bombed by the fossil-fueled war machines of the imperial core. Except this time the shrapnel, tanks, and bullets pour from their settler-colonial oppressors, Israel. Today we will attempt to reveal the deep connections between fossil capitalism, imperialism, and the settler-colonial project that is Israel. We'll delve into how the current
genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is connected to broader desires of fossil capitalism. How the echoes of the past in the bombardment of Akka rattle through to the present. And why Palestinian freedom is not just an issue of moral justice but also a struggle of climate and anti-imperialism. This video is made possible by my amazing viewers who support me on Patreon. Political videos like this one are deemed untouchable by sponsors and are often demonetized on YouTube, which means the channel takes a financial hit. Which is why I need you. Our Changing Climate
will always be free for everyone regardless of how much I make, but OCC is a one-person operation and it would be nice to earn enough to pay for rent and my health insurance. So, if you've been a long-time viewer, or just stumbled across the channel, and want to help me make more anti-capitalist ecological videos please consider supporting Our Changing Climate on Patreon using the link in the description. Just one dollar a month from a small portion of my audience would be huge for the channel and to be honest, me. Genocide: As of late June of 2024, 38,179 Palestinians have been killed. 15,000 parents are now childless. Hospitals, schools, and
markets- bombed into dust. The streets of Gaza lie in rubble, echoing the burnt remains of Akka in 1840. Cut off from food and aid by Israeli forces, Palestinians in Gaza are facing, according to Oxfam, the worst hunger crisis on record. This is genocide. A wholesale erasure of a people and the destruction of their land. One that's driven by the forces of settler-colonialism and Zionism, and as we will see later on- the passionate backing of the imperial core. It's crucial to understand the wholesale razing of Gaza not as an isolated event, but instead as the next step in a long
blood trail of the settler-colonial project that is Israel. Unlike other forms of colonialism that function to funnel resources from occupied lands towards the imperial core, settler-colonialist projects, whether on Turtle Island by the United States, South Africa by the British and the Dutch, or Australia by the British, are often much more interested in the land itself. Settler-colonialism is, as scholar Patrick Wolfe notes, about access to territory. Settlers claim the land for themselves and those that currently live on the land must be eliminated- physically,
culturally, and ethnically. In the occupied lands of Palestine, settler-colonialism takes the form of Zionism. An ideology and structure that stretches back to the 1840s, Zionism states the need to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine, which would inevitably require the expulsion and eradication of the majority Muslim or secular Palestinians currently living on the land. In their own words, prominent Zionists are very clear-eyed in their goals: one Zionist leader in 1925 wrote, "Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question
of armed force." While in 1937 during ongoing UN talks about a potential Israeli and Palestinian two-state partition, the future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, explained: "After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Israeli] state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." Or more recently the Mayor of the Israeli city of Sderot which was attacked on October 7th, Alon Davidi, claimed on TV: "We don't live in Europe or the USA, we live in the State of Israel which is surrounded by
enemies and we need to teach them a lesson, destroy them. These are animals, monsters." On the ground, Zionism has led to narratives and myths surrounding Palestine that ease the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land, like the narrative that Israelis are occupying uninhabited land or that Palestinians are less than human and have no claim to the land. This Zionist ideology eventually came to a boiling point in 1948. Wherein, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed over 800,000 Palestinians under the military Plan Dalek, which strategized the ousting
of Palestinian lands by "destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble)." A gruesome moment in history known as the Nakba. This was coupled with, among other tactics, the legalization of land theft under policies like Israel's 1953 Land Acquisition Law, which seized 739,750 acres of Palestinian agricultural land, 73,000 houses, and 7800 workshops. Ever since, Israel has marched with slow violence over the land punctuated by fits of bloody occupational explosions like that in 1967, when the Israeli
military destroyed the air forces of Egypt and Jordan in a sneak attack, then proceeded to invade and occupy the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The captured lands these military invasions created were shored up by encouraging over 600,000 Israelis to grab land for settlements in places like the West Bank- pushing Palestinians into smaller and smaller pockets across the land. Settlements which are illegal under international law. The long march of Zionist settler-colonialism, then, is marked by, as professor of political economy Adam Hanieh
writes, "the periodic use of extreme violence, twinned with false promises of internationally backed negotiations." Indeed, during the times of so-called peace within occupied Palestine, apartheid conditions and concentration camps hang heavy over Gaza and the West Bank. For Palestinians travel between the two is virtually impossible, and movement is severely restricted without express permission from the Israeli state. As the non-profit human rights watchdog group, B'Tselem notes, "Restricting movement is one of the main tools that Israel employs to enforce its
regime of occupation over the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories." In the West Bank, there are a documented 645 checkpoints, roadblocks, and earthen mounds blocking roads. They are used to cut-off streets and travel points, making going to work or even traveling to go see a doctor uncertain and dangerous ordeals. At those checkpoints and on the streets of the occupied territories abuse by Israeli security forces is constant. For example, in August of 2023, one Palestinian man was arrested in East Jerusalem and beaten
and branded on his cheek with the star of David, while in May of 2022, a journalist for Al Jazeera, Shireen Abu-Akleh, was shot in the head by Israeli security forces while on assignment in the West Bank. As the deputy director for Amnesty International in the Middle East and North Africa asserts: "The evidence… paints a damning picture of discrimination and ruthless excessive force by Israeli police against Palestinians in Israel and in occupied East Jerusalem." Conditions are gruesome in Palestine. Israeli surveillance, violence, and policing are all-encompassing,
and it's only gotten worse since October 7th. It is for this reason multiple human rights and NGOs have asserted that Gaza and the West Bank are open-air prisons or concentration camps. And now we are witnessing yet another outburst of extreme violence. Israel's war machine is currently butchering men, women, and children in the streets of Gaza. The response to the Palestinian strike of resistance on October 7 has been remarkably bloody. One Israeli elected official, Revital Gottlieb, called for another Nakba that will "overshadow the Nakba of 48,"
while another politician, Ariel Kallner, called on Israeli forces to "Bring down buildings! Bomb without distinction!" to "Flatten Gaza." One Israeli journalist went so far as to claim "Gaza should be wiped off the face of the earth." These are the words of settler-colonial Zionism plain and simple. For Israel to exist, Palestine must be destroyed. As the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl put it in 1896: "If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct." But the existence of Israel and the normalization of its
colonial occupation and violence hasn't happened in a vacuum. It exists within a swirling whirlwind of political struggle and imperialist intervention spearheaded now by the United States. The imperial core needs Israel despite the genocide that it's been perpetrating for the last 76 years. But why? Why the Imperial Core Needs Israel: Foreign aid is Israel's greatest weapon. According to the Transnational Institute, "Israel is now the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid in the world, even though it ranks as the world's 13th wealthiest economy."
To put it bluntly, the United States is bankrolling Zionist settler-colonialism. Some claim that this immense support comes from the influence U.S. Zionist lobbying groups have on American politicians, but this misses the broader geopolitical advantages Israel's presence in West Asia has for the United States and its imperial core allies. For a country and indeed an economic system built on fossil fuels, the consistent flow of oil from the countries of West Asia towards the factories, cars, and homes of the United States is crucial. In short, because fossil fuels allow for the ever-growing accumulation of capital, the United
States has to ensure that fuel supply will never stop. Up until the nationalization movements in the 1970s and 1980s, imperial core corporations alongside U.S.-backed leaders like the Iranian Shah after 1953, maintained that consistent flow of oil. Indeed, as Adam Hanieh writes, "The recentring of Europe's oil supply on the Middle East was a remarkably rapid process: between 1947 and 1960, the share of Europe's oil that originated from the region doubled, rising from 43% to 85%." West Asian oil became a centerpiece of imperial core economies. But as countries
began to wrestle control of that oil away from the imperialist interests through the nationalization of oil reserves, that flow was threatened. With this surge in West Asian control of oil supply, the U.S. and Europe needed a new way to assure military dominance and control in West Asia and make sure crises like the OPEC oil embargo would never happen again. Hanieh again writes in an article for the Transnational Institute, "US interests in the region revolved around guaranteeing the stable supply of oil to the world market - denominated in US dollars - and ensuring
that oil would not be used as a 'weapon' to destabilize the American-centered global system." Enter Israel. Together with U.S.-backed monarchies in the region like Saudi Arabia, Israel acts as a bulwark against any West Asian nation that tries to withhold oil from the global market. Essentially, Israel is both a vessel and foothold for the imperial core's military in the region. As the U.S. Secretary of State under Nixon explained "'Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a
critical region for American national security." Or as now President Biden has exclaimed over and over again: ["it is the best three billion dollar investment we make whether or not Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region."] ["Israel is the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East"] Israel is the lynchpin of the United States' military and economic strategy in West Asia. As a result, since 1946, the United States has poured $310 billion to prop up the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Israel, in turn,
needs this support. Both in terms of legitimizing their claims to the land they've stolen as well as fueling their violent hyper-militarized project of settler colonialism. As Adam Hanieh writes, "Settler colonies must continually work to fortify structures of racial oppression, class exploitation, and dispossession. As a result, they are typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support, which allows them to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment… For this reason, settler colonies are
much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than 'normal' client states." In short, the settler colonial nature of Israel makes it the perfect partner for U.S. imperialism. In overlapping layers of interconnectedness and reciprocity- settler colonialist Zionists need the imperial core's backing and the imperial core needs Israel's military presence in West Asia in a dance that ignores and legitimizes the plunder of Palestinian land and the genocide of an entire people as a means of securing the oil and resource interests. Oil and resources which
ultimately guarantee the engines of capital accumulation continue chugging for those in the imperial core. This is why Biden decries: ["The security of Israel in the United States is inextricably tied."] Here we can draw direct lines between the siege of Akka and that of Israel's bloody destruction of Palestine. Through their fossil-fueled machines of war, the 1840s steam battleship, or the Israel Defense Force's gas-guzzling tanks and bombers, both Britain and the United States sought to pry open the markets and resources of West Asia for themselves. For
Britain, it meant opening up trade routes for their surplus cotton, and for the U.S. it meant ensuring a constant flow of oil. Hundreds of years apart, yet still fossil-fueled imperialist excursions continue to pummel the Palestinian people with death and destruction. And in this colonial conquest, Israel's U.S.-backed wars wreak havoc on the very land, air, and water themselves. The Fossil Fuel War Machine In the early morning light in January of 2018, 50 Israeli settlers climbed a hill peppered with Palestinian olive trees. They start cutting, hacking, and snapping at branches and trees. The settlers destroyed 100 olive trees that
day as Israeli Defense Force soldiers looked on. Ecocide is a tool of settler colonialism. As evidenced by the extensive eradication of the plains Bison throughout the 19th century in Turtle Island, or what's now called the United States. In Israel, Palestinian culture and livelihoods are being ripped apart by a war on centuries-old olive groves. Since 1967, over 800,000 olive trees have been destroyed by Israeli forces. These trees are not just culturally significant, as well as symbols of resistance, but a foundational part of many Palestinian farmers' livelihood. The
presence of these olive orchards flies in the face of the common Zionist assertion that Palestine is "a land without a people." This is why the "one-time deputy-mayor of West Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti recalled, 'As a member of a pioneering youth movement, I myself 'made the desert bloom' by uprooting the ancient olive trees of al-Bassa to clear the ground for a banana grove, as required by the 'planned farming' principles of my kibbutz.'" Put another way, settler colonialism is about the occupation of land and the expulsion of those already living there. To justify that
expulsion, settler-colonial forces argued that there was no one living on the land. To legitimize this narrative of erasure, settlers must wipe clean the slate and establish an Israeli landscape- in other words, clear-cutting centuries-old olive trees to plant a banana grove. But Israeli ecocide goes further than the destruction of Palestinian olive groves, years of bombing and military conquest in the region have left the soil and water contaminated and toxic. Since October 7th alone, Israel has dropped the equivalent of 2 nuclear bombs on
Gaza. As the Guardian reports, "olive groves and farms [in Gaza] have been reduced to packed earth; soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter." There is a stark difference between access to clean drinking water and food in the concentration camps that are Gaza and the West Bank compared to that in Israeli settlements and cities. In the occupied West Bank, the average Palestinian has access to just 80 liters of water per day, 20 liters short of the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization. Meanwhile,
since October 7 and the subsequent onslaught by the Israeli Defense Forces, which included the flooding of tunnels under Gaza with seawater that then seeped into freshwater aquifers, "97 percent of groundwater in Gaza was undrinkable prior to Israel's most recent attack, 71.5 percent of the Gazan population were food insecure and 65 percent lived in poverty." Compared with Israeli settlers encroaching on Palestinian lands in the West Bank, who on average use 247 liters of water per person per day, this appears to be the wielding and withholding of the very substance of life as
a tool of settler-colonialism. To make matters even worse, the Israeli war machine guzzles fossil fuels. Indeed, much like the steamboats that facilitated Britain's indiscriminate bombardment of Akka, fossil fuels are the foundation of Israel and the United States' military power. Alongside the human toll of Israeli bombers and missiles, these fossil-fossiled war machines spew pollutants into the atmosphere- directly causing climate change. A recent study found that emissions from the post-October 7th slew of bombings and violence alone were greater than the
annual emissions of 26 individual countries and territories. So, with the destruction of the land, the withholding and control of water, and indiscriminate pollution, environmental devastation becomes not just incidental to Zionist settler colonialism, but instead essential to it- a crucial tactic of the occupation. This ecocide and genocide must end, but how? What Does the Future Hold The weight of genocide lies heavy over the settler-colonial state of Israel. For over seven decades, Zionists have occupied and expelled Palestinians at the barrel of a gun and through the sharp ax felling olive
trees. How can we bring justice and reparations to this ghastly situation? Understanding that Israel's presence in Palestine is legitimized and backed by the imperial core, especially the U.S., is a crucial step towards carving a path away from Israel's settler-colonial violence. But there are no simple answers. An immediate ceasefire must be drawn up to end the current flattening of Gaza, but that is just a stopgap to stem the tide of Palestinian blood. Many have proposed a two-state solution and point to the Oslo Accords as the path forward, these are often heads of imperialist states like the United States. But as we saw earlier,
Israel's strategy has been the combination of extreme violence coupled with internationally backed negotiations that the Israeli government quickly ignores. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel erected the 440-mile-long Wall of Apartheid in the West Bank as well as established and locked in the surveillance and violent policing strategies that we witnessed earlier. In addition, Israel slowly and illegally (according to international law) encroached even further on Palestinian territories through settlements. As long as Israel exists, it will continue to try to gobble up Palestinian land
and territory and, in violent outbursts, eradicate the Palestinian people. The core driving force of Zionism is a single Jewish ethno-state, it cannot and will not tolerate any challenge to that claim. If not a two-state solution then what? That's not for me to decide. But whether it's a secular one-state with a full right to return for all Palestinian refugees to their ancestral lands, recognizing Palestinian history and tenure on the land, as well as freedom for all, a free Palestine must be the future. At this moment of violence, that future can feel far off. But it
can and must be achieved and we do that through acting. Those of us in the imperial core must support Palestinian resistance. Yes, this means pressuring officials for an immediate ceasefire, but we also need to be working toward dismantling the fossil imperialist forces that are driving these conflicts. Whether that's through protest encampments, joining up with anti-war groups like Dissenters, embracing the Boycott Divest Sanction Movement, or even directly supporting those trying to escape the hellish bombardment of their homes in Gaza, standing with Palestine is
an essential duty of anyone who calls themselves an environmentalist, a leftist, or a human being. Ultimately, the fate of Palestine asks us to question and rebel against the forces of fossil fuel imperialism and settler colonialism. It demands that we end the long history of flattening cities like Akka in 1840 or Gaza in 2024 to protect fossil fuel and the profits of capitalists. Because the struggle for climate justice is an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. If we are to truly build a more just, sustainable planet all people must be free.
I need your help. Unfortunately, sponsors and advertisers are uninterested in touching videos like this one. In order to continue discussing necessary videos that sponsors deem too "controversial" I increasingly rely on the generous support of viewers like you who directly support me on Patreon. I mean it when I say that Our Changing Climate would not exist without the grassroots support of my wonderful Patreon supporters. So, if you want to help keep this channel afloat so I can make even more anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial ecological content, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter using the link in the
description or onscreen right now. When you become a Patreon supporter you'll get early access to my videos ad-free, as well as access to our Patron's only discord server. At higher tiers you'll even get bonus content like a guided meditation to calm your climate anxiety or even the occasional full-length interview with authors or scholars. So again go to patreon.com/ourchangingclimate to help make more videos like these. And if you already support the channel, thank you so much, I hope you found this video illuminating and I'll see you next month!
