Why climate activists love to hate Israel

Climate activists have been busy since 7 October. The demands for ‘action now’ on global warming continue, but affairs in the Middle East are proving to be a distraction for Just Stop Oil. Cries of ‘free Gaza’, ‘ceasefire now’, and even ‘from the river to the sea’ – a chant, purported to be a cry for peace and ‘solidarity’ with Palestinians, but used by those who want to wipe Israel off the map – have now joined, and at times drowned out, the usual green slogans.

Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists took part in a sit-in protest at London’s Waterloo station on Saturday to demand a ceasefire, despite Hamas continuing to hold hundreds of Israelis hostage. The group’s eco-warriors have also been waving placards, condemning Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack: ‘Stop murdering children, free Palestine, end apartheid’. Of course, what JSO won’t tell you is that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid killing civilians, and particularly children; Palestine/Gaza is in chains thanks to its own theocratic, fascist government – Hamas – and Israel does not operate ‘apartheid’.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is also distracted from the looming climate apocalypse. Its website tells how ‘parents from Extinction Rebellion placed hundreds of empty childrens’ shoes’ in Trafalgar Square ‘to represent all the young Israeli and Palestinian lives lost in the ongoing fighting’. While XR does commemorate the 26 Israeli children killed by Hamas attacks on Israel, too many of the placards wielded by climate activists in recent weeks ignore the horrors done to Israel and the children who were attacked, many of whom are still trapped as hostages in Gaza. Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ murder of civilians is instead the usual target of activists. 

For some people keen on the climate cause, this focus can be bewildering. At a 70,000-strong climate protest, at which a keffiyah-sporting Greta Thunberg spoke, the crowd chanted ‘Palestine will be free’. As Greta prepared to speak, a man got on stage and tried to wrestle her microphone away from her, before telling the crowd: ‘I have come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view’. He was told by Thunberg to ‘calm down’ as he was dragged off stage. A ‘No climate justice on occupied land’ chant drowned out his protest. 

One might well wonder why some of those passionate about saving the planet have such an interest in events in the Middle East; why the battle against carbon emissions and Israel’s just self-defence following an attempted second Holocaust might be linked. According to XR, ‘Countries at war are less able to cope with the effects of climate change because their ability to adapt is undermined by internal divisions or ongoing violence.’

This seems vague, to say the least. What is clearer is that the climate movement has long prioritised populist, anti-progress, anti-humanist politics over facts, science, or reality. This is an ideological backdrop that can all too easily descend into plain-spoken anti-Semitism and an unhealthy fixation on the alleged evils of Israel. 

Not all climate protesters are anti-Semitic, of course, and most would probably be horrified at the suggestion. Regardless, in the case of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, truth, facts and history are brushed over by some protestors to make way for a discourse that tallies with many old anti-Semitic tropes, such as that Jews murder children for kicks. For a few activists, the spurious fixation with ‘climate justice’ itself is a device for pitting the oppressed ‘global south’, which Palestinians represent, against the carbon-spewing, greedy, cruel and racist, rich global north (Israel). Never mind that Israelis and Palestinians live in the same place. 

What unites the climate movement is the insatiable desire to blame and ban those things associated with power, profit and greed: free movement in the form of planes and cars; capitalism and the pursuit of wealth for ‘killing the planet’. For Jews like me, there is unease in the climate movement’s disgust of people who travel, whose families and professional interests are dispersed, and who thus constitute a rootless cosmopolitan elite. Ditto the yodelling for persons-of-the-land, communitarian life, the condemnation of those who don’t stay local, who are ‘nowheres’ instead of ‘somewheres’ as David Goodhart’s book put it. Jews generally haven’t had the privilege of digging into earth and soil, of being ‘folk’, and many slurs against cosmopolitans have, over the bloodthirsty years, been directed at us.

Green politics does attract people in good faith, who genuinely see climate change as a worry aside from highly politicked ideas of social justice and ‘equity’. But it is no surprise so many eco-warriors refuse to condemn Hamas, wear keffiyehs and relentlessly attack Israel – easily one of the greenest and most eco-forward states in the Middle East. For enemies of prosperity and the West, Israel – and its legitimate exercise of self-defence – are an irresistible target.