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Greenwashing is Israel’s attempt to project a pro-environment image abroad while in practice destroying the ecology of Palestine and cementing its apartheid rule.
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Most of Israel’s alleged environmentally friendly initiatives are in fact hostile to the Palestine ecological landscape. Take for example the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) forestation enterprise which claims environmental benefits to the land by ”reinvigorating soil” when in reality only eleven percent of the thousands of trees the JNF has planted over decades are native to Palestine. These new species are endangering numerous endemic species. When you look a little closer into the JNF’s history you’ll quickly find that it was in fact first established in the early 20th century as part of Zionist efforts to slowly take control over Palestinian land.
The JNF continues this work in 2023. As of April 2023, the Palestinian village of Al-Araqib has been demolished over 200 times to make way for a JNF forest project that plants pine trees in the desert. The fight for Al-Araqib is ongoing.
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Israeli apartheid comes with a heavy dose of environmental racism. Israel’s apartheid rule and blockade on Gaza have left Palestinians with little to no access to safe or reliable water sources. According to the UN ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption and eighty-five percent of the West Bank’s water resources are controlled by Israel. Israel also uses Palestinian land to dispose of its hazardous waste. For example, illegal Israeli settlements dispose of approximately forty million cubic meters of wastewater onto nearby Palestinian land each year.
Settler-colonialism always impacts the ecology and environment of native land. The case of Israel’s occupation of Palestine is no different.
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Here are a few articles that dig into the specific impacts of colonialism on the Palestinian people and their environment.
Israel’s Ecological Apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Palestine is a climate justice issue
An Environmental Nakba: The Palestinian Environment Under Israeli Colonization
The destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure is exacerbating environmental health impacts
How Palestine’s climate apartheid is being depoliticised
Palestine: ‘Climate change is not just a natural phenomenon but a political one.’
Why write to Sierra Club Board candidates now?
Sierra Club members are currently voting on their next Board of Directors.
Candidates for open board positions are taking questions from Sierra Club members and supporters up until voting ends on April 26th. This is our opportunity to push candidates to take a stand, and clarify their position on the Sierra Club’s greenwashing tours.
You can use our tool to write directly to the board candidates and ask them to honor the Sierra Club's commitment to cancel future tours to apartheid Israel.
We have a small window of time to influence the incoming board. It is vital that we ask them now to take a stand against environmental racism and show up in solidarity with indigenous Palestinians.
Why are we asking them to cancel these trips?
In March 2023, the Sierra Club sponsored a “nature outing” to Israel that willfully ignored ongoing Israeli settler colonialism, Israel’s illegal military occupation, and its brutal siege on Gaza.
Although the Sierra Club canceled a similar trip last year after meeting with a coalition of Palestinians, Indigenous leaders from Turtle Island, and Jewish and Black allies, it failed to come through on its commitment to cancel future trips.
These trips support Israeli apartheid and Israel’s abuses of the Palestinian people. They are part of Israel’s greenwashing strategy to cover up settler colonialism and environmental destruction.
The reality is:
Israel commits water apartheid, where settlers use three to eight times as much water as the Palestinian people whose lands they occupy in the West Bank, redirecting water to prioritize Israeli settlers.
Only 11% of trees in Israeli forests are indigenous species. The rest are non-native species replanted by Israel to quickly take over land where lies the ruins of at least 182 destroyed Palestinian villages.
The Israeli state has designated much of Palestinian land stolen in 1948 as protected nature parks and reserves, similar to U.S. conservationists' establishment of national parks on plundered native land. Colonization and erasure of Indigenous people is never green—it’s deadly greenwashing.
Sierra Club claims that it is promoting environmental justice by attempting to repair past harm toward Black and Indigenous communities. However, it cannot make this claim if it excludes Palestinians who are still being ethnically cleansed by the state of Israel.
Tips for your letter to the board:
We've provided a sample letter to get you started but it's always better to use your own words.
Please change the subject line so that the emails look different from one another.
If you are a Sierra Club member, donor, or have been involved with them in any way, it’s great to put that in the subject line and the first sentence of your email.
And if you have the time to write your own letter or reword the template that is the best!
Thank you for taking action with us.
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