Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe

Israeli innovations in “green” technology are ostensibly aimed at sustainable resource management

and climate change mitigation. But sustainable development and environmental (in)justice in

Palestine/Israel need to be examined through interdisciplinary perspectives that account for the

broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts in which they occur. Taking into account the historical

and geographic context of Israel’s scientific development, we argue that Israel’s green technologies

are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands.

Within settler colonial analysis, environmental injustice comprises part of a broader pattern of settler

domination of Indigenous ecological relations, requiring attending not to ‘equity’ in relations

with the state and environment but a reckoning with settler privilege and the return of land to

Indigenous communities. We analyze the use of environmental infrastructures—specifically in

the areas of waste management, renewable energy, and agricultural technologies (“agritech”)—

as mechanisms for land appropriation and dispossession in Palestine/Israel. Our analysis of ‘greenwashing’

as a rhetorical strategy asserts that regardless of the ecological impact of individual technologies,

in Israel’s settler colonial context they further indigenous dispossession and elimination

and are therefore incommensurable with long-term socio-ecological resilience. Through this analysis

of Israeli greenwashing, we discuss Israeli sustainability initiatives and technological innovations

not as ahistorical discourses, commodities, or technologies, but as elements of a

historically situated settler colonial project.