One of Abdul Hamed’s earliest childhood memories is having his home searched by Israeli Defense Forces. His mother and father were living in the United States, where they’d heard tales of better paying jobs and a thriving Palestinian immigrant community. Hamed lived with his grandfather and siblings in a small town north of Ramallah. His brother had a toy gun, and when soldiers drove down their street, he would rush to hide it underneath the house.
“A few times a month, they would yell through a loudspeaker ordering us to stay in our houses,” Hamed said. “We would see them from the window hunting young men, catching them and putting something on their eyes, and then throwing them in a truck.”
In his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, investigative journalist Christian Parenti describes a phenomenon he calls, “catastrophic convergence,” in which social and economic factors are reinforced by -- and in turn reinforce -- the devastating impacts of climate change. In the occupied Palestinian territories, climate change, conflict, and colonialism have all converged with catastrophic results.
In both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Israeli occupation and the ongoing Palestinian struggle for sovereignty have made adaptation to climate change nearly impossible, triggering what some call “eco-apartheid,” in which the Palestinian people are shouldering the vast majority of the burden of regional climate change impact, while Israel consumes and controls the vast majority of the region’s natural resources. The fate of Palestine in relation to climate change has become inseparable from the politics of the occupation. Gaza in particular can be seen as a case study of what conditions to expect when militarized borders trap people in increasingly uninhabitable areas. The UN predicts anywhere between 25 million and 1 billion people will become climate refugees by 2050.
But what happens if those people have nowhere to go?
In 2008, when Abdul was ten years old, his parents returned to Palestine for him and his siblings. They packed their belongings and left their home on the West Bank never to return. They traveled to the United States via Jordan and settled in the suburbs of a small Southern city, coincidentally in an area called the West Bank, in reference to its location relative to the Mississippi River.
Abdul is one of more than 6 million Palestinians living outside of their country of origin. The vast majority would have started their journey in the same place, Jordan. But more than half have never left. An estimated 3.2 million Palestinians live in Jordan today, many the children and grandchildren of people who were pushed out to make space for Israeli settlements, some still waiting in refugee camps to return to the place their ancestors were born.
Palestinians from the West Bank, like Abdul, have significantly more freedom of movement than their compatriots in the Gaza Strip.
Since 2007, over two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have been confined by Israel and Egypt to an area about the size of Rhode Island in the United States, making Gaza one of the most population-dense areas in the world. Residents of Gaza must secure exit permits from Israel to leave the territory, which are only granted in extreme humanitarian circumstances.
The consequences of the confinement faced by the people of Gaza since 2007 are extreme. As Israel and Egypt have upheld their land, sea, and air blockade of the territory, the population has grown, and conditions worsen every year. Restricted migration is paired with restricted access to resources, resulting in a growing humanitarian crisis that—according to policy experts—climate change threatens to escalate exponentially. Zena Agha, a Palestinian and Iraqi scholar who has researched the impacts of climate change in Palestine, warns that increased temperatures will "likely to lead to highly disruptive, if not catastrophic, changes to the region’s climate, including increased desertification."
Researchers have widely named food and water security in Gaza and the West Bank as the greatest challenges to the Palestinian people in achieving climate resilience, and Israel's control over natural resources in the region has so far stymied efforts to adapt to the changing climate. An estimated 97 percent of water in Gaza is considered undrinkable by international standards. Saltwater intrusion and pollution is a growing problem within the Coastal Aquifer, Gaza's main source of groundwater. At the same time, Israel has used an average of 75 percent of the sustainable groundwater the Coastal Aquifer provides each year.
Over 20 years ago, Assistant Professor Charles Harvey and Dr. Annette Huber-Lee of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published research warning that in order for Gaza to have enough clean water to sustain the population, agriculture would have to be entirely eliminated within their borders.
"Contaminated water accounts for more than 26% of all reported diseases in Gaza and is a leading cause of child mortality, at more than 12% of child deaths."
—Zena Agha, former Policy Fellow at Al-Shabaka
Since then, not only has Israel failed to address the issue of water quality and availability in Gaza, the Israeli government has eroded it further. During a several-weeks conflict between Israel and Gaza in the summer of 2014, it was widely reported that Israel bombed Gaza’s only power plant and significantly damaged water and sewage infrastructure. In the aftermath of that conflict, the siege on Gaza has continued, and the blockade has made it enormously difficult for Gaza officials to repair and replace failing infrastructure. In the summer of 2020, Gaza residents only had access to electricity for four hours each day.
Israel's failure to leave enough water for the residents of Gaza on its own is troubling. But the government's laissez-faire approach to their own water usage is only one of many ways Israel retains control of natural resources in the region. Israel also bans Palestinians from access to the Jordan River and claims the right to approve or deny any decisions about groundwater extraction in the occupied territories. As a result, Palestinians have extremely limited options and none so far which could feasibly achieve the World Health Organization's recommendations for the minimum amount of water needed to avoid health issues and meet basic needs: 50 to 100 liters per day.
Nidal Al-Azraq grew up in the UN-run Aida refugee camp located in Bethlehem. Today, he lives in Boston, where he’s the executive director of 1for3, an organization that partners with people in the West Bank to address water availability in refugee communities.
“In the summertime, Palestinians in many areas of the West Bank and Gaza face significant shortages. There might water once every two weeks, or every four weeks, or every two months. When you go to Palestine, you see a lot of water tanks on the rooftops, because they need to store this water and use it until the next time water is pumped,” said Nidal. “But imagine in the summertime, these metal pipes and metal tanks, they rust, and all kinds of bacteria can grow in them. So we started our work doing a lot of water testing and water quality work in refugee camps in Palestine.”
Eventually that work led them to start new projects, and today their partnerships in Palestine are providing health care, water testing and community water infrastructure support, urban farming programs, and even early childhood education in refugee communities in the West Bank. But Nidal is concerned about what the future holds for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
“Water is being used as a tool and sometimes as a weapon for sought and forced displacements,” he explained. “Right-wing religious groups are working to ensure there are as many settlers as possible in the lands without really paying attention to any of the environmental impact. They want to force displace as many Palestinians as possible by removing water and making the area unlivable. Later on, they go to Canada, the US, and Europe and secure funds from Zionist
Nidal Al-Azraq
Source: 1for3.org
families to establish parks with natural resources and wildlife. Like what they did in Walaja Village. And Walaja is an excellent example of that, where after they displaced people, took all the water resources, and dried the lands, now they are building a national park around the village which is in the West Bank and for Jewish only use.”
Abeer Al-Butmah, an engineer and gender justice and environmental activist in the West Bank, works as a coordinator for an organization called Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network - Friends of the Earth Palestine, or PENGON-foe. PENGON-foe is a coalition of a number of NGOs in the region working together to advance environmental justice. She agrees that the issue of climate cannot be divorced from the occupation.
"Palestinians have the right to sovereign control of our resources, but right now, Israel controls those resources. Israel restricts Palestinians from developing our own land, protecting our environment, and adapting to climate change," says Abeer. "Israel practices apartheid, and these practices work directly against building resilience in Palestine, making us more vulnerable to climate-related events. Our demand is Palestinian sovereignty for the land and natural resources."
Abeer believes that time is of the essence. "Without action, Palestinians will lose their basic rights to live on their land and will live basically in a prison under full Israeli control within the next five years."
Center: Abeer Al-Butmah
Source: Friends of the Earth International
The health of Palestinians continues to be negatively affected by the occupation and related policies and practices.
World Health Organization
2016
The future Abeer describes has already come to pass in Gaza, a region that’s often described as an open-air prison. In 2012, the United Nations predicted in a report that Gaza would be unlivable by 2020. As 2020 approached, news outlets around the world resurfaced that report for headline stories. But among those in Gaza, the reaction to this news was not panic. By 2019, Gaza had already been unlivable for years by many of its residents' standards.
Waterborne illness is the leading cause of childhood illness and death in Gaza. Electricity
shortages hamper the sewage treatment process, and raw sewage is often seen flowing into the Mediterreanean sea along its coast. In the summer, which is a little bit warmer each year, hot temperatures lure people into the water for relief. The crumbling infrastructure, combined with sea rise in the Mediterreanean, threatens the underground water aquifer with both saltwater intrusion and bacteria, making it difficult to imagine the aquifer continuing to supply Gaza with water for much longer. Already, wells throughout Gaza have been closed due to salinization making the water undrinkable.
Border restrictions that prevent people from leaving increasingly uninhabitable places could easily replicate the conditions seen in Gaza today on a global scale.
Border restrictions that prevent people from leaving increasingly uninhabitable places could easily replicate the conditions seen in Gaza today on a global scale.
Today, Abdul Hamed is an art student in Maryland. He loves Korean TV dramas and hopes to work in the graphic design industry when he graduates. He says he worries about climate change sometimes but doesn’t feel like it’s particularly relevant to his life. His housemates have quit using paper towels in favor of rags and always compost and recycle. Hamed’s experience will be shared by a significant majority of the global north, those on the wealthier and more powerful side of borders that are more fortified every day.
The situation on the ground in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank as well, has serious implications beyond the region and across the world. A 2020 study published by the National Academy of the Sciences suggested that up to 3 billion people will live in extreme environments “unsuitable for human life to flourish.” It’s widely accepted that migration will become a necessity for survival in the context of climate change, and in some parts of the world, this migration has already begun. Border restrictions that prevent people from leaving increasingly uninhabitable places could easily replicate the conditions seen in Gaza today on a global scale.
Gaza’s fate rests in part with the international community and in particular the leaders of those wealthier and more powerful nations. Anti-occupation activists on the ground in Palestine and abroad have had considerable success raising global awareness of the plight of Palestinians over the last decade, and political tension is increasing. But even as the pressure mounts, the slow poaching of over two million people trapped between soldiers and the Mediterranian sea continues. It is not clear yet how far away we are from the point of no return. Still, Nidal and Abeer, alongside thousands of others, are working relentlessly to secure a better future for Palestine. Perhaps, there is reason to hope.
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