Geographies of erasure: ecocide and genocide in Occupied Palestine.

In Palestine, the land dies alongside its people. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact. This is not a war. It is not a conflict between two states, nor a clash between equals. It is a colonial project — violent, calculated, and systematic — aimed at the eradication of the Palestinian people and the land that sustains them.

Occupation as an Ecological Weapon

The Israeli occupation does not only control lives: it dominates entire ecosystems. Land, water, air, vegetation — all are manipulated, rationed, polluted, or destroyed. This form of violence, slower but no less lethal, has a precise name: ecocide.

It is ecocide when Israel destroys Palestinian wells, forcing entire communities to rely on rationed, controlled water. In the West Bank, according to Amnesty International, Israel uses nearly 90% of shared water resources, leaving Palestinians with the bare minimum. In some areas, Israeli settlers consume up to eight times more water than neighboring Palestinian villages. Water thus becomes a weapon — a colonial privilege granted to occupiers and denied to those resisting.

It is ecocide when ancient olive trees are uprooted — more than 800,000 since 1967. Each uprooted tree is a wound to history and autonomy. Olive trees are not only a source of income: they are identity, memory, resistance. To destroy them is to sever the deep bond between people and their land.

It is ecocide when toxic Israeli landfills are placed next to Palestinian villages. When greenhouses are bombed. When the sea off Gaza becomes a poisoned wasteland, the soil saline, the air unbreathable. When, as documented by Forensic Architecture, the land is rendered toxic through a methodical assault on local ecologies.

Environmental destruction in Palestine is not collateral damage. It is a fundamental part of the genocidal project. As architect and theorist Eyal Weizman has written, “Colonialism is also about ecological appropriation. It is not only the soil that is conquered, but everything that lives and breathes upon it.”

The Architecture of Occupation: An Engineering of Disappearance

This strategy also unfolds through urban planning, bureaucratic control, and territorial manipulation. The architecture of occupation names a system that builds walls — but also invisible barriers. A network of illegal settlements, Israeli-only roads, military checkpoints, and areas declared “military” or “green” to prevent Palestinians from building, farming, or remaining on their land.

Israel has deliberately fragmented, disconnected, and degraded Palestinian geography. The objective is clear: to make life unlivable for Palestinians and simultaneously make the land available for colonial expansion.

Weizman describes this as a form of domination that is not confined to the flatness of maps, but extends vertically: into the sky, with drones and airstrikes; and below ground, with control over aquifers, tunnels, and archaeological layers. Every layer of the territory is colonized. Every meter is surveilled, exploited, or expropriated.

When the Environment Becomes a Weapon

In Palestine, the environment has become a colonial technology. The landscape is militarized, depleted, and weaponized. Every ecological act is a political act. Every environmental assault is a form of warfare — less visible, but no less deadly.

Ecological destruction is a tool of starvation, contamination, and dismantling of all possibility for autonomous existence. It is the erasure of the material conditions for life. It is a slow, relentless form of control. It is genocide — in one of its most widespread and normalized forms.

As the research collective Forensic Architecture, which has rigorously documented decades of ecological violence, wrote: “You cannot speak of ecology without speaking of militarization, colonialism, and environmental injustice. Palestine is the clearest expression of this entanglement.”

A Land That Resists

And yet, something resists. In every saved seed, every field planted against all odds, every rooftop garden blooming amidst the ruins. Palestinian resistance is also ecological: it is the daily practice of those who refuse to disappear. It is the stubborn defense of a land that continues to speak, even under siege.

In villages threatened with forced displacement — like Al-Walaja or Masafer Yatta — planting a tree or building a dry-stone wall is not simply agricultural. It is an act of insubordination. A declaration of presence. As one local activist said, “Our struggle to stay on this land is the struggle to breathe. To keep cultivating. To refuse disappearance.”

Palestinians are not only enduring a genocide: they are responding to systematic death with a culture of care, memory, and return. Every harvest, every cultivation, every map of a destroyed village is a political gesture, a form of active survival.

Naming It

There is no neutrality in the face of genocide. To keep calling it a “conflict” is complicity. So is environmentalism that stays silent, that avoids taking a position, that excludes Palestine from its maps.

To be an ecologist today is to be radically anti-colonial. It is to denounce the ongoing ecocide and recognize it as part of the larger genocide. It is to affirm, without hesitation, the Palestinian right to live, to return, to farm, to breathe.

Because when a land is dying, it is never dying alone. Someone is killing it. And those who kill the land, also kill the people who belong to it.