Extinction Rebellion Boston's Statement on the Palestinian struggle for freedom

SOCIAL JUSTICE IS CLIMATE JUSTICE

Before Israeli occupation, Palestinians produced their own grains, melons, olives, and other crops and native biodiversity was protected. Since Israeli occupation, biodiversity has decreased because Israelis removed indigenous plants and replaced them with invasive plants from Europe. This is a practice that Naomi Klein refers to as "green colonialism."

In the United States, the Biden administration is currently spending $1.3 billion more on funding the Israeli government and military than they are spending internationally to stop the Climate Crisis. They are using our tax dollars to fund violence instead of investing our money into national and international efforts to transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and urgently act on the biggest existential threat that humanity has ever faced.

The Biden administration's decision to allocate more funds to Israel than solving the Climate Crisis is counterintuitive. Without urgent action on the Climate Crisis, much of the Middle East is projected to be uninhabitable by 2100 and conflict over the land will become moot. Many Israelis and Palestinians will become climate migrants. The U.S. and other wealthy countries need to take urgent action to protect more vulnerable countries who are and will continue to suffer the worst effects of the Climate Crisis while having done the least to create it.

The World Economic Forum reports: "By 2050, temperatures in the MENA will be 4°C higher, according to Germany’s Max Planck Institute. By the end of the century, daytime highs could reach 50°C, with 200 days of exceptional heat every year. And without urgent action to curb global emissions, according to research, cities in the region may become uninhabitable before 2100."

Demanding and creating a world where every person is free from unnecessary suffering, violence, and has their basic needs met, regardless of race, social, or economic status, is imperative to our fight for a habitable Earth. As long as there are segments of the world's population that are abused or treated as disposable, while the rest of the world responds with silence or denial, there is space for environmental injustice to both continue and take root.

In a world where all life - human, plant, and animal - is viewed as equally worthy of living under conditions of security, peace, and protection, with the right to at least the bare minimum resources necessary to live a life of health and dignity, there would be no more space for fossil fuel infrastructure and excessive environmental destruction to exist.

Extinction Rebellion Boston stands with Palestinians in their fight for freedom from Israel, the freedom to live in peace, security, and the ability to continue to farm and care for the land. We stand against settler-colonial violence. Settler-colonial violence and imperialism are the drivers of the sixth mass extinction.

Our criticism of Israel has no basis in anti-semitism. We do not conflate the Jewish people with the Israeli nation. We condemn Israel's oppression of Palestinians while opposing any attacks on Jewish people, and we hope for a peaceful resolution between Palestinians and Israelis.

TAKE ACTION

Each of us has a role to play in bringing this US-enabled injustice to an end. Let us join our voices to those of people of conscience across the country and demand a say in how the $3.8 billion we give Israel every year is used.

Take this demand to your Members of Congress: stop bankrolling ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and start investing in health and safety for all. You can do so here.

See this 3 minute video for how aid to Israel from Massachusetts could be used at home. Please raise your voice and take this action now!