Green Technologies, White Colonies: Zionism and the Colonial Uses of “Indigeneity” and “Environmentalism” 

Grey Weinstein & Angel White

Abstract:

This paper explores two competing liberal Zionist discourses which attempt to justify the Zionist project by invoking a unique relationship between settlers and the land. First, we examine how despite its enactment of environmental harm and ecological apartheid, contemporary Zionist discourse frames the Israeli state as a global leader in environmentalism, positing the Zionist settler as a civilizing force over a “savage” landscape. Second, we analyze a competing Zionist discourse that frames Zionism as an Indigenous land sovereignty movement. Taken together, we demonstrate how adherents of liberal Zionism simultaneously view themselves as Indigenous stewards of the land, and as settlers whose technological superiority to the Indigenous “other” justifies their control of the land. To understand these ecological discourses, we analyze liberal Zionist writing and place it in conversation with Indigenous scholars’ understanding of Indigeneity as founded on resistance to colonialism. Contextualizing the narrative of the Israeli state as a pillar of environmentalism within a broader history of colonial environmentalism, we demonstrate how this narrative is both factually inaccurate as well as a continuation of the colonial aims that founded the environmentalist movement. Despite their blatant and inherent contradictions, these two strands of liberal Zionist discourse operate together to disguise the colonial nature of the Zionist project while continuing to perpetuate that very colonialism. We identify three central mechanisms that liberal Zionism uses to accomplish this: 1) it posits a post-politics framework that naturalizes the Israeli state’s colonial expansion; 2) it imposes a white supremacist view of natural and racial purity onto Palestine’s ecology; and 3) it re-embraces the terra nullius view of Palestinians as invisible. These mechanisms demonstrate the centrality of racism to liberal Zionist discourse and spotlight the structural flaws in liberal and leftist conceptualizations of Indigeneity and the environment. We conclude by calling on environmentalists and anti-Zionist critics to engage with how liberal Zionism continually weaponizes appeals to sustainability and decolonization in service of white supremacy. 

Keywords: Decolonization, Environmentalism, Greenwashing, Indigeneity, Liberal Zionism

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In this paper we investigate two central claims of liberal Zionism¹: that all Jews are Indigenous to Palestine, and that Israel is a world leader in environmentalism. While both claims are meant to shore up liberal and left-wing support for the Israeli state, upon closer inspection they demonstrate how Zionism functions as racism. 

We explore two different liberal Zionist arguments that pertain to the coloniality of environmentalism. First, we lay out how modern liberal Zionism frames itself as an Indigenous decolonization movement. Yet even as they profess their so-called Indigeneity, liberal Zionist Jews use a second argument that frames Zionist settlers as a civilizing force over a “savage” landscape. Building on early Zionist rhetoric about how Jewish emigration to Palestine would “make the desert bloom,” modern liberal Zionism touts Israeli anti-climate change initiatives as evidence of the state’s technological and moral superiority. Arguing that the Zionist project’s superior and forward-thinking use of the land justifies its continued occupation of Palestine, they appeal to the colonial logic of “proper use” doctrine.²

Yet, situated within the historical context of colonialism, we contend that the Zionist state’s self-proclaimed global leadership in environmentalism does not constitute a perversion or betrayal of “true” environmentalist values. Rather, the Zionist state deploys environmentalist rhetoric and policy for its stated purpose: colonial extraction. Yet, by simultaneously claiming that the Jewish Zionist settler is Indigenous to Palestine, liberal Zionism seeks to obscure the inherent colonialism of its environmentalist policies. Working hand-in-hand, self-Indigenizing and environmentalist logics aim to depoliticize Zionist colonialism, impose a white supremacist spatial ordering onto Palestinian land, and invisibilize and thus dehumanize Palestinians. By identifying these liberal Zionist arguments as a mechanism for maintaining the hegemony of a colonial, white supremacist state, we draw attention to Zionism as racism. Toward challenging liberal Zionism, our analysis reveals key flaws in how it—and liberal and left discourses more broadly—imagines ecology, Indigeneity, and connection to the land.

Implementing Ecological Apartheid: The Policies of Liberal Zionist Environmentalism

While the Zionist state has proclaimed itself a leader in liberal reform by implementing various environmentalist policies, its green paradise for settlers comes at the expense of the environmental destruction of Palestinian land. Zionism professes to “make the desert bloom,” a slogan used by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) while buying large swathes of Palestinian land,³ but decades of Zionist afforestation have devastated native desert ecosystems, resulting in 89% non-native tree plantations and uprooting native olive and carob trees in the process. These “pine deserts” have devastated Palestinian ecosystems through erosion, acidification of local greenery, soil degradation, and the spreading of wildfires.⁴ Still, Zionism also holds up afforestation as evidence that Zionist settlers are protectors of the land.”⁵

The dissonance between the Israeli state’s environmentally destructive actions and its pro-environmental rhetoric has existed since Zionism violently established its colony in Palestine. Following the Nakba in 1948, the Zionist state began to establish environmentalist policies aimed at controlling Palestinian movement. The state planted trees along the Green Line to delineate the West Bank from territory the Zionist project now deemed “Israel” and thereby “further isolate the [West Bank] and curtail the freedom of Palestinians to fully access their homeland.”⁶ In the Naqab Desert, Zionist afforestation impeded the movement of nomadic Palestinian Bedouin peoples.⁷ Zionist settlers consolidated Palestinian agricultural land into kibbutzim and moshavim, agrarian communes that Zionism championed as pillars of equitable community living even as they operated to seize, de-Arabize, and Judaize stolen land.⁸ The Zionist state has also created national parks, nature reserves, and protected forests out of formerly populated Palestinian villages, impeding Palestinians’ right of return. It has done the same to colonized and annexed territory like the Syrian Golan Heights.⁹ Undertaken in the name of preserving the environment, the Zionist state’s transformation of the land solidifies its military and political territorial dominance.

Today, the Zionist state continues its environmental settler mission, branding itself as a global innovator advancing the cutting edge of sustainability. As Zionist settlers systematically bulldoze Palestinian land and uproot olive trees, the state champions the agricultural progress of the Israeli state’s olive plantations’ selectively bred fruits.¹⁰ This greenwashing smokescreen obscures the state’s environmental violence while bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the Israeli state’s agri-tech companies.¹¹ While the Israeli state highlights its waste treatment plant in Tel Aviv for processing a refuse-derived green alternative to fossil fuel, most of the state’s waste treatment plants are built in the West Bank, where they violate international regulations around hazardous waste dumping.¹² The Zionist state also deploys solar energy to extend its energy output and limit Palestinians’ access to renewable sources.¹² Zionist settlements in the West Bank have placed massive amounts of solar panels in the Jordan Valley, while the Zionist government simultaneously empowers settlers to destroy Palestinian solar farms. Lastly, proclaiming itself a world leader in sustainable water use, the Israeli state touts its investments in drip irrigation technology. However, illegal Zionist settlements implement drip irrigation on stolen Palestinian land, while denying or obstructing Palestinian use of the same technologies.¹⁴

In case after case, under the guise of Western scientific process and environmental sustainability the Zionist state dispossesses Palestinians of land and consolidates it for itself. By tying science and sustainability to domination, the Zionist state employs colonial technologies to demonstrate the Israeli state’s superior capability to care for the land, while simultaneously using that technology to implement ecological apartheid and conceal its own environmental destruction. Deprivation of resources, destruction of infrastructure, and continuous violence makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to advance sustainable environmental initiatives.¹⁵ These realities speak to a system of colonization that enables Zionist settlers to enjoy greater ecological health at the expense of the dispossession and environmental degradation suffered by Indigenous Palestinians. 

It is tempting to conclude that the Israeli state’s environmental colonialism represents a betrayal of environmentalist principles, and that colonial exploitation corrupts righteous ideals about protecting the environment. However, such an argument would require us to ignore the fact that environmentalism has always been colonial. In the 19th century, settler colonies began to face mass environmental degradation from resource extraction.¹⁶ Since environmental collapse would decimate a colony’s profit and place in the colonial trade network, conservation movements emerged to introduce incremental sustainable practices that would allow for continuous resource extraction. Claiming that white, urban, bourgeois elite were best suited to protect the land, early environmentalist discourse justified elite land ownership and control,¹⁷ ushering in new iterations of Western ideas about property and terra nullius.¹⁸ Environmentalism continues to section off land in the name of conservation and preservation, while utilizing such enclosure to reify and expand the power of colonial states. Across much of colonized Africa and Asia, vast tracts of land are enshrined as natural parks, obstructing the return of that land to Indigenous peoples. In the name of protecting the environment, paramilitary park rangers enact state violence against those seeking to inhabit, steward, or utilize this land, criminalizing them as trespassers or poachers.¹⁹ Such actions are not the perversion of environmentalist ideals, but rather environmentalism enacted as intended by dominant powers. 

Colonial Discourses: Liberal Zionist Greenwashing Then and Now 

Prior to the Israeli state’s violent inception, Zionist self-justification relied heavily on discourse about Palestine’s environment. For early Zionist writers, Palestine was “poor and neglected,” a “wilderness” that would soon be transformed by “oases—our Jewish settlements!”²⁰ Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the Israeli state’s first president, stated that Palestine’s “beauty can only be brought out” by Zionist settlers who “will devote their lives to healing its wounds.”²¹ Early Zionist rhetoric thus establishes a dichotomy between Palestine under the stewardship of Indigenous Palestinians–backwards, savage, barren, injured, and hostile to life–and under the domination of Zionist settlers–flourishing, healing, hearty, and alive. This dichotomy reflects the colonial understanding of “a degraded and unworthy East” and “a noble, enlightened West,” wherein the Zionist project tames the land via the progress and civilization of Western colonial forces.²²

This discourse draws directly on European justification for colonialism, namely the Lockean concept of proper use. Philosopher John Locke, commonly known as the father of liberalism, argued that ownership over land was based on one’s ability to use their labor to “improve” the land. Believing that European settlers possessed rationality and knowledge that Indigenous peoples lacked, Locke argued that only settlers were morally justified in controlling and extracting the land’s resources.²³): ch. 5.] This reasoning appears in various justifications of Europe’s global colonial endeavors, providing a moral backing for the forced dispossession, slaughter, and domination of Indigenous peoples. Assuming that Indigenous peoples are unable to efficiently steward the land, a Lockean logic posits the land as effectively a wasteland and thus virtually uninhabited.²⁴ This concept of terra nullius goes hand-in-hand with proper use to justify European colonialism. The Indigenous population of a given land is seen as at once both so inefficient as to make their removal and genocide justifiable, and simultaneously so inefficient as not to exist at all.

Terra nullius is most notably embodied by Zionist claims that a Jewish state would “make the desert bloom” in Palestine. Building on the image of Palestinian desert ecosystems as arid wastelands, Zionist leaders envisioned an afforestation campaign that would turn the Naqab Desert green.²⁵ By aiming to transform the “backwards, uncivilized” desert into a green oasis, Zionist rhetoric positions itself as a civilized and technologically advanced colonial force that is able to properly use the land, justifying its seizure of Palestinian land.²⁶ At the same time, Zionism employs the logic of terra nullius by portraying Palestine as an empty desert and thus “a land without a people for a people without a land.”²⁷ By constructing the desert of Palestine as degraded, Zionist discourse simultaneously proclaims settler superiority over the native Palestinian population and erases that population altogether.

In line with this colonial environmentalist tradition, liberal Zionist greenwashing instrumentalizes environmental interventions to sustain colonial extraction, which they justify through an appeal to the West’s superior ability to care for the land. As political ecologist Gabi Kirk explains, American agricultural scientists began to partner with Zionist settlers at the end of WWI, employing so-called Western technologies to enhance the output of Zionist plantations.²⁸ American funding, particularly from Jewish American institutions, became central to the survival of Zionist settlements during this period (previous Zionist settlements from the first and second aliyot, or waves of settlement [1882–1903 and 1904–1914 respectively], had been kept afloat by European capital despite their agricultural failures).²⁹ American horticulturalists, botanists, and other agricultural scientists determined that the Zionist settler was more suited to “technologically advanced agriculture” due to their presumed superior intellectual capabilities, while deeming native Palestinians better suited to manual labor in the so-called harsh climate.³⁰ Such technologically advanced agriculture could, in turn, be utilized by the “intellectually superior” Zionist settler to make the land flourish, American ecological scientists argued. This rhetoric was used to justify the seizure of Palestinian land, the segregation of Palestinians from Zionist settlers, and the spatial reordering of Palestinian land into plots deemed ready for Zionist settlers. Early American agricultural technology thus enforced a racial hierarchy that, through the language of ecological productivity and sustainability, insisted upon the racial superiority of the Zionist settler as more evolved and intelligent than Palestinians.³¹

Today, the Israeli state’s agri-tech is funded not only by Jewish American institutions but also, largely, by the state. Since 1977, the U.S.–Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD) has funneled American money into research into genetically modified organisms (GMOs), selectively bred crops, aquaculture, and “desert farming” technologies in the Zionist state.³² In 2013, the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) signed a memorandum of understanding with BARD.³³ BARD allocated $11 million to the NIFA-BARD-IIA program in 2021, a joint U.S.-Israeli research program “fostering sustainable agricultural practices and the development of innovative food and nutrition technologies.”³⁴ In 2024, it launched the NIFA-BARD-MOST Nutritional Security Program, which invested $1.1 million in “sustainable solutions to nutritional security.”³⁵ These projects largely focus on selective breeding and genetic modification of crops. BARD also boasts of funding research projects at 1,661 American universities between 1979 and 2024, spending a sum of over $169 million³⁶ to “foster collaborative agricultural research between the US and Israel.”³⁷ The Israeli state’s agri-tech cloaks itself in the green progressivism of sustainability, while the supposedly superior innovation of the Israeli state’s Western-backed agri-tech is used to gesture toward the Zionist’s superior technological ability to maximize the land’s productivity. Such greenwashing argues for the technological and moral superiority of the Zionist state, mobilizing proper use doctrine in a modern context. Exercising discursive power through greenwashing, the Zionist state employs agri-tech to maintain the logic of proper use and reinforce a racial binary between enlightened, advanced Zionist settlers and base, uncivilized natives. We see continuity from early waves of pre-Nakba Jewish settlement to the present, wherein farming and specifically agricultural technology (such as GMOs, organic farming, etc.) are tools to expand settlements and consolidate Palestinian territory under the control of the Zionist state.³⁸

This greenwashing is also reflected through the Zionist state’s implementation of solar energy. Zionist settlements have created major solar farms in the West Bank, especially in the Jordan Valley region. The Israeli state uses these farms to present itself as a global leader in green energy and as a model for other countries to emulate.³⁹ At the same time, the Zionist state conducts a campaign of seizures and demolitions that has undermined Palestinian attempts to develop solar energy.⁴⁰ This system is even more intensified by the Oslo partitioning of the West Bank, since the most suitable areas for solar energy are all “Area C,” under control of the Israeli state. “Area C” is the largest part of the West Bank, where Palestinians are required to obtain building permits from the Israeli state.⁴¹ Given that less than 2% of these permits are approved,⁴² it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to develop solar energy, demonstrating how Zionist greenwashing imposes environmental apartheid. The Zionist state redirects attention away from its colonial endeavors by presenting settlements as expanding solar energy, rather than furthering displacement. The necessity of creating more solar—and therefore green—energy justifies, and conceals, colonization. We further witness the modern transformation of terra nullius. While Palestinians are deprived of solar energy because the Israeli state’s law criminalizes solar projects, greenwashing transforms this discriminatory state behavior into a claim about the technological and moral superiority of Zionist settlers. The political structures that prevent Palestinians from constructing solar energy are erased, and the lack of solar energy among Palestinians is presented as a natural(ized) racial/ethnic deficiency. Taken together, solar energy projects hide the explicit colonialism within Zionism, while also implicitly maintaining the discursive strategies that justify colonization and domination.

Besides GMOs and solar energy, the Zionist state also invests in drip irrigation, waste management, water conservation, and other green techniques. This system of sustainability not only maintains agriculture for a growing population of settlers who continue to dominate the land, but also keeps investments and capital flowing into the colonial state while simultaneously providing justification for further colonial expansion. Claiming it has transformed the desert into a green oasis, the Zionist project implicitly argues that it has demonstrated a greater ability than the native population to steward the land and the environment.⁴³ The Israeli state is framed as a steward of progress, environmentalism, and technological advancement, contrasted with the ignorance and ineffectiveness of the native Palestinians. Such rhetoric harkens back to the doctrine of proper use, arguing for the superiority of the Zionist settler’s land stewardship – a prime example of liberal Zionism in action. Thus, such greenwashing is not a departure from, but rather another iteration of, traditional environmentalism’s dependence on ideas about terra nullius and private property. Positing the Zionist state as a pioneer and world leader in climate justice, the language of imperialism betrays the colonial framework that greenwashing reinforces.⁴⁴

The Zionist state also utilizes enclosure of Palestinian land to preclude Indigenous sovereignty and expand colonial settlements, further aligning with the traditional colonialism and white supremacy of the Western environmental movement. This manifests through the Zionist project’s afforestation, which limits Palestinian movement and herding practices along the Green Line and in the Naqab. The enclosure of Palestinian land into natural parks or nature preserves to prevent the right of return, and the expansions of settlements for the purpose of experimenting with solar panels or drip irrigation on Palestinian land are further examples. In this manner, Zionist environmentalist policies serve to consolidate Zionist control of territory, dictate the movement of Palestinians, and discipline and control the Palestinian population. Remaking the landscape of Palestine through spatial (re-)ordering is an exercise of power that places Palestinian land under Zionist dominion and renders it inaccessible to Palestinians.⁴⁵ Here, environmentalist discourse and greenwashing operate as mechanisms of racism by preserving, strengthening, and expanding the power of the Zionist state. Through Zionism, environmentalism carries out one of its key functions: enabling colonial expansion and extraction.

“Zionist Indigeneity”

Unlike their contemporary liberal descendants, early Zionist leaders were unabashed in their colonial project to create a Jewish settler nation-state through the violent elimination of Indigenous Palestinians. Theodor Herzl, hailed as the father of modern Zionism, spoke openly of Zionism as “something colonial.” In his landmark pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Herzl outlined his vision of the Zionist project’s “occupation of land,” which was to be “systematically settled.”⁴⁶ Early Zionist congresses established institutions with names like the Jewish Colonial Trust.⁴⁷ In turn, Herzl explicitly referred to Palestinians as “natives” and to Palestine as their “territory.”⁴⁸ In his diary Herzl laid out the terms of Palestinians’ “expropriation and the removal,” describing them in Der Judenstaat as “wild beasts.”⁴⁹ Through this violent displacement and elimination of native Palestinians by European Jews, the father of modern Zionism imagined harnessing Europe’s wealth and monopoly on violence to establish yet another colonial state.⁵⁰

Alongside this violent rhetoric, the Zionist focus on Palestine brought with it a narrative of the creation of a Jewish nation-state as a return to an ancestral homeland. Early Zionist leaders began to incorporate Biblical allusions into their discourse, invoking God’s alleged promise of the Holy Land to the Jewish people.⁵¹ They imagined the Zionist project as a Jewish return to a land that once belonged to them, dramatizing “the spurious claim that the ancient Israelites were given the country because of a divine promise” while ignoring the reality “that Palestine has been continuously inhabited, owned, and cultivated by its people long before the Bible.”⁵² This combination of direct appeal to religion and pseudo-history tinted by religious interpretation became foundational for justifying Zionist colonialism.

Zionism’s religious claim to the “fatherland” is not at odds with Herzl’s conception of Zionism as a colonial endeavor. The concept of divine providence has long been used by colonizing forces to justify violently dispossessing people of their land, as in European colonists’ employment of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.⁵³ But where European settlers of the past saw themselves as simply spreading European culture and religion to new lands, Zionist settlers believed their mission was to “rebuild … a vanished Jewish State” of the Biblical era and reestablish a “lost fatherland,”⁵⁴ rhetorically constructing a historical Jewish connection to the land. This is demonstrated by Zionist settlers in the 1910s, who employed “indigenising and nativising strategies” such as adopting the dress of native Palestinians in order to cultivate the image of “the ‘new Jew’ or the New Hebrew Man, rebranded as a ‘native,’ self-reliant and armed Jew ‘rooted’ in the land of Palestine.”⁵⁵ Here, a rhetorical shift appears: the Zionist settlers’ pride in their role as colonizer is traded out for the language of nativity. Thus, we see how the appeal to a Jewish return to a lost homeland sets the stage for liberal Zionist proponents of the twenty-first century to argue the case for their own Indigeneity.

In the 2020s, as calls for decolonization and land back become increasingly mainstream in the U.S. (and, then, globally), liberal Zionism has co-opted this language in service of the Zionist project. Discourse that previously framed the Zionist project as an effort to “rebuild a Jewish homeland” now labels the very same Zionist project as an Indigenous movement of decolonization.⁵⁶ In 2024, theTimes of Israel proclaimed that Zionism is a “fight for indigenous rights and sovereignty,” while the Jewish magazine Tablet stated that “Israel stands as the original land-back and decolonization model” and that Zionism “is the essence of being indigenous.”⁵⁷ In a 2022 piece for theTimes of Israel, Bob Ryan argues, “To be indigenous, one must have ancient claims to the land, which is only the Jewish people.”⁵⁸ This rhetoric, although wearing the cloak of contemporary liberal and even leftist political ideology, clearly traces back to the religious and historical claims of early-1900s Zionism. The Jewish people’s alleged ancient claims to the land harken back to the assertion of a Biblical Jewish presence in Palestine, whose claim to the land is strengthened by divine providence. The assertion that Palestine’s Indigenous population includes only the Jewish people—Ryan continues that “there can be no other peoples” with “a greater claim to ancestral land in Israel”—violently erases the historical presence of Palestinians on their own land. Ryan’s claim seeks to establish not only a justification for colonization, but evidence of an inherently decolonizing force behind Zionism. By proclaiming ownership of the “ancestral land” of Palestine, Ryan draws on the concepts of historical and spiritual connection to the land to assert the Zionist settler as Indigenous, and thus justify the ongoing control of Palestine by the Zionist project.

By defining itself as an Indigenous movement, Zionism maintains elements of its early incarnation—the assertion of a Jewish return to the homeland of their ancestors. At the same time, it rejects what is less savory to contemporary left-leaning audiences—the open support for colonialism. The argument for what we refer to as “Zionist Indigeneity” thus functions as a manifestation of liberal Zionism, adopting an image of concern for human rights even as it reifies a colonial framework.⁵⁹ As we show, by invoking decolonization and land back movements, liberal Zionism accomplishes something quite noteworthy: it uses the language of decolonization to marshal discursive power to enforce colonial land seizure, borders, and governments. 

​​It is tempting to view liberal Zionism, and its appeal to Indigeneity and environmentalism, as an aberration; however, this is not the case. A century before the founding of the Israeli state, the Back to Africa movement led to the founding of Liberia. African American settlers colonized African territory as the ruling class and enforced a strict hierarchy between themselves and the Indigenous populations of the area. These actions were justified under the guise of African Americans being “native” to Africa.⁶⁰ Indigeneity, in addition to justifying colonial ventures, has also been used to extend imperialistic power and re-enforce racialized logics. In 1982, Canada passed The Constitution Act,which legally established the concept of “Aboriginal Rights.” While on the surface a positive change, the Supreme Court of Canada interrupted these rights not as giving the Indigenous people in Canada self-governance, but instead as requiring Canadian courts to define what were, in fact, “Aboriginal Rights.” Since what counted as “Aboriginal Rights” was based on the “distinctive culture” of each Indigenous nation, this meant that the Canadian courts acquired the power to decide what was or wasn’t part of each Indigenous community’s culture.⁶¹ The Soviet Union constructed a similar reality in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet ethnographers led a process to declare which Indigenous groups were or were not a nation. The Soviet state decided which peoples were worthy of accommodation and autonomous governance, adopting a white supremacist logic of creating a definitional grid out of a chaotic landscape.⁶² In all these cases, we see the same process: Indigeneity being utilized to uphold colonization and racial categorization.

Indigenizing Zionist Environmentalism

In the liberal Zionist imagination, then, the Zionist settler is simultaneously an Indigenous steward of the land and a colonizer who must be entrusted with the land as a result of their technological (and thus racial) superiority to the Indigenous other. These discourses frame the land of Palestine as a territory with which the Zionist has a meaningful spiritual connection to as an Indigenous person, and as a hostile, foreign landscape that must be tamed. These conceptualizations of the figure of the Zionist and the landscape of Palestine are inherently contradictory. 

To see these contradictory frameworks operate in tandem, we briefly return to modern liberal Zionist writing to explain what we mean by “Indigenizing Zionist environmentalism.” The Jerusalem Post champions its “spiritual, physical, and historical ties to a piece of land” to advocate for the Zionist entity’s “land stewardship” over Palestine.⁶³ In marshalling this imagined Indigeneity to support a claim to “land stewardship,” the author invokes not just the right to political control of Palestinian territory, but also the right to the care and keeping of its ecological resources. Tablet magazine proclaims, “Even the soil responds, blossoming and springing to life when its original caretakers walk upon it once again,” arguing for an explicit connection between the Zionist entity’s territorial control of occupied Palestine and the flourishing of the land’s ecological resources.⁶⁴ Colonial rhetoric is harder to spot in these pieces, because it is interspersed with the self-Indigenizing logic of liberal Zionism. The same colonial rhetoric of proper use appears: Zionist colonizers can properly cause the earth to “blossom and spring to life,” and thus deserve land stewardship and political control over the territory. Here too the logic of terra nullius operates, if only by omission—the Jewish people are the land’s “original caretakers” with “spiritual, physical, and historical ties,” and Palestinians are nowhere to be seen. But articles are framed around the very rhetoric that many scholars argue is necessary for the decolonization of environmentalism: Indigenous sovereignty and land stewardship. 

Although contradictory, then, liberal Zionism’s use of both self-Indigenizing language and the colonial language of environmentalism accomplishes a key goal. It allows liberal Zionism to define itself as a decolonial movement while still championing its financial and military backing by Western neocolonial powers. In conversation with one another, these discourses seek to reframe Zionism as possessing a decolonial nature that is still consistent with its ability to align itself with the West, purge the land of Palestinians, and tame the wilderness. Such cognitive dissonance aligns with the goals of liberal Zionism, which seeks to justify settler colonialism in progressive or even socialist terms. Self-Indigenizing arguments attempt to establish Ayyash’s second pillar of liberal Zionism, that “Jews have inherent, biblical, and sovereign claims to the land of Palestine,” while Zionist environmentalism attends to the third pillar, that the Zionist state is a beacon of progress and Western enlightenment.⁶⁵

In addition to justifying settler colonialism as the unquestionable post-political status quo,⁶⁶ liberal Zionist environmentalism also contributes to the colonial division and construction of land. In his book Enclosure, Gary Fields details how Zionism reordered the spatial reality of Palestine.⁶⁷ Zionist settlers began this process through maps that erased Palestinian towns and gave new Zionist names to the land. This implementation of terra nullius justified the next step of spatial reordering: the material theft of territory. Before stolen land was given to settlers, it was first surveyed, divided up, and turned into a European style grid that defined property lines as well as lines of exclusion.⁶⁸

Transformation of the environment has long been a major part of this spatial reordering. Whether it is the JNF’s longstanding afforestation efforts, the establishment of kibbutzim, or Zionist settlers using the West Bank to test new green technologies, numerous efforts have contributed to the theft and re-purposing of Palestinian land. Fields notes these environmental efforts have two interconnected legitimating effects for Zionist discourse. First, importing greenery allows Zionist settlers to claim they are re-creating ancient Judea, which is imagined as a green paradise. Second, Zionist settlers can see themselves as bringing order, and therefore a thriving future, to an unordered and chaotic landscape.⁶⁹ These dual claims are useful for proponents of liberal Zionism as they allow for a self-image as stewards of an ancient, Indigenous nature, while also being masters and conquerors of the land.

Extending Fields’s analysis, we suggest that what connects historical Zionist and contemporary liberal Zionist thinkers is an attempt to impose a white supremacist hierarchy onto the land.⁷⁰): 222–262.] To analyze the working of white supremacy in Zionist spatial ordering, we follow María Lugones’s conception of purity. Lugones argues that purity is a method of order and control imposed by white supremacy. For something to be pure, it must first be separated from other objects and concepts so as not to be contaminated by them, and then categorized to establish its place in relation to the world. This purification process can be extended to people: those whose identities are privileged (and therefore not perceived) are seen as a purified whole, whereas those with a multitude of hypervisible identities are seen as inherently contaminated. As only the “purified” person is seen as unified enough for rational thought, this system justifies those with privilege as the only ones deserving of understanding, categorizing, and controlling the world.⁷¹

Using Lugones’s analysis, we can see Zionist enclosure as implementing two basic premises of white supremacy. First, the perceived chaos of Palestinian land makes it impure and fallow. By bringing ordered rows and grids to land management, the land is purified of chaos and made white. White supremacist purity views the Palestinians as controlled by their stagnant culture and backwards practices. By contrast, the Zionist settler is both more cultured and yet less culturally controlled than the Palestinian. The settler views himself as both having a greater connection to the land and as a rational, outside observer disconnected from the material world. For the Zionist, European practices render rational, and therefore white, both the land and the land’s manager.

Liberal Zionist proponents, though, view themselves as opposed to colonialism’s control and domination over the land. Therefore, to openly support this type of rationalist violence would be too overtly racist. To save Zionism from this critique, liberal Zionism turns to environmentalism. Environmentalism has a long history with the concept of purity. Specifically, the romanticized environmentalist vision of nature is one that is pure—untouched by man, a virgin resource, a universal and singular expanse, and a rational and self-sustaining system.⁷² Western environmentalists seek to measure their success against this ideal of pure nature.⁷³ This ideal of nature pervades liberal Zionist discourse. The Israeli state’s actions, even when they are environmentally destructive, are justified in the name of making Palestine natural. It does not matter, for instance, that afforestation harms the soil, because the point is to order Palestinian land and introduce the universal benefit of European rationalist environments.

This turn towards environmentalism is essential to the liberal Zionist discourse we analyze in this paper. Specifically, the purification of nature is necessary for liberal Zionist adherents to combine their view of themselves as both rational settlers and Indigenous people. Environmentalism, as a means of protecting this purified nature, is meant to restore the mythologized green past of ancient Judea. It claims itself as Indigenous because it is a project of restoration, returning the land to its imagined former green utopia. At the same time, due to the purified nature being necessarily white, that green space aligns with European land management. By employing this concept of pure nature and weaponizing environmentalism in its name, the imagined Indigenous past merges with colonial desire to become a singular vision: a white landscape for Zionist settlers to inhabit, and from which Palestinians shall disappear.

Disappearing Palestinians

The rhetoric of both Zionist Indigeneity and Zionist environmentalism attempts to discursively erase Palestinians. Champions of Zionist Indigeneity insist that there are “no other peoples” with a historical or spiritual claim to the land aside from the Indigenous Jewish people.⁷⁴ Simultaneously, the principle of terra nullius is based on the invisibilization of Palestinians, which Zionist environmentalists often invoke to justify their occupation of the land. A shared logic underpins these two arguments, despite their seeming incompatibility. Both operate as a mechanism for racism, rhetorically defining Palestine as “a land without a people” to justify the racial violence of colonization.

The marriage of self-Indigenizing and environmentalist Zionist discourse accomplishes a further step: contemporary Zionist environmentalism does not require denying that Palestinians exist to make them invisible. Environmentalism targets the question of relationship to the land. Defining Palestinians as categorically unable to contribute to the fight against ecological crisis (in contrast to a fabricated Zionist Indigenous land stewardship), Zionism rhetorically and materially renders Palestinians unable to attach to the land. Palestinians may be allowed to exist, but not as people who have a home, an identity, or a place in the world—certainly not in Palestine.

The Palestinian claim to Indigeneity situates the Palestinian people as having deep roots in the land and a developed environmental practice, threatening the liberal Zionist view of Palestinians through a white supremacist prism as passive observers unable to truly affect history. If Palestinians have their own land practices, then their roles as actors in the world is secured; the colonial viewpoint might see their contribution as a negative, but it is still a contribution. To preclude that possibility, and to achieve the post-politics that colonizers desire, this reality must be denied at all costs. Given the importance of environmentalist justifications to liberal Zionism’s self-image, this denial of Palestinian agency and action takes on a new role. It now justifies their lack of connection to the world, and the non-necessity of caring for their lives and suffering.

To challenge this invisibilization, we must go further than merely acknowledging Palestinian Indigeneity. As the Indigenous population of Palestine, Palestinians do in fact share belonging to the homeland and thus to the world, and are actors with agency and dignity.⁷⁵ But we also must challenge the colonialism at the core of environmentalism. 

Contemporary liberal and left environmentalism often depoliticizes climate change, erasing the resistance to colonialism that is necessary to prevent ecological collapse. This is sometimes accomplished by envisioning ecological crises through the prism of the Anthropocene, the period of time when humanity is a force of planetary change. We argue that, in the common conceptualization of the Anthropocene, the human in this human era is coded white. In discourse about changing society to be more environmentally friendly, the society is Western society. And when we discuss who deserves environmental survival and who will thrive because of this changed society, it will be those people who have embraced Western norms.⁷⁶ Indigenous traditions can be accepted insofar as they help us solve the issues of ecological crisis, but when the future is conceptualized in an environmentally friendly world, it is an image derived from the white imagination. Settler colonial institutions, in attempting to correct past acts of Indigenous invisibilization, often frame Indigenous populations either as relics of a backward past or as a mere point of contrast to white Western ways of knowing and being.⁷⁷ This framing is overly focused on the depoliticized science of the era, imagining climate change as an issue “started by coal and oil, and not by capitalism, colonialism, or even liberalism.”⁷⁸ Such discourse problematizes our relationship to nature alone, and not its connections with human politics. 

This depoliticization is at the heart of the acceptance and support that mainstream environmentalism has gained from colonial societies. In his analysis of this phenomenon, Erik Swyngedouw theorizes contemporary environmental politics as central to a turn towards “post-politics,” a condition in which political change is foreclosed in favor of managerial solutions.⁷⁹ Environmentalism is framed as a question of how best to arrange these managerial processes, rather than a challenge to the colonial and capitalist extraction driving the climate crisis. This posits any attempt at radical change as both unthinkable and dangerously irrational.We must reject this depoliticized view of the environment and its consequential default-whiteness in our efforts to de-invisibilize Palestinians and move towards a decolonial environmentalism. 

The weaponization of post-politics enables Zionist colonial expansion via environmentalism. It becomes unthinkable to question the Zionist state’s settlement because it is the status quo. Instead, the development and implementation of environmentally healthy practices is posited as the only solution to climate change. This then allows the Zionist project to frame colonization of the West Bank as necessary because Zionist settlers need space to test out their new solar and agricultural technologies, or to build waste plants that lead to a healthier environment. This logic provides infinite justifications for colonization, which leads to constant resource depletion and environmental harm. To fix this problem, new colonization is continually necessary. If we view this environmental harm not as a choice by a group of settlers, but as an inherent and unchangeable fact of the Anthropocene, then eternal expansion is always justifiable.

The depoliticization accomplished by the self-Indigenizing Zionist environmentalism neatly aligns such discourse with the goals of liberal Zionism. Concern for climate change allows Zionist settlers to maintain “the veneer of democratic and progressive” values even as it seeks “the normalization of Israeli settler-colonialism,” a paradigm as central to liberal Zionism as it is to the process of depoliticization itself. Champions of the Israeli state’s ability to properly use Palestinian land through anti-climate change initiatives seek to uphold what Ayyash identifies as the third pillar of liberal Zionism: that the Zionist project “carrie[s] the torch of modernization and civilization” to colonized Palestine. The result is the framing of the Zionist state’s existence as natural and something that “ought to be accepted.”⁸⁰

In the face of a liberal environmentalism that maintains the colonial status quo via depoliticization, calls for decolonizing environmentalism appear as the obvious next step. But Zionist proclamations of their own Indigenous land stewardship and decolonization should warn us of how Indigeneity can be captured and appropriated by white, colonial institutions. We must critically engage with the concept of Indigeneity and how it is employed by our movements to challenge this co-optation. We can start by correctly identifying which groups hold Indigenous positionality by reorienting ourselves to the reality of power (in occupied Palestine and elsewhere) and defining Indigeneity as a “political relationship to … settler-colonialism,” but we cannot end there. In his article, “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty,” Jamal Nabulsi calls for us to embrace Indigenous sovereignty as a praxis which rejects a liberal rights framework and goes beyond state sovereignty to demand tangible and material acts of decolonization that challenge the colonial state’s monopoly on violence.⁸¹ We must reject a politics that essentializes and depoliticizes Palestinian cultural identity or demands an authentic performance of Palestinian culture.⁸² We must reject a view of Indigenous knowledge as a foil or optional add-on to Western science, but likewise reject a view of Indigenous land stewardship as a tool for rescuing white societies from environmental crisis. And we must be critical of environmental solutions that require Indigenous people to do the brunt of land management labor without the redistribution of resources, wealth, and power.⁸³ For frameworks like Indigeneity and environmentalism to be useful, they must not essentialize reality, but instead become strategic tools. We need Indigeneity because colonialism and imperialism must be resisted; similarly, we need environmentalism because resource extraction, ecological violence, and climate change must be opposed. Only through embracing these frameworks as tools of anticolonial struggle can the colonizers be exposed and their systems broken, and we can escape the continual re-enactment of violent hierarchies in our liberation movements.

Conclusion

We have explored how Zionism, contrary to its claims, does not contribute to decolonization or a healthy environment, but rather empowers colonial ventures, destroys Palestinian land, and only practices sustainability insofar as it upholds settler colonies. These acts of ecocide and colonization are in line with the explicit white supremacy and imperialistic logics of Zionism’s founders. Liberal Zionist arguments are revealed as rebranding: a distraction from the most obvious signs of racial violence, and intended to maintain the colonial status quo.

By labeling themselves Indigenous environmental stewards, liberal Zionist adherents engage in more than mere linguistic manipulation. Instead, the use of these frameworks reflects a historical interpretation of environmental and Indigenous ideas to suit the needs of the colonizer. Again and again, these supposedly liberatory principles are equated with white supremacist ideals around clear spatial delineations and grids, colonial visions of land management, and categorizations that benefit imperial state power. Liberal Zionism, when placed in historical context, is not doing anything novel, rather it is developing its own mutation of a centuries-old trope. Such an understanding should make clear why solely critiquing Zionism for greenwashing, or any other form of appropriation, is insufficient to disprove its claims. We must also evaluate the centuries of struggle related to how we define and understand Indigeneity and environmentalism. If this latter work is ignored, we will be unable to challenge Eurocentric models of nature and environment, or land and Indigeneity. It is only through embracing frameworks of Indigeneity and environmentalism as tools for anticolonial struggle that the colonizers can be revealed and their systems broken, that we can escape the continual re-iteration of violent hierarchies in our liberation movements.