Weapon of distraction: How Israel uses greenwashing to mask its climate crimes

A fire blazes in an olive grove in the village of Salim, in the occupied West Bank, after an Israeli settler attack on 25 May 2025 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

22 September 2026

Asma Barakat

Israel's illegal occupation and destruction of Palestinian land are incompatible with environment justice. Consumers must wake up to this fact 

For decades, Israel has projected a narrative of being a beacon of sustainability. A major part of this facade is its food tech industry, particularly its latest advancements in lab-grown and cell-cultivated foods.

This past April, Israeli food tech company Celleste Bio reportedly produced the world’s first lab-grown chocolate bars. The company touts a proprietary technology that enables it to eliminate the cocoa industry’s “costly reliance on fragile rainforests”. 

Celleste Bio is backed by Mondelez International, a multibillion-dollar parent corporation of brands such as Cadbury and Oreo, making the possibility of lab-grown chocolate on consumer shelves closer than ever.

Israel has frequently been ranked among the world’s top global food tech start-up nations. Its champions assert that lab-grown foods require fewer resources than traditional agriculture, and can offer alternatives to the slaughtering of animals - all amid the continuing genocide and starvation campaign in Gaza.

 Foodwashing, or the use of sustainable food harvesting methods to distract from crimes against humanity, is a key part of Israel’s broader greenwashing agenda. The state promotes “environmentally friendly” initiatives to mask its human rights abuses against Palestinians. 

Yet Israel’s illegal occupation and destruction of Palestinian land are incompatible with climate justice, systematically wreaking havoc on the environment. Israel’s food tech industry, as with all other aspects of the state, was built on the theft of Palestinian resources, undermining Palestinians’ own sustainability efforts.

The water and energy that Israel boasts about conserving are redirected from Palestinian communities, who are then denied access to their own natural resources. 

Ecological collapse

Israel’s wars further damage the environment. In September 2025, the Palestinian Initiative for Climate Strategy found that Israel and its allies owe $148bn in “military and conflict-related climate reparations” to the Palestinian people, dating back to the 1948 Nakba. Since then, Israel has continued bombing Gaza.

Throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, it has dropped more than 200,000 tonnes of explosives on the enclave, resulting in ecological collapse. In July, an Oxfam-commissioned report found that over the past three years, Gaza’s wastewater treatment facilities have been decimated, fuelling an environmental and public health crisis.

“Sewage treatment facilities have been destroyed, resulting in the discharge of hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of untreated wastewater daily into the environment and the Mediterranean Sea, creating both a public health emergency and an ecological catastrophe with consequences extending well beyond Gaza’s borders,” the report noted.

Israel’s determination to destroy the environment across occupied Palestine long predates the current genocide, including through its routine practice of spraying chemical herbicides on Gaza’s agricultural lands, destroying thousands of dunums of farmland.

In addition, Israel’s policy of water apartheid actively harms the environment. Human rights organisation Al-Haq has explained how Israel’s denial of fresh-water access pushes Palestinians to rely on desalination, a process that “can cause substantial damage to marine ecosystems and ocean health”.

At the same time, the Israeli occupation sabotages Palestinian sustainability practices. Najla Abdellatif, the founder of Zero Waste Palestine, an environmental advocacy initiative, told Middle East Eye that she has met affected Palestinian farmers whose groundwater sources were diverted by Israel’s state-run water company.

“Their water pipes are also continuously targeted and stolen by nearby settlers, making them even more water insecure and unable to buy back their own water sources at the elevated prices that are offered,” Abdellatif said. “This is affecting their whole ability to sustain their farms and their livelihoods.”

Resource deprivation

Israel’s cultivated foods industry further helps to normalise the occupation of Palestine... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/weapon-distraction-israel-greenwashing-detract-human-climate-crimes-Gaza

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]

"... It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies."

If "you have the money to fund a junktank, it will produce whatever opinion you request, then papers such as the New York Times will balance that opinion against decades of academic study, as if the two things are of equal weight." 

Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich

George Monbiot 

If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate crisis running headlong into the epistemic crisis.

An epistemic crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It’s about what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.

Let’s start by recognising that they were never robust. There was no golden age of public knowledge, no moment at which the information most people received was largely unbiased and accurate. Throughout modern history, European societies have formed a broad consensus around blatant falsehoods: such as the view that the monarch embodied all the interests of the nation, that women were unsuited to public life, that Black and Brown people were inferior beings, that empire was a force for good. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was built around these beliefs. Public knowledge is always shaped by power.

The promise of democracy was that the lives of all would steadily improve as knowledge spread: we would turn our gathering understanding of the world into social progress. For a while, in some places, we did. But that era now seems to be coming to an end.

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the ... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/14/climate-crisis-communication-super-rich

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES & QUOTES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]  

CONNECT THE DOTS: 1917 ... 1948 ... 2023

RACISM: 1917 "Jerusalem Is Rescued By British After 673 Years Of Moslem Rule"

 

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..."

The Beginning of Forced Displacement of Palestinians

The Nakba
During 1947 and 1948, Israel systematically demolished 531 Palestinian villages inside the area that became Israel. More than 200 of these villages were destroyed, and between 250,000 and 350,000 people were displaced before May 1948 when the first Arab-Israeli war officially began.

A 67-year-old Palestinian man in the Dehaishe refugee camp displays the original key and title deeds to the home his family abandoned when they fled their village in the 1948 war in Israel

1948 UN Resolution 194: The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 194 (III), resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”  ....

Greenwashing refers to when a state or organization appeals to environmentalism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. Robbing The Refugees   

 

Since 1948, thanks to Zionism