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

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Super-rich’s assets cause outsized amount of climate harm, study says. Greenpeace calculates that wealthiest contribute nearly $1tn of damage a year with ownership-based emissions... "By contrast, the bottom half of the world by wealth accounts for just 3% of ownership-based emissions."

Greenpeace said a large share of emissions was associated with the ownership of carbon-intensive assets and investments such as property developments. Photograph: A Amsel/Alamy

 Fiona Harvey in Bonn

Wed 10 Jun 2026 

Ultra-wealthy people zooming across the world on their private jets, lounging on yachts and conspicuous by their Instagrammable consumption are among the most easily identified individual culprits when it comes to the climate crisis – but new research argues that it is not just their heady lifestyles to blame, but also their bank accounts.

Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

Greenpeace has calculated the “climate debt” of these high net worth individuals, by attributing to them their share of the damage done to the climate by the assets they own. By this reckoning, the world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of damage to the climate.

Clara Thompson, the global lead campaigner on socioeconomic systems at Greenpeace International, said: “At a time when people are facing rising energy bills, rising living costs, and growing climate impacts, many are asking why ordinary households should shoulder so much of the burden, while some of the world’s wealthiest people continue to profit from the industries driving the crisis.”

Greenpeace estimates that the top 1% by wealth are responsible for about 40% of all “ownership”-based emissions – that is, the emissions produced by businesses and associated with privately owned financial and physical assets – which themselves make up 60% of global carbon output. Within that group, the top 0.1% account for about 17% of ownership-based emissions, and the top 0.01% about 9%. The top 1% is made up of people with wealth above about $2m, the top 0.1% people with wealth above about $7m, and the top 0.01% is people with wealth above about $38m.

By contrast, the bottom half of the world by wealth accounts for just 3% of ownership-based emissions.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/10/super-rich-assets-outsized-amount-climate-harm-study

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Abby Martin exposes the media's role in normalizing genocide.... & The Empire Files premiered its highly anticipated film about the devastating impact our environment and planet are experiencing due to the United States military-industrial complex. Titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,”

The Empire Files’ Martin Is a Force To Be Reckoned With... 

In a world in which media consolidation has given the average American fewer options to choose from, independent outlets have become all the more important. Without them, the narrative—which is already tilted in the neoliberal order’s favor—would be wildly skewed, giving the government and their corporate allies free rein to abuse an ostensibly democratic system.

Social media and the internet in general, for all its faults, have enabled independent reporters and activists to push back against conventional wisdom, whether they’re correcting the record about an ahistorical narrative or something timely and newsworthy that’s so obviously one-sided.

One such journalist is Abby Martin, the indefatigable, unrelenting, probing, and uncompromising reporter who for more than a decade has helped shine a light on the excesses and wide-ranging abuses of the U.S. empire.

While there are plenty of journalists similarly confronting American hegemony with thought-provoking coverage and analysis, Martin, to her immense credit, takes the time to visit regions systematically crushed by Western influence, such as Palestine and Venezuela.

To say Martin is fearless would be wholly insufficient. Her coverage of colonialism and criticisms of the United States has not won her any favors from a government that often dismisses alternative journalism as enemy-influenced propaganda.... READ MORE  https://www.unftr.com/blog/progressive-spotlight-abby-martin

&

Ounka

@OunkaOnX

 

Abby Martin just exposed the media's role in normalizing genocide. 

 

"Palestinians telling their own stories, dictating their own narratives for the first time. That's why we see the urgency to censor their voices and to consolidate these narratives on social media. 

 

Israel's supporters often say Gaza's suffering is quote unquote tragic, but complex. Is complexity the new weapon of obfuscation in genocidal politics? This is the propaganda that's made it so overly difficult to talk about this issue, but it's the most simple issue in the world. It's the most clear cut issue in the world. It's an occupation that is illegal. And this occupying force is besieging a population in a ghetto and committing genocide against them. 

 

In what reality would 2.3 million Jewish people be allowed to be caged inside of an Arab nation, half children, cut off their electricity and water and then indiscriminately bomb them for two years? In what reality in our world would that be allowed to be possible? It is only the nature of anti-Islam, anti-Muslim bigotry that has made this justified. 

 

This is the most documented atrocity of our time. And it is a disgrace that it took a genocide for people to wake up"

 

https://x.com/i/status/2054417058868367414 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=abby+martin

& 

Journalist Abby Martin’s new documentary takes aim at one of the world’s largest polluters: the U.S. military

On Oct. 18 [2025], The Empire Files premiered its highly anticipated film about the devastating impact our environment and planet are experiencing due to the United States military-industrial complex. Titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” it follows journalists Abby Martin and Mike Prysner who spent years researching, studying, and traveling the world to report on the effects of the military's massive carbon footprint.... READ MORE   https://thesouthlander.com/abby-martin-earths-greatest-enemy/

Military Industrial Complex Infographics

 

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https://designaction.org/project/military-industrial-complex-infographics/

American University Department of Anthropology

• Military Industrial Complex Infographics
• April 2024

• Project Type:

  • Data Visualization
  • Illustration
  • Social Media Graphics

David Vine, Professor of Anthropology at American University, worked with Design Action Collective to create a series of infographics that illustrate how the Military Industrial Complex functions —showing its impacts on communities within the United States and around the world. As the U.S. war machine continues to enable genocide on a global scale and violent policing in our cities, these graphics are important political education tools for our communities to understand our conditions, and find points of intervention for anti-war campaigns.

"... 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

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If you ever feel heavy because you care deeply about injustice, suffering and ecological destruction, remember that a trillion dollar propaganda machine was built to make you numb AND IT DIDN'T WORK ON YOU