On April 9, 2024—as Reuters reported that Israel’s military offensive in Gaza had killed 33,360 Palestinians and wounded 75,993 since October 7, 2023¹—the Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour shared an image on Instagram showing a deceased boy’s dusty hand reaching out from his concrete rubble grave, holding the green stem of a date palm. It’s a shocking image: distressing to look at, and yet evidentiary and mournful.² As a haunting portrayal of death and destruction, invoking both human loss and environmental devastation, it’s intolerable in the double sense of the term: it documents the insufferable killing of innocents, and it horrifically reproduces that killing within social media’s rapacious attention economy. The aesthetic conditions of genocide—what might be termed aestheticide—prevail: the representation of the lived experience of mass death is simultaneously under erasure (entombed in the rubble of destruction, obscuring traumatic loss, unfathomable to process) and yet irrepressible (the real emerges despite all, can’t be wished away or repressed, continues to disturb the living). Still, interventions like Sansour’s are necessary, cutting through the otherwise numbing unreality of corporate news media, its lying cover-ups and sanitized narratives, to deliver a critical message: “This image encapsulates what it means to be a Palestinian today.”³

       Since the infamous October 7 attacks led by Hamas—which, whatever war crimes were committed, represented an uprising of people driven to desperation by years of daily humiliations, military blockade, illegal detention, and systematic torture—Israel’s assault on Gaza has involved multiple war crimes and violations of humanitarian law. These include violating the principles of distinction (between civilian and fighter), proportionality (in its scale of lethal response), and precaution (failing to protect civilian lives), according to the UN human rights office (OHCHR).¹² In the wake of its scorched-earth bombing, Gaza’s social, political, medical, educational, agricultural, and economic systems are in ruins. Pending the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) active investigation into Israel’s “plausible” acts of genocide, and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, international human rights organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have been joined by growing numbers of independent expert analysts in charging Israel with breaches of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention—“the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part”— owing to the IOF’s systematic violence, including the targeting of first responders and medics, its wholesale destruction of hospitals, and its weaponization of hunger by blocking humanitarian relief.¹³

       Israel’s destruction of Gaza surpasses conventional language’s descriptive capacities, leading to all manner of superlatives and new terms to describe the scale and breadth of the devastation, which ratchets up further pressure on conventional loss and damage’s narrow terminology.¹⁴ Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian—who, after she publicly accused Israel of genocide in March 2024, was condemned with harassment, suspended from her position at Hebrew University, and arrested—uses “scholasticide” to designate the demolition of Gaza’s schools and universities (among those killed are approximately 100 university deans; 750 teachers, professors, and administrators; and 11,000 students).¹⁵ Ammar Azzouz employs “domicide” to reference the widespread destruction of approximately 80,000 homes. “Cultural genocide” identifies the devastation of Palestinian heritage museums, including Al Qarara Cultural Museum and Shababeek for Contemporary Art; of libraries housing rare books, historical documents, and ancient manuscripts; of historical mosques (including the second oldest in Palestine, the Great Omari Mosque) and churches; and of ancient archaeological and UNESCO heritage sites.¹⁶ Employing a term first used in the early 1970s to describe the destruction of ecosystems in Vietnam, and which has since been designated under the Rome Statue as a war crime, Forensic Architecture uses “ecocide” to name the systematic destruction of Gaza’s greehouses, agriculture, and access to clean water, and thus of its livable environment.¹⁷ Gaza’s destruction has also provoked the hideous new acronym “WCNSF”: wounded child, no surviving family. These terms build on already existing monstrous ones, like “politicide,” used by Baruch Kimmerling to describe the negation of Palestinian political agency. Taken together, the new lexicon conveys the calculated destruction of representational systems, institutions of cultural meaning, and the infrastructure of memory. By targeting the cultural infrastructure of Palestinian identity, this violence, which could be termed aestheticide, destroys collective ways of knowing and feeling, breaks connections between generations, history, and nationhood, and thus contributes to Israel's genocidal project of complete erasure. All of this, too, is what it means to be a Palestinian today—but not just. Indominable Palestinian resistance continues, which I’ll return to below.
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       As part of its assault—one that makes it impossible to distinguish between violence against Palestinian people and violence against Palestine’s living environment—Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s ecosystem, including plants, animals, and soil, as well as strictly controlling and cutting off access to water and energy. This has transformed the land itself into an expanded kill zone. Escalating violence in the West Bank sees settler-soldier militias murdering and terrorizing Palestinian farmers, burning farms, poisoning and pouring cement into wells, and destroying ancestral olive tree orchards.¹⁸ These practices supplement Israel’s decades-long weaponization of nature, with settlers planting nonnative pine forests on occupied lands at the expense of Palestinian olive and orange groves, modeling a kind of green colonialism, or eco-Zionism.¹⁹ Indeed, the Jewish National Fund has established over 260 million trees, including on the ruins of the more than four hundred villages destroyed in the 1948 Nakba.²⁰ Most are fast-growing pine, servicing nostalgia for the botany of Europe, from where many of the trees and settlers came from. But their needle drops also acidify the ground and prevent Palestinian crops from growing, furthering the settler-colonial dispossession of Palestinian lands and life systems.^21
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       Traces of this history are portrayed in Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom photo series—part of his three-volume research project Erasure—which documents Israel’s “acquisition and alteration of the land through militarization, mining, industrialization, settlement, and afforestation,” in the process portraying “the gradual enforced displacement of [Palestinian] Bedouins, the denial of their human rights, and the erasure of their traditional way of life.”²² This siege on and through nature—the pine colonizing the olive tree—parallels broader documented efforts by Israel to destroy living conditions in the Occupied Territories and Gaza by demolishing flora, bombing greenhouses, polluting water supplies, and shooting animals, thereby making the reproduction of life virtually impossible.²³ It’s clear in this regard that Palestine is enmeshed not simply in a human-rights crisis but one of environmental and climate injustice too. By systematically destroying ecosystems, the Israeli siege, and its broader occupation, has imperiled Palestinian lifeways, imposing a climate of destruction that renders survival nearly impossible. In its recent investigation of the war on Gaza, Forensic Architecture shows how ecocide is joined to genocide. In“No Traces of Life”: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza, 2023–24 (2023–ongoing), the group details the systematic elimination of more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including many fruit tree orchards, and the destruction of 90 percent of greenhouses in northern Gaza since October 2023. Utilizing cartographic evidence, the organization charges: “The destruction of agricultural land and infrastructure in Gaza is a deliberate act of ecocide and a critical dimension of Israel’s genocidal campaign.”²⁴ If climate change is the ultimate form of ecocide, then it’s because the destruction of life irreversibly alters functional living systems, which appears to be the IOF’s aim in Gaza.^25
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       In a related analysis, Andreas Malm notes how “ecocide [in Gaza] fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before”—he calls it the world’s first “technogenocide,” the first to be executed by means of the most advanced military technology—where “destruction has now reached apocalyptic proportions: the people who have not yet died from the bombs live in a wasteland of contaminated soil, undrinkable water, orchards and fields packed into dust, garbage and debris mixed in a hyper-polluted strip of land in which human life is being rendered impossible for the long term.”²⁶ Not surprisingly, this has produced a human health crisis of indirect deaths caused by reproductive, communicable, and noncommunicable diseases, including polio. What has abetted this destruction, according to independent research published in +972 Magazine and cited by Malm, is the IOF’s extensive use of Lavender, an AI-based targeting system, developed by the secretive Israeli intelligence division Unit 8200 to identify more than 37,000 Gazan targets through mass surveillance data and statistical pattern-of-life analysis with little human oversight. These marks are subsequently bombed with unprecedented collateral damage-kill ratios of as much as hundreds-to-one, depending on the target’s importance (the highest allotted to high-ranking Hamas officials). Blurring the lines between combatant and civilian, adult and child, human and nonhuman, the IOF’s deadly system amounts to an automated “mass assassination factory,” according to Israeli independent journalist Yuval Abraham.²⁷ 

      Through automation, the IOF ever more effectively reduces any and all Gazans to “Hamas terrorists,” according to an indiscriminatory logic of algorithmic dehumanization that enables mass killability. It’s continuous with the ideological dehumanization of Palestinians as “human animals” according to former Defense Minister Gallant, who ordered the “complete siege” of Gaza on October 9, 2023—“No electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Forensic Architecture’s Humanitarian Violence in Gaza (2024–ongoing), shows how amid wide-scale bombing, even designated “safe areas” in Gaza “far from protecting Palestinian civilians, serve rather to support Israel’s genocidal campaign by systematically forcing civilians into unlivable areas, where they inevitably come under renewed attack, only to be displaced yet again.”²⁸ “Complete siege” extends Israel’s longstanding and continuing eliminationist settler-colonial project, which has subjected Palestinians to summary erasure—enacting a form of “ontocide” in Gaza that reproduces the racialized destruction of Black and Indigenous peoples during histories of slavery and genocide more widely.²⁹ Along the same lines, some Indigenous activists such as members of The Red Nation, whose motto is “decolonization or extinction,” have recognized the war on Gaza as a contemporary replay of the longstanding genocidal colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas.^30
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       The siege of Gaza, as we’ve seen, has exacerbated a climate catastrophe whose impacts have only intensified Palestinian vulnerability and suffering. Not surprisingly, analysis has found that emissions caused during the first sixty days of Israeli bombing, including nonstop flights from the US transporting missiles over a permanent airbridge, has equaled the annual emissions of that of more twenty low-emitting countries.³¹ War is indeed disastrous for the climate.³² In fact, fossil capitalism and settler colonialism (abetted by Christian Zionism)—the intertwined drivers of climate change in relation to Gaza—have long collaborated in the shaping of Israel, and this arrangement will likely continue to defend petrocapitalism into the foreseeable future. Critical research, such as Adam Hanieh’s, offers an expansive geopolitical explanation for the present catastrophe in this regard: the largely unconditional international, and in particular US, support for Israel hinges on the “strategic centrality of the oil-rich Middle East in American global power.”³³ Indeed, the US has materially enabled the last year of attacks on Gaza, consistently supplying Israel’s war machine with more than USD $22.76 billion of bombs, munitions, intelligence, and financial support without red lines, without pause—even as its doublespeak diplomacy has called for de-escalation and a ceasefire.³⁴ This is reinforced by a counterinsurgency campaign aligned with extreme rightwing interests aimed at suppressing all resistance, including through the instrumentalization of antisemitism. Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace terms it a “political weapon of mass destruction.”³⁵ Wielded against the NGO sector as well as any pro-Palestinian/antigenocide speech, free university inquiry, or critical art and cultural practice to squash dissent, weaponization of antisemitism provides an ideological cover to preempt and, when necessary, justify violent policing, including during the 2024 mass student uprisings in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. This is especially the case when anti-Zionism is absurdly equated with antisemitism—such as in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IRHA) definition—seeking to condemn any criticism of the state of Israel.

       What the above brief analysis shows is that Gaza’s losses and damages are as extensive as they are historically complex, involving destruction of both life and land. In this context, climate change must be understood as an irreducible entanglement of political, technological, and environmental conditions, rather than largely natural transformations caused by abstract “human activities” without perpetrators. Climate violence is in fact part of the very telos of colonial modernity, rather than simply an unintended eventuality.³⁶ In the case of Gaza, greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and rising seas—the abstract markers of conventionally understood climate change—are inextricable from, if not reducible to, the bombings, destruction of infrastructure, and massive loss of life (up to 186,000 or even more, according to a report in The Lancet³⁷). In this sense, ecocide is genocide.³⁸ To propose a strict limitation on what loss and damage signifies in the case of Gaza, as I argue further below, not only fails to take account of the full extent of climate coloniality’s devastation. It also enables a cruel abridgement of the logic of reparation, preventing any structural transformation that might otherwise bring climate violence in Palestine to an end.
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       Given that Sansour’s artistic practice centers on rejoining Palestinian life and land in opposition to the forces that separate them, it’s only appropriate that she would repost an image in which Palestinian death coincides with rebirth. The image of a boy’s hand rising from the rubble grave documents the site where Israel’s genocidal acts meet their inevitable failure in Palestinian steadfastness and struggle for life, where that struggle—as painfully sacrificial as it is—grows from the seeds of survival and is disseminated further through image and text.³⁹ None of this struggle is new, of course. “It has not been half a year,” Sansour writes in her April 9th caption. “It has been a life time of having to live and having to fight every single day. It’s been a life time of counting our smiles in fear that we may have smiled too much. When is the second shoe going to drop. When is my smile going to represent a danger. When is the next soldier going to fire a gun.”
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       Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (2014–ongoing) offers another mode of survival amid ongoing colonial violence. Nurturing Palestinian existence is, for her, an act of resistance. Her seed-saving project, created in collaboration with Palestinian traditional organic farmers, opposes the colonial forces of monocropping and chemical-based agribusiness by reviving heirloom seeds—those passed down through generations, often resistant to diseases and drought, and which can live on winter rains, summer dew, and soil moisture without irrigation. In the process of retrieving them from Palestinian lands threatened with ongoing illegal annexation, Sansour grows networks of support and defiance among farmers in the Occupied Territories, networks fortified through botany, oral history, and storytelling. Her botanical-artistic practice thus models a socio-environmental aesthetics of caretaking, enabling meaningful connection to the more-than-human world, relinking Palestinian life and Palestinian land torn asunder by colonization. This includes sharing homemade food, made in part from plants and fruit grown from those saved seeds, as part of her related project Traveling Kitchen (2018–ongoing), where she gathers invited guests to share meals together. Her humble collective practice of cooking and eating opposes not only the encroachment of multinational corporate fast food into local diets, but also the violent uprooting of Palestinians from their homeland and its sustaining socio-botanical networks since the 1948 Nakba.^40
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       In this regard, Sansour’s social practice mirrors the decolonial political ecology performed by other Palestinian artists such as Jumana Manna, including the latter’s Foragers (2022), an hourlong film shot in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem that mixes documentary and fiction in telling the stories of Palestinians who forage for wild edible plants. The film basks in the joy and knowledge embodied in these resilient local traditions, practiced in defiance of prohibitive Israeli laws that criminalize the Palestinian practice of picking such plants as wild za’atar (the most widely used herb in Palestinian cooking) and akkoub (an artichoke-like tumble thistle,^‍

       While neither Sansour’s nor Manna’s practice is located in Gaza, both exist on a continuum of eco-aesthetic resistance that bonds Palestinians together across divided lands. This includes those situated in the occupied West Bank, for whom the slow violence of juridico-political exclusion and social fragmentation is experienced through a militarized, high-tech architecture of checkpoints, border walls, and surveillance watchtowers. And it extends to Gaza, where the extreme genocidal-ecocidal siege has included the destruction of Palestinian nutritional sources to weaponize hunger as a mode of ethnic cleansing, even as Gazans—such as Hamada Shaqoura, Mrs. Najah’s Kitchen, and Mohammed Qomssan—are doing everything they can to grow and share food in desperate circumstances, including under continual threat of being killed, as was Yousuf Abu Rabea, Medo Halimy, and Mahmoud Almadhoun of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, over the course of 2024.⁴² In solidarity with these Gazan farmers and food providers, both Sansour’s and Manna’s practices call for material and political transformation, meaning the end of Israeli settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid rule. They also express the discursive and epistemological hopes and dreams of a different world—one where practices of social liberation guarantee equity, life, and multispecies flourishing lead toward the wider horizons of freedom and the end of ethnostate authoritarianism and its rampant climate violence.⁴³

       Yet while Sansour’s and Manna’s engagements are pledged to the ongoing struggle for survival, it’s true that any decolonial liberation appears ever distant and out of reach for the time being, as indeed it has for the last hundred years. After all, “decolonizing climate,” Farhana Sultana observes, “is largely meaningless if it doesn’t accompany measurable shifts in law, policies, institutional frameworks or material distributions.”⁴⁴ In Palestine, these shifts do not appear realistically achievable anytime soon (despite important gains with the ICJ and ICC rulings). In the meantime, there is survival media of the kind that Sansour and Manna practice, which registers the ongoingness of disaster even as its performance constitutes refusal and resistance. Survival media reasserts even the most precarious forms of life in defiance of the forces of destruction—like the date palm growing from a lifeless hand buried in rubble.

       Writing about politics and poetics in wartime Sri Lanka—a parallel case of ethnonationalist eliminationism that ended violently in 2009 with the Sinhala supremacist neutralization of the Tamil minority—Suvendrini Perera defines “survival media” as acts of “improvised transmutations and forced improvisations” in zones of conflict. These include “forms of cultural politics, corporeal poetics and their material effects” that express a refusal of victimhood and a defiant performance of resistance, by any media necessary.⁴⁵ It’s akin to  Gazans growing vegetables and distributing them freely within informal care networks during the Israeli siege (mirroring Sansour’s and Manna’s models but under much worse conditions), or knitting with recycled materials to provide clothing for the needy, or writing the names of loved ones on the concrete rubble that entraps them as a tragic form of poetry—all performances of a defiant cultural politics in the midst of war, continual bombing, and serial forced displacements.⁴⁶ Still more literal examples of survival media include organizations like Survival Media Agency and Ain Media, photojournalist collectives whose members have documented survival during the relentless assaults in Gaza, even as they have been endangered and sometimes tragically killed on the job owing to the IOF’s systematic targeting of members of the press. These cases define survival media as the determined practice of aesthetics as a representational system freighted with intentional political meaning in defiance of annihilation.⁴⁷

       More speculatively, as well as transversally and agentially, survival media can also manifest a generative synergy between plants and people, as Manna and Sansour show. Their approaches form a creative medium where Palestinian resistance grows through collaborative support networks with comradely more-than-human relations, expressing a kind of botanical politics of life and a collective will to survive. Here, solidarity in survival rises through multispecies collaboration, challenging settler-colonial property claims which withdraw land from Palestinian access and commonality. Survival media opposes the eliminationism that seeks to erase Palestinian being, doing everything it can to resist the engineered famine in Gaza that cruelly pits “the biological survival instinct against the bonds of social solidarity,” even while speaking to its horrors.⁴⁸ Rather than an impossible return to a precolonial past, recovering heirloom seeds from oblivion offers Palestinians, as Sansour argues, a forward-looking way to “give old stories a contemporary relevance,” because “within these narratives”—of seeds, of their various uses, of their connection to farming and cooking and thus the reproduction of local life—“is the essence of who we are; we need to create conscious visions about who we want to be, both individually and in the world.”^49
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       Seeds and plants function as survival media, both in being cultivated for human and multispecies nourishment, and in signifying political resistance, collective memory and belonging, and the will to live. Ever vulnerable as they are to destruction, and though they attest more to resilience than to solution, survival media are literally and figuratively seeds of futurity transcending climate colonialism, expressing the determination of resistance and the power of environmental restoration. “We will rebuild,” Manna wrote on December 31, 2023, in the midst of IOF assaults. “Palestine will never die. We will never go silent. We will continue telling our stories and imagining our futures, because this is our obligation to ourselves, our ancestors, and to the generations to come.” She closes with “the words of our beloved martyr, Refaat al-‘Areer, ‘We live for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival and of hope.’”⁵⁰ Seeds of survival help transmit these tales, and sometimes they are these tales.⁵¹

       Conventional approaches to loss, unfortunately, don’t offer much hope for the future of Gaza. The UNFCCC definition of Loss and Damage, for example, provides a technocratic and monetized approach to risk management that seeks to calculate the costs of climate change in terms of unrecoverable loss (of human and animal lives, species, territories, water sources, ecosystems, livelihoods, heritage sites, and languages) and reparable damage (to physical and mental health, schools, homes, health centers, and infrastructure).⁵² Yet by constricting climate impacts to the results of generically defined “human activities,” and specifically those “primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels,” the UNFCCC proves inadequate for accounting for the climate violence of extractive capitalism, colonial dispossession, and military destruction—the necessary scope for any comprehensive understanding of climate catastrophe in Gaza.⁵³ This is despite the more ambitious definitions of losses and damages offered in IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) science and independent research, as well as in claims from many countries in the Global South (such as Haiti, Sudan, and Bolivia) about how carbon colonialism, debt burdens, and geopolitical conflict produce and exacerbate climate vulnerability. Still, even in reference to standard definitions of climate change, the US and other developed countries have consistently blocked, and continue to block any proposal—in Palestine or anywhere else—to deliver Loss and Damage finance at the scale needed to meaningfully provide reparations, owing to fears of being held liable for the destruction caused by their historic emissions.⁵⁴ In doing so, they have rejected any accounting for climate impacts that speaks to the all-embracing nature of climate violence.

        Meanwhile, the case of Gaza makes starkly clear how “Eurocentric hegemony, neocolonialism, racial capitalism, uneven consumption, and military domination are co-constitutive of climate impacts experienced by variously racialized populations who are disproportionally made vulnerable and disposable,” as Farhana Sultana explains.⁵⁵ This mirrors the views of critical Indigenous researchers such as Kyle Powys Whyte, who argues that “loss and damage” must necessarily account for how “settler states have inflicted anthropogenic environmental change (including anthropogenic climate change) on Indigenous Peoples in a number of ways through the political relations of settler colonialism.”⁵⁶ Considered in this light, the current Loss and Damage policy framework offers a poor substitute for more comprehensive proposals for compensation and liability, let alone transformative justice and climate reparations.

       Any meaningful approach to climate reparations for Gaza surely must first end the violence of “climate colonialism” (including genocidal war) and “climate apartheid,” where powerful elites, according to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s analysis, insulate themselves from the devastation they themselves cause.⁵⁷ Indeed, in his view, “the connection between climate crisis, slavery, and colonialism flows from distributions of wealth and vulnerability created by centuries of global politics and its ecological consequences, layered with more recent histories of pollution in the Global North and corporate fossil fuel interests.”⁵⁸ These follow patterns of imperial violence targeting the most vulnerable and least resourced, subjecting them to oppressive policing and military force whenever they resist. Offering an ambitious antidote to narrow technocratic climate policy, Táíwò’s “constructive view” of climate reparations seeks to restore morality to social relationships, spread the conditions of equality (including by securing access to food, water, shelter, energy, and healthcare for all), and build a just transition toward a future of equity and universal liberation. For him, these components arc toward the ultimate horizon of reparations as a forward-thinking worldbuilding project: “global justice” (where climate justice is indivisible from racial justice), enacted through a “just distribution” of material resources, forming “a global community thoroughly structured by non-domination.”⁵⁹

       The opposite of such a project is occurring in Gaza, which is precisely the problem with current policy recommendations. Without addressing Gaza’s catastrophic situation as a territory long besieged by Israeli settler colonialism, current plans for “post-conflict” Gaza’s “recovery and reconstruction” appear poised to return the area to the prevailing conditions prior to October 7, 2023. Indeed, given the logic of the World Bank, EU, and UN–sponsored Gaza Strip Interim Damage Assessment published on March 29, 2024, such a post-ceasefire scenario is already taking shape and largely in support of Israel’s annexationist interests.⁶⁰ While the report details the massive destruction in Gaza—including the colossal loss of life and the damage to Gaza’s social, physical, and productive infrastructure and environment, totaling $18.5 billion, equivalent to 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza’s GDP in 2022, according to World Bank estimates—it neither assigns culpability for the massive destruction nor names any nation responsible for the reconstruction. Even if politics were favorable and funds available for reconstruction (according to current proposals, these would likely be financed by loans that would increase Palestinian debt and inflict further injustice), the time required to rebuild Gaza, according to UN research, would take approximately eighty years (and would also release substantial carbon emissions).⁶¹

       What does a prospective “recovery” mean if it enables the continuation of social violence, colonial enclosure, and mass killing, the ongoing landgrabs and illegal annexations in the West Bank, and the ongoing erasure of Palestinian political agency—none of which are mentioned in the assessment? Without acknowledging the fundamental causes of the most recent tragedy, such a proposal can only mean the renormalization of climate coloniality.⁶² Indeed, even prior to 2023, it was recognized that Gaza was in a state of climate emergency: “The catastrophic climate crisis is fueled by global inequality and engineered by complicit governments and corporations that put profit before people and planet. Everywhere, the least powerful are the most affected,” Abeer Butmeh argued in Al Jazeera in 2019. With multinational corporations like AXA and HSBC investing in arming Israel and extractive corporations pillaging Palestinian land and natural resources, 97 percent of Gaza’s polluted water was deemed unfit for human consumption, leading the UN to warn that the territory had become “unlivable” even then.⁶³

       Matters may get still worse. Starting in 2022, and alongside the last year of destroying Gaza, Israel has become a fossil fuel exporter, supplying Germany and other EU states with stolen gas and crude oil from the Karish and Leviathan offshore gas fields.⁶⁴ To exploit these resources (and justify its actions with claims of mitigating the global energy crisis sparked by NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine), Israel has agreements with BP, the same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk–Haifa pipeline in the 1930s, and Chevron, a corporation accused of ecocide and genocide worldwide, which fuels and profits from Israeli apartheid and war and climate crimes.⁶⁵ In fact, Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Israel’s fossil-fuel extractivism are deeply intertwined. And yet it is ultimately this geopolitical arrangement that dominant policy frameworks on loss and damage are paradoxically set to reinforce. While Israel has always represented an outpost of Western expansionist fossil capitalism—functioning as a geostrategic extension of Western interests and military security in the Middle Eastern region since 1948⁶⁶—it continues to use Palestine as a laboratory for weapons research, military technology development, and live-action testing, including to securitize its fossil reserves and market its security tech worldwide.

       These developments should concern all of us, no matter where we live, no matter our religion or ethnicity (including in the US, which prioritizes funding Israel’s war machine over critical domestic investment in the public good). This is because, in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, we confront not only the horrors of the intertwinement of genocide and ecocide, but also, as Antony Loewenstein points out in his important book The Palestine Laboratory, an “exportable model of domination” for an emerging world fortified by high-tech security and AI surveillance and all manner of new weapons—in part responding to the kind of geopolitical insecurity Israel has caused—a growth industry that will be worth $68 billion by 2025.⁶⁷ Israeli cyberweapons corporations, such as Elbit Systems, a tech firm that built Israel’s apartheid wall and is currently contracted to expand the US’s southern border wall, are positioned to be among the main economic beneficiaries. New military and security technologies are “battle tested” on Palestinian lives and lands, deployed in repeated attacks on Lebanon and Syria to defend new occupations and landgrabs, and distributed through multi-billion-dollar neoliberal markets to repressive governments worldwide.

       Ominously, if we believe the words of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the future belongs not to liberal democracy, as US President Barack Obama once defined it—a multicultural world of tolerance, equal rights, and the rule of law—but to authoritarian ethnonationalism, enabled by neoliberal trade and technological might, as produced by Israel.⁶⁸ This points to the ultimate pending loss and damage threatened by the situation of Gaza: the end of the liberal democratic multilateral world order as we know it (with all of its current flaws). The only response to this global existential threat is for us all to join the rising struggle against continued destruction in Gaza, and in support of anti-imperialism, decolonization, and abolition everywhere. “If we are to move forward,” as Tareq Baconi argues, “we must center Palestine in the broader project of decolonizing international law and dismantling systems of global hegemony.”⁶⁹ That means, as Rashid Khalidi argues, ending the occupation and reversing the colonization of Palestinian lands; or establishing a Palestinian state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital; or, most ambitiously, creating a democratic, sovereign binational state in all of Palestine with radical equality for all; or some blend of all these options.⁷⁰ Palestinian liberation—including the rights of return and self-determination, both enshrined in UN resolutions, and reparations for land and property lost to generations of refugees—is the immediate horizon. This would be real climate reparation, and through it, peace and collective liberation.

       Survival media, as we’ve seen, confronts ongoing disaster in the meantime, where the IOF’s military siege of Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank have attempted to destroy Palestinian lives, institutions, and culture, and their natural environment. Climate coloniality places incredible stress on practices like Sansour’s, bringing about the impoverishment of their conditions of possibility in its destruction of the life-giving capacities of the land integral to them. But survival media, which is ontologically relational in its bridging of human and more-than-human realms, also refuses to surrender the horizon of liberation premised on social and environmental emancipation from climate coloniality. In this bind, the aesthetics of survival media, submerged within the genocide-ecocide nexus, suffer from unfathomable losses and damages too, even while Palestinian liveliness struggles on. This struggle arises into insurgent sensibility in the passage from Sansour’s vibrant social practice celebrating Palestinian heritage under the duress of occupation, to her sharing an image of death, despair, and rebirth in Gaza’s catastrophic destruction on Instagram.
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      Despite all, the image of the interred boy’s hand holding a sprouting date palm expresses lively resistance and determination, even as it participates, with Sansour’s aid, in collective witnessing and mourning. While photojournalist disaster imagery risks voyeuristic objectification and false compassion, perhaps in this case by placing its visuality within an appropriate discursive context and in relation to an engaged aesthetic practice we can dispel both the dangers of social media desensitization and the unexamined privilege of taking in horror at a distance.⁷¹ Perhaps then Palestinian life can be made grievable, and hence valuable, and the forces of dehumanization can be made political, not natural, by finding the appropriate critical frames.⁷² Some might suggest that addressing ecocide within a genocide is nonetheless ethically misguided, given the decentering of human life in the analysis of environmental destruction. In response, I underline that these categories are neither separate nor can they be ultimately distinguished—indeed, as Sansour’s own practice shows, both genocide and ecocide are integral to the climate violence destroying Palestinian being and its life-giving environment. That violence urgently calls for a comprehensive and intersectionalist model of Loss and Damage as the necessary framework for any meaningful climate reparations in Gaza. As I have argued above, this would require nothing less than massive structural transformation in our political systems, the demilitarization of governance, and the decolonization of states like Israel.
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        At a more granular level, restoring Palestinian life and land, seeds and people—the mutually reinforcing terms within struggles for Palestinian liberation—is also key. “Seeds and people are not separate,” writes Vivien Sansour. “Every living creature has sprouted from a seed or a spore that allows the continuation of its species.”⁷³ And indeed, her post of April 9, 2024 also includes three further images—one of heirloom spinach seeds, another of a young girl watering potted orange trees, and a final one of tomato plants thriving in seedling trays. As she writes: “[I]n the midst of our heartbreak we are forced to be strong. To pick up the pieces and show the world that something else is possible. That tenderness is possible. And we bring our plants and we try to speak to them and we teach our children as much as we can the language of seeds and the language of trees so that if and when they survive they would know how to plant shade for those who will come after them. This is Palestine and that is who we are.”⁷⁴