No Environmental Justice without Palestinian Liberation!
Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians grinds on, destroying Gaza and causing a catastrophic human and environmental disaster of untold proportions. On the occasion of COP29, we call on all civil society organisations at COP29 and around the world to mobilise urgently to impose an energy embargo on Israel to stop the genocide in Palestine and put an end to Israel’s apartheid, illegal occupation and ecocide.
At least 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza have now been killed, with estimates that the death toll is likely far larger. Many thousands are buried under the rubble of their homes, with hundreds of thousands of others suffering from severe physical injuries and mental scars, and most of Gaza’s population deliberately starved and undernourished, forcibly displaced in tents. The situation is more horrifying in the north of Gaza where Israel is committing massacres and ethnic cleansing. Many thousands more are being held in Israel’s network of torture camps, subject to the most barbaric treatment imaginable.
This shocking human cost has been combined with an appalling ecological destruction, intentionally inflicted on Gaza to make it uninhabitable. According to UN human experts, Israel’s genocide has also included “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.” Since the start of the genocide, more than 76% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed, and there has been extensive damage to soil, green houses, water wells, farms and animal shelters.
Israel’s genocidal war has emitted hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions, equal to 31,000 kilotons of coal – enough to power about 15.8 coal-fired power plants for a year. During the first 120 days alone, this produced more CO2 than the annual emissions of 26 countries and territories. The CO2 emissions that will be produced during the rebuilding of Gaza’s devastated urban landscape will produce a figure higher than that of over 130 countries. Chemicals from weapons such as white phosphorus have also contaminated the air, and likely impacted agricultural land and soil.
Meanwhile in the West Bank, the Israeli occupation has continued its colonization and theft of Palestinian land and natural resources for illegal settlements, killing approximately 800 Palestinians and injuring thousands of others in the process. This is despite the International Court of Justice declaring in July that Israel’s entire occupation is illegal and must be brought to an end.
The international community’s failure to end state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s genocide and underlying system of apartheid – and to impose legal, targeted sanctions to stop Israel’s war machine – has emboldened it with a sense of complete impunity, giving it carte blanche to spread its destruction and massacres beyond Palestine to the people of Lebanon. In just a few weeks, Israel killed more than 2,000 Lebanese citizens, injuring more than 10,000 and wantonly destroying thousands of homes and entire villages. It is clear from Israel’s bombardment that it intends to spread its genocidal pattern of destruction – targeting hospitals, medical staff and civilian infrastructure – to the people of Lebanon. Israel’s use of white phosphorus and cluster munitions has devastated agricultural production in south Lebanon, and its direct attack on the Litani water conveyance system demonstrates that such destruction is intentional.
Israel’s plans are now clear as day: to ethnically cleanse the entirety of Palestine and the south of Lebanon of their indigenous peoples, a continuation of the ongoing Nakba that has gone on, unabated, since 1948 until the present day. In this context, the international community’s delayed demand for a ceasefire in Gaza is meaningless unless backed up by concrete actions that can stop Israel’s genocidal war machine.
The governments and corporations profiting from and supporting a financial system and socio-economic order destroying our planet, indigenous lands and forcing millions of people into exile and poverty, are the very ones complicit in powering and fuelling Israel’s genocidal machine.
Energy Embargo for Palestine
Today, the urgent need for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to stop Israel’s genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation is evident. The UN General Assembly has – for the first time in 42 years – passed a resolution calling for concrete sanctions on Israel after repeated decisions by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) highlighting the legal obligation of all states and corporations to end complicity with Israeli crimes.
Israel’s genocide is powered by oil and coal, which fuel its electricity grid, its arms industry, its AI infrastructure and its military vehicles. The sale of gas funnels billions into the Israeli economy, allowing it to continue its genocidal campaigns. At the end of February 2024, Palestinian organisations issued a call demanding the cessation of all energy transfers to Israel, the purchase of Israeli gas and corporate complicity in the extraction and sale of energy sources, particularly those found in Palestinian land, waters or exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
In response to this call and other Palestinian-led campaigns, the Colombian government stopped the transfer of coal to Israel – approximately 70% of its usage – and activists in the Mediterranean mobilised around the demand for #BlockTheBoat and No Harbour to Genocide, preventing a tanker carrying military jet fuel and a ship carrying explosives to Israel from docking in many ports in both Africa and Europe. Further mobilisations calling for an energy embargo are continuing in Britain, South Africa, Turkey, the United States, Brazil and elsewhere.
The gathering of this year’s COP in Baku, Azerbaijan is an opportunity to highlight Azerbaijan’s role in sustaining Israel’s crimes. Azerbaijan is one of the major importers of Israeli weapons, directly financing Israel’s military industry. Furthermore, Azeri oil, among other major suppliers, fuels Israel’s war machine. During the genocide, oil from Azerbaijan has made up more than a fourth of Israel’s crude oil imports. This oil is transported through the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to Turkey for shipping. The pipeline is majority owned by British Petroleum (BP) and Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR.
Despite Turkey’s stated support for Palestinian liberation and its formal suspension of most trade with Israel as a result of the genocide, it still permits Azeri and Kazakh oil (together accounting for approximately 60% of Israel’s oil imports) to flow through the Turkish port of Ceyhan, from where it is transported by tankers to Israel. Since October 2023, this complicity has been challenged by Turkish youth groups who have consistently protested SOCAR and the complicit Turkish companies, with many activists facing arrest and harassment by Turkish authorities as a result.
Numerous legal experts have warned that the transfer of dual use products such as oil, which can be used in military vehicles (tanks, APCs, military jeeps and aircraft), makes states complicit in genocide by providing material support to the perpetrating state. A recent legal expert analysis affirms the obligation to end energy supplies to Israel in compliance with the Genocide Convention.
All energy transfers to Israel, and the genocide and environmental destruction they wreak, must be stopped. We therefore call for pressure on all those governments and corporations present at COP29, and around the world, to take immediate steps to:
- Stopping the flow of weapons and energy sources to and from Israel.
- Pressuring all governments, especially the US, EU members (Greece, Cyprus, and Italy), Albania, Azerbaijan, Russia, South Africa, Gabon, Brazil, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Turkey in particular, to cease the sale and/or transport of energy supplies to Israel.
- Pressuring the governments of Jordan, Egypt and the EU institutions to stop all gas imports from Israel.
- Mobilising globally in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and self-determination around COP29, on the theme of BP and SOCAR Stop Fueling Genocide, and to participate in two days of action:
- On November 11: targeting Azerbaijan’s oil exports by raising awareness about the role of the Azerbaijani and Turkish states, and taking action to pressure them to stop the flow of Azeri oil to Israel’s genocide.
- On November 16: joining global COP29 mobilisations, and focusing actions primarily on SOCAR, BP, companies involved in operating the BTC pipeline, and Chevron. Actions can also be focused on other complicit firms, such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Eni, and Total Energies, together supplying 66% of oil to Israel; as well as Eni and BP for their illegal contracts for gas exploration in the Palestinian EEZ off of Gaza.
Signed:
BDS National Committee (BNC)
Global Energy Embargo for Palestine (GEEP)
Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign
