Why the climate activists have pivoted to Palestine

Greta Thunberg was detained last month in Germany, during a sit-in at a munitions factory that sells weapons to Israel. She was wearing a Yalla Intifada T-shirt. Perhaps you thought Thunberg was a climate activist. She used to be. Thunberg gained fame by warning that greenhouse-gas emissions posed a threat to human life so urgent and existential that the world must put aside trifling concerns to solve it immediately. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is,” she told the World Economic Forum in 2019. But someone else will have to put out the fire, because these days, Thunberg is possibly the planet’s most famous anti-Israel protester.

Much of the climate movement – particularly its most radical elements – has pivoted to Palestine. The Climate Justice Alliance, Extinction Rebellion and Climate Defiance, among other green organisations, participate regularly in Free Palestine demonstrations. Most of the campus groups that were previously organised around demanding that their universities divest from fossil-fuel companies now demand that they divest from companies that do business with Israel. The same holds true across swaths of the left. Activists who previously treated racial justice, public health or trans rights as the cause of a lifetime have determined that Gaza is now the cause of their lifetime.

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Atlantic