A review by samdalefox
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

2.75

This is a short essay-form rehash of Malm's PhD thesis which was republished in 'Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming'. It is relevant, it is a useful perspective to take that desrves further enquiry, but my god I found it hard to read; I genuinely dislike the way Malm writes. 

So much of this short book was author-centered. Lot's of 'I' sentences, personal history ancedotes etc. Frankly, I don't want to hear a string of these, I want to hear about the subject matter the book promises - the relation between the destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the climate. 

Malm does actually touch upon that, but only in sporadic intervals inbetween lengthy sections of history and personal dialogue that both could be condensed, along with other bits of analysis like the morality of armed conflict and the use of technology in resistance, plus rebuttals to criticisms of his work which were so poorly written he shouldn't have bothered. Malm consistently self admittedly states that his essay barely scratches the surface and is a light commentary analysis using limited English sources since he does not speak Arabic. In which case, he should treat it as such, and point to more robust analyses by other academics or sit down and spend some more time of it himself. 

"How do we think through the relationship between these two processes? It is with this question the following pages are largely concerned, but they merely scratch the surface. There is nothing here in the way of exhaustive inquiry. The text seeks to approach Palestine as a microcosm of larger processes, focusing on a historical moment in 1840 that I believe has particular importance. Still, the story of what happened then is only told with brevity. There are troves of primary and secondary sources – not least in Arabic – that would have to be plumbed for the whole picture to emerge. Work on other projects has prevented me from giving more than a rough (and lightly referenced) account."

On to the good bits! Malm convincingly traces the parallels and dependencies between petro-states and Israel in maintaining soft power and hard economic power through fossil capital in the middle east through the destruction of Palestine and Palestinians. He presents a solid timeline and good quality sources evidencing the UK's (then later the USA's) plan to use Israel as a colony to maintain its power. This history is given from the pivotal battle of Akka in 1840 with the use of steam boats to the present day. Malm charts the letters between key political figures Palmerston, Shaftesbury, and the other Churchill that explicitly states their intentions to move Jews to the 'empty' land to further the empire's interests. "This, then, was the moment of conception for two interrelated principles: one, no people exists in Palestine; two, the land must be taken with the force of technology running on fossil fuels. As for the former, contemporary Zionists debate who first came up with the slogan ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, but there is a consensus that it happened around the year 1840." This source in particular was eye-opening to discover:

"Fifty-seven years before the first Zionist congress, seventy-seven years before the Balfour declaration, 107 years before the partition plan, the chief architect of the British Empire near the summit of its power here laid down the formula for the colonisation of Palestine. For some reason, this particular document appears to have never been cited in the entire historiography.

53. Broadlands Archive: Lord Palmerston to Lord Ponsonby, 25 November 1840, GC/PO/755-769."

Malm also touches upon his newly coined term ‘paupericide’ which I think sums up the connection neatly:

"...the relentless expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure beyond all boundaries for a liveable planet. The initial purpose of the act is not to kill anyone per se. The goal of extracting coal or oil or gas is to make money. Once it becomes fully established that this form of money-making actually kills multitudes, however, the absence of intention begins to fill up. As a corollary of the basic insights of climate science, the knowledge is now more or less universally spread: fossil fuels kill people, randomly, blindly, indiscriminately, with a heavy concentration on poor people in the Global South; and they kill in greater numbers the longer business as usual continues... Mass casualties are then an ideologically and mentally processed, de facto accepted result of capital accumulation."

In the last quarter of the main essay Malm finally writes about the touchpoints between the genocide and climate crisis beyond the historical political modes of destruction, such as parallels between victims, e.g., both Palestinian lives affected by imperial genocide and global south lives affected by climate change have no perceived value globally. Though I still found this writing lacking depth. I've included pertinent quotes below.

"More than 5 per cent of annual CO2 emissions stem from the militaries around the world. We often talk about flying and how bad it is for the climate, and it is bad, but civil aviation accounts for about 3 per cent of the total. And the 5 per cent that comes from militaries precede actual war: these are peacetime emissions, made in the process of maintaining the logistical apparatuses and fighting capacities of armies before they go to war."

"Ecocide here fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before. Bosnia was not a less habitable land after 1995 than before 1992. Rwandan soil and water and air went relatively unscathed through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. But will people ever be able to live again in Gaza?"

"Destruction and construction are interpenetrating opposites that presuppose one another: the destruction of the planet is the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure; the destruction of Palestine is the construction of racial colonies – or as Theodor Herzl put it in 1896: ‘If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.’ Limiting, stopping, reversing the destruction of Palestine and the planet therefore require, as a logically unassailable condition, the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and racial colonies – not necessarily their physical destruction; but necessarily their decommissioning and repurposing, in the cases where that is possible, and where not, on the path to their abolition, yes, their physical destruction."

"Perhaps we can then specify this as the first technogenocide. A technogenocide would be defined as a genocide that is 1) executed by means of the most advanced military technology, and 2) at least party animated by the drive to restore it's supremacy after a humiliatingly successful challenge."

"We are grappling with a structural deficit of climate subjectivity and a structural surplus of objective forces of destruction; and perhaps the imbalance is nowhere as extreme as in the Middle East. (Latin America is far richer on the subjective side.)"

"Nelson Mandela - Choose peace, rather than confrontation – except in cases where we cannot proceed, where we cannot move forward. Then, if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence."