Dispatch #126 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers How Israel Has Killed Gaza’s Environment and Created an Unlivable Hellscape

Kathleen A. Maloy
Jan 18, 2024
6 min read

January 18th 2024

1093 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

5 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin

573 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

Israel’s Assault Day 104: Israel’s unrelenting assault continues – ‘If we’re not killed by bombs, we die from the cold, starvation, or disease.’

As Palestinians in Gaza continue to be starved and bombed by Israel, hundreds in Gaza are killed every day. Every day, the situation in Gaza grows exponentially worse amid Israel’s bombardment and ongoing blockade, leaving the majority of the besieged enclave’s population displaced with little to no belongings and nowhere safe to run. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-104-israels-unrelenting-assault-continues-if-were-not-killed-by-bombs-we-die-from-the-cold-starvation-or-disease/

Netanyahu tells US he opposes creation of Palestinian state after Gaza war. PM rebuts White House by saying all territory west of Jordan River would be under Israeli security control.

Israel’s prime minister has told the Biden White House that he rejects any moves to establish a Palestinian state when Israel ends its offensive against Gaza, and that all territory west of the Jordan River would be under Israeli security control. www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/netanyahu-tells-us-opposes-palestinian-state-after-gaza-war

Israel’s right to tyranny. In justifying the violent unraveling of Gaza as ‘self-defense,’ Western capitals have once again signed off on Israelis’ license to act like despots.

Indeed, from its oral arguments in The Hague to its actions on the ground, Israel has made it abundantly clear that it is not asking the court to respect its right to self-defense. What it really wants is for the world to indulge Israel’s right to tyranny: to violently redesign its geopolitical environment, to secure its military and demographic dominance, and to do whatever it wishes to the Palestinians without criticism or consequence. https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-icj-tyranny/

Award-winning author Joshua Frank – his most recent book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America Haymarket Books November 2022 -- begins his article discussing reports that Israel plans to flood the Hamas tunnels by pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea.

While Israel is already test-running its flood strategy, it’s not the first time Hamas’s tunnels have been subjected to sabotage by seawater. In 2013, neighboring Egypt began flooding Hamas-controlled tunnels that were allegedly being used to smuggle goods between the country’s Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. For more than two years, water from the Mediterranean was flushed into the tunnel system, wreaking havoc on Gaza’s environment. Groundwater supplies were quickly polluted with salt brine and, as a result, the dirt became saturated and unstable, causing the ground to collapse and killing numerous people. Once fertile agricultural fields were transformed into salinated pits of mud, and clean drinking water, already in short supply in Gaza, was further degraded.

Israel’s current strategy to drown Hamas’s tunnels will no doubt cause similar, irreparable damage. “It is important to keep in mind,” warns Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, “that we are not just talking about water with a high salt content here — seawater along the Mediterranean coast is also polluted with untreated wastewater, which is continuously discharged into the Mediterranean from Gaza’s dysfunctional sewage system.”

This, of course, appears to be part of a broader Israeli objective — not just to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities but to further degrade and destroy Gaza’s imperiled aquifers (already polluted with sewage that’s leaked from dilapidated pipes). Israeli officials have openly admitted their goal is to ensure that Gaza will be an unlivable place once they end their merciless military campaign.

Frank continues his article noting that this latest potential environmental injury is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year campaign to destroy Palestinian cultural heritage.

During an average year, Gaza once produced more than 5,000 tons of olive oil from more than 40,000 trees. The fall harvest in October and November was long a celebratory season for thousands of Palestinians. Families and friends sang, shared meals, and gathered in the groves to celebrate under ancient trees, which symbolized “peace, hope, and sustenance.” It was an important tradition, a deep connection both to the land and to a vital economic resource.

Since 1967, Israel has uprooted more than 800,000 native Palestinian olive trees, sometimes to make way for new illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank; in other instances, out of alleged security concerns, or from pure, visceral Zionist rage.

Wild groves of olive trees have been harvested by inhabitants of the region for thousands of years, dating back to the Chalcolithic period in the Levant (4,300-3,300 BCE), and the razing of such groves has had calamitous environmental consequences. “[The] removal of trees is directly linked to irreversible climate change, soil erosion, and a reduction in crops,” according to a 2023 Yale Review of International Studies report. “The perennial, woody bark acts as a carbon sink … [an] olive tree absorbs 11 kg of CO2 per liter of olive oil produced.”

Besides providing a harvestable crop and cultural value, olive groves are vital to Palestine’s ecosystem. Numerous bird species, including the Eurasian Jay, Green Finch, Hooded Crow, Masked Shrike, Palestine Sunbird, and Sardinian Warbler rely on the biodiversity provided by Palestine’s wild trees, six species of which are often found in native olive groves: the Aleppo pine, almond, olive, Palestine buckhorn, piny hawthorne, and fig.

As Simon Awad and Omar Attum wrote in a 2017 issue of the Jordan Journal of Natural History:

“[Olive] groves in Palestine could be considered cultural landscapes or be designated as globally important agricultural systems because of the combination of their biodiversity, cultural, and economic values. The biodiversity value of historic olive groves has been recognized in other parts of the Mediterranean, with some proposing these areas should receive protection because they are habitat used by some rare and threatened species and are important in maintaining regional biodiversity.”

An ancient, native olive tree should be considered a testament to the very existence of Palestinians and their struggle for freedom. With its thick spiraling trunk, the olive tree stands as a cautionary tale to Israel, not because of the fruit it bears, but because of the stories its roots hold of a scarred landscape and a battered people…

Frank describes how the white phosphorous bombs dropped by Israel contaminate the soil, and the nonstop bombing in dense urban areas create constant clouds of greenhouse gases and particulates. The consequences of 15-year blockade culminating in the current siege include 96% of Gaza’s sole aquifer unfit for humans, disrupted sand and soil that will make rebuilding on weakened ground, and contaminated groundwater. https://tomdispatch.com/the-killing-of-gazas-environment/

In Gaza, Israel has turned water into a weapon of mass destruction. By denying Palestinians safe water since the war began, Israel has created an unparalleled health crisis and risks causing irreversible ecological damage.

As the ICJ considers the charges of genocide against Israel, we call on water scholars and activists to consider signing this open letter, which outlines Israel’s discriminatory water policies over the decades and calls for an end to the weaponization of water in the Gaza Strip. https://www.972mag.com/gaza-israel-water-weapon/

US Officials Care More about Protecting Oil Tankers than Palestinians. United States is demanding an end to attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, but it won’t support a ceasefire in Gaza. www.juancole.com/2024/01/officials-protecting-palestinians.html

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on October 16^th that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65295ee8e4b03ea0c004e2a8

Israel Keeps Gaza Communications Blacked Out for 7 Days Gaza is facing yet another communications blackout.

The Gaza Strip was plunged into another communications blackout on Friday, with internet and phone service cut off for most of its more than two million residents as Israeli bombardment continued. It is the ninth blackout the enclave has endured since the war began in early October. The blackouts have terrorized besieged Palestinians in Gaza, leaving them unable to confirm whether their loved ones were still alive or call for help as Israeli airstrikes continued www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/world/middleeast/gaza-communications-blackout-israel.html.