Given the billions of barrels worth of oil in Palestine, some advocates believe that fossil fuels are influencing Israel’s attacks.
Handala was born and raised in Palestine’s West Bank. He grew up spending ample time on his family’s olive farm—with the trees from which his ancestors have harvested olives for generations. These plants, some 1,500 years old, seeded Handala’s appreciation for the environment. He realized around the age of 12 that he wanted to dedicate his life to studying agriculture when he helped his father save some trees that the Israeli military had cut down.
“That taught us how the olive trees are so resilient and can survive even though a lot is affecting [them],” said Handala, a 31-year-old environmental activist with a Palestine-based organization who is using a pseudonym out of fear of Israeli government retaliation.
In that way, the trees and the Palestinian people who care for them are not so different. As a child, Handala wouldn’t devote his attention only to the olive trees. There were always the tanks, too; he’d count them on his walks to school.
“Life has never been normal,” he said.
Since October 7, 2023, normalcy in Palestine and Israel has felt even more out of reach. For nearly two months, the U.S.-funded Israeli government has launched attack after attack on Palestine’s civilian communities. Indeed, the U.N. has warned the international community about “a genocide in the making.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that the Palestinian death toll has likely reached 20,000 as of Nov. 17. The terrorist group Hamas has begun releasing hostages but still has nearly 200 held captive.
Though pro-Israel politicians and officials have framed the offense as a war against Hamas, some pro-Palestine advocates throughout the Middle East don’t buy that message. They believe another interest is behind the violence: fossil fuels.
“This genocide is not about the claims of Israel protecting itself,” said Shereen Talaat, founder and director of MENAFem Movement for Economic, Development, and Ecological Justice, which approaches the climate crisis in the Middle East-North Africa region through a feminist lens. “This genocide is about oil.”
Both off the coast and beneath the occupied lands of Palestine, over 3 billion barrels of oil are estimated to exist, according to a 2019 U.N. report. These numbers don’t even include the gas potential in Palestine. The Levant Basin, which sits in the Mediterranean, is estimated to have some 1.7 billion barrels of oil while over 1.5 billion barrels are estimated to lie beneath the occupied West Bank area that Handala calls home. Despite the billions of dollars these resources offer if extracted, Handala would prefer the oil and gas stay where they are—the world cannot afford more fossil fuel extraction.
“We want more clean energy,” he said.
All of this, of course, is aspirational. Right now, it’s downright impossible. Though the U.S. is reportedly pushing Israel to allow Palestinians to profit and build an independent energy system from offshore gas post-war, under Israeli occupation, Palestinians cannot drill for oil and gas. Many communities are not allowed to build out solar energy, either. Israel, on the other hand, hasn’t wasted time in claiming these dirty resources for itself. On October 29, its government approved 12 licenses for six companies to look for more gas fields offshore.
Since the launch of the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, Europe has been in need of an energy provider that can fill in the gaps. For years, Israel has been trying to build a pipeline to export gas to European nations.
“In the Middle East, you can never talk about conflict without the corresponding associations of oil and gas,” said Atif Kubursi, a retired economics professor at McMaster University who authored that 2019 U.N. report. “This is particularly problematic now that Russia has cut its oil and gas to Europe, and everybody is looking for alternatives.”
Many advocates feel that foreign interests in extracting these resources from Palestinian lands are contributing to the potential genocide Palestinians face, at least in part. Historically, foreign policy in the Middle East has often involved fossil fuels. Could it be different this time?
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In times of crisis, history serves as a compass of sorts, showing the public the direction they’re heading—or helping them understand how they got here in the first place. When it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the history is a long and complicated one mired in blood and dispossession.
“The struggle is a very deep struggle that goes back to the colonial times,” said Jamal Wakim, a professor of history and international relations at Lebanese University.
In 1882, Zionists built their first settlement in Palestine. This small group of Jewish people left Eastern Europe to build homes in what they declared their Holy Land. In 1882, the Jewish population in Palestine was 24,000. By 1914, it had expanded to 85,000. Early on, tensions rose between the two inhabitants of the land—one group Indigenous and the other settlers, both seeking community and safety.
The division and disagreement over the land only heightened after 1917 when Great Britain conquered Palestine and issued the Balfour Declaration, where the government boasted its support for a Jewish state in Palestine. The Holocaust and the genocide of some 6 million Jewish people further encouraged survivors to migrate to Palestine. Mass displacement of Palestinians quickly ensued in 1948—what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic.
As all this persecution, forced migration, and war were taking place, world powers were also in search of a crucial commodity: oil. In 1908, imperial forces discovered oil in Iran. In 1927 came the discovery in Iraq. At the time, these oil reserves sat largely within British territories, but by the 1920s, the U.S. entered the Middle East oil scene. By the 1970s, a third of U.S. oil consumption came from the region. The fossil fuel industry’s roots run deep in the Middle East.
“For most Middle Eastern oil producers, the arrival of oil coincided almost exactly with the beginnings of the creation of the modern state,” wrote historian Roger Owen in his 2008 paper One Hundred Years of Middle Eastern Oil. “As a result, the growth of these states and of their oil revenues took place together, in a symbiotic relationship that makes it virtually impossible to imagine one without the other.”
In Palestine, the industry identified a gas field some 20 miles off the coast of Gaza in 1999. The second intifada, or Palestinian uprisings, came a year later, essentially shutting down negotiations between Israel and Palestine to figure out how to divide these resources.
“The rules about exploiting shared, common resources are not very well defined,” said Kubursi, author of the 2019 U.N. report. “Therefore, it comes a bit of a tangle of issues, and who gets what could easily be who has the louder gun and the bigger plane.”
Though under international law, these resources should belong to the occupied territory—and not the occupying power—Israel has benefited from the oil and gas lying beneath Palestinian lands and waters. Abeer Butmeh, coordinator of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network, has spent the last few years fighting against energy projects tying together Israel and Europe. She cautions those world powers working with Israel.
“When they cooperate with Israel, they will violate the Palestinian rights and natural resources,” Butmeh said.
Meanwhile, Palestine has lost billions of dollars of economic potential by not accessing oil and gas before the planet reached critical climate tipping points. Scientists have been urging leaders to end fossil fuel extraction immediately to avoid locking in further global heating.
“That’s what’s making things a lot more urgent,” Kubursi said. “There is a window to get the benefits. After that, the assets better stay in the ground or else we’re going to fry the planet.”
Local Palestinian environmental activists would prefer to leave fossil fuels alone: They don’t want their people’s hands sullied by contributing further to climate calamity. Handala wants to see the land heal, especially after all the destruction it’s faced. He says that before the Israeli occupation in 1948, Palestinians were creating green spaces and planting forests.
“[Palestine] was one of the only green areas in the Middle East,” he said.
He dreams of a future where biodiversity thrives again—where creatures like the black iridescent Palestine sunbird can fly free, where the olive trees can once again grow old. The burning of bombs and fossil fuels pushes these dreams farther and farther away.
For Yasmeen El-Hasan, an advocacy officer with the Palestine-based Union of Agricultural Work Committees, there’s no way to untangle the global thirst for oil and gas from what’s happening to Palestine. None of this is a coincidence, she said.
“It is quite apparent that the international complicity in the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza is intricately tied to the capitalist interests of global actors and corporations, where financial gain is prioritized over Palestinian lives (and preservation of our environment),” El-Hasan wrote via email.
She believes that this is “only one of the many reasons” why much of the international community is standing by Israel. “As the Indigenous people and stewards of the land, these actors view us as an obstacle to their profit,” El-Hasan said.
Many of the region’s gas and oil fields are underneath Gaza. Israeli airstrikes have been leveling entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Talaat of MENAFem Movement for Economic, Development, and Ecological Justice believes that the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza has been the plan for years.
“It was always about oil. It was about evacuating Gaza people from Gaza,” Talaat said. “Gaza is floating on oil.”
Historian Wakim, however, looks at the conflict with a bit more nuance. Religious ideology and other geopolitical strategies, such as accessing maritime trading routes, play a bigger role than fossil fuels in his opinion. “When it comes to fossil fuels, I believe they have a very marginal role in the ongoing conflict now in Gaza,” Wakim said. After all, Israeli leaders didn’t have to go to war to tap into those resources. They were already producing oil and gas.
“I believe that the issue at stake is much deeper here,” Wakim said.
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When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called out colonialism’s role in the climate crisis last year, Basav Sen was shocked. “I didn’t expect to read the word ‘colonialism’ in an IPCC report, but there it was,” said Sen, who is the Climate Policy Project director for the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based think tank.
This history is especially relevant as environmental advocates investigate the mounting genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. After all, it was the British Empire that discovered the oil resources in the Middle East, which helped build its power and ability to colonize with impunity. The wealth that colonizing powers accrued allowed them to invest further in fossil fuel infrastructure. Now, the chase for even more dirty energy creates power imbalances throughout the Global South that mimic the legacy of colonialism.
“The Israeli occupation that we’re seeing today is a manifestation of the same process of colonialism that has also brought us the climate crisis,” Sen said.
He draws parallels between the sort of “historical amnesia” that U.S. leaders incur when they justify the kind of violence unfolding in Gaza to when they expand fossil fuels despite publicly admitting to the science that directs officials to do the opposite.
Like previous forms of colonialism, this war—and the mass murder of the Palestinian people—will ripple for generations. History will not forget those who stood by and supported the killing of thousands. The people will not forgive those who were driven by their greed and addiction to fossil fuels.
Handala, who has been visiting in the U.S. to share his work on organic agriculture since the Israeli offensive began, hopes to return to his beloved Palestine. His entire family is in the West Bank: his parents and his siblings. He doesn’t yet have children; he knows firsthand the struggle of growing up under occupation.
“It’s really hard to bring a child into this world,” he said. “There is no guarantee for anything.”
No matter what happens to the land, he will carry Palestine with him. He wants the next generation to know that Palestine will live on—it must—even if only in the hearts of its survivors. Like the olive trees, their roots run deep. Not even this violence can uproot them.
Words by Yessina Funes via Atmos.earth
