I think I have identified a new version of the ancient anti-Jewish ‘Blood Libel’.
In case you are unaware, this age-old lie held that the Jews were once responsible for the ritual killing of innocent Christian children across medieval Europe, sometimes supposedly even drinking their blood or mixing it up with their sacred bread when baking it. The legend was genuinely believed in, and led to murderous pogroms taking place against the supposed perpetrators.
Today, however, this ghoulish old fable seems rather too far-fetched for most people to actually still believe in (albeit not necessarily Hamas itself, which has a long record of painting Jews as vampires, as I have previously demonstrated elsewhere). Instead, the Jews of Israel are now much more ‘plausibly’ blamed for killing innocent Palestinian Muslim children through the obviously far, far greater horrors of climate change, particularly via harmful, baby-slaughtering CO₂ emissions being belched out on a daily basis by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
As a result, rather than an anti-Jewish Blood Libel, what we have being born before our eyes right now, I would like to suggest, would be better christened as an anti-Jewish ‘Carbon Libel’. In one simple phrase, the whole idea could be summed efficiently up as follows: “Save the planet, kill the Jews!”
Carbon Copies
The basic notion of the whole Carbon Libel predates the current war in Gaza, as demonstrated by an article which appeared on the Al Jazeera website on October 5th 2023, a mere two days before Hamas attacked Israel, entitled ‘Interwoven struggles: The green paradox meets the Palestine paradox’ by Marwan Bishara, a former professor of International Relations (so, not climate science, then) at the American University of Paris. According to Bishara’s analysis:
Israel’s own meteorological studies reveal that the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet. Whereas worldwide temperatures have increased by an average of 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, in Israel/Palestine average temperatures have risen by 1.5°C between 1950 and 2017, with a forecasted increase of 4°C by the end of the century.
Why could this be? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was all down to those cunning, Machiavellian, Israeli Jews and their equally malign American and Western allies. Despite calling for global reduction in the use of gas and oil,
the United States will be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. … This hypocrisy perfectly mirrors the long-standing response of affluent, and powerful, Western nations to the Palestinian tragedy. … [T]he lofty promises of ‘climate justice’ from Western nations have regrettably proven as hollow as those about ‘Palestinian justice’. In both cases… they devised and implemented inadequate and counterproductive mechanisms to appear to be ‘helping’. On climate change, they came up with deceptive concepts like ‘carbon offset’ and ‘carbon credit’ to evade meaningful action and a just, swift transition to renewable energy. On Palestine, they devised unworkable ‘peace plans’ that only serve to deepen Palestinian oppression. … Equally cynical is Israel’s routine attempts to confiscate Palestinian lands under the pretext of ‘environmental conservation’. This tactic, known as ‘green colonialism’, exposes Israel’s appropriation of environmentalism to displace the indigenous population of Palestine and exploit its resources. Israeli green zones are primarily established to legitimise land seizures and prevent the return of displaced Palestinians, further entrenching a system of apartheid. … Israel’s uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive trees so that JNF [the Jewish National Fund, a regional land-purchasing NGO] could plant imported trees to efface all traces of Palestinian existence is not eco-friendly, it is ecocide, and utterly criminal.
In other words, whatever Israel does, it can’t win. If it doesn’t intervene environmentally within Palestinian affairs, it is leaving the area’s inhabitants to all sizzle and die from so-called global boiling. If it does intervene to try and help, however, it is merely another form of “green colonialism”.
From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Tree
Just how paranoid some of these accusations can sometimes be is well illustrated by a November 2021 submission made to the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) from the Palestinian advocacy NGO the Al-Haq association, ‘Climate Oppression: A Major Tool to Establish and Maintain Israel’s Apartheid Regime Over the Palestinian People and Their Lands’. This document aimed to “address the [uh-oh!] intersectional and multidimensional impacts of Israel’s apartheid colonisation and military occupation on the comprehensive human rights of the Palestinian people within the context of climate change”.
Speaking of “climate oppression” as just one more tool within Israel’s imperialist “matrix of control”, Al-Haq also focused upon the JNF’s tree-planting campaign within the region as a chosen means for effecting a kind of ‘Great Replacement’ of the region’s Muslims.
Supposedly, argued Al-Haq, the JNF was presenting its “afforestation projects” in Palestine as a benign means to combat global warming. However, this false foliage was really being used to cover over the remains of ancient, Jew-ruined old settlements, so their original inhabitants would never be able to return back to live in them ever again: “Since 1948 [when Israel was founded], 4,300,000 trees have been planted by the Jewish National Fund, 67% of which [were sown] on the ruins of some 89 Palestinian villages [whose inhabitants were] forcibly displaced in 1948 [by Israeli troops].”
Bizarrely, just like so many of the 1940s Jewish colonisers themselves, these trees were (analogously speaking) of ‘white European’ stock, mere alien invaders who sought to force out the native non-white local species via a kind of racially supremacist tree-racism. Yet this arboreal Great Replacement also had unfortunate environmental consequences, probably intentional in their nature: “Most of the preferred species sown were conifers to provide a European cover to a new alien landscape, and their lack of adaptive capacities to the dry and hot climate of Palestine renders them highly vulnerable to climate change-related wildfires.”
Therefore, whilst cunningly posing as environmentally friendly items, the white-European invader trees in question were really little more than big green Mossad agents, whose true aim was to “primarily function as a green camouflage to war crimes”, namely the war-crime of ethnic cleansing.
The overall secret plan, said Al-Haq, was for Israel to appear to be making Palestine more well-adapted to climate change, whilst actually making it more vulnerable to the phenomenon, thereby forcing its people to flee: “By strengthening a climate-related coercive environment, Israel uses climate oppression over Palestinians to drive Palestinian forcible transfer” to nations elsewhere, something “unequivocally prohibited under Article 49(1) of the Fourth Geneva Convention”.
The brilliance of this sinister Zionist scheme, of course, was that, if the Israelis had openly forced the Palestinians out at the point of a gun, they would immediately have been exposed as war criminals: if they engineered a localised climate catastrophe so severe that the Palestinians upped sticks and left of their own accord as so-called ‘climate refugees’, however, then Tel Aviv could feign innocence and disavow all responsibility for their wicked tree-based crime.
(Deliberately) Eyeless in Gaza
Following Hamas’s October 7th attacks, this Carbon Libel narrative went into overdrive. In January 2024, the Guardian carried exclusive coverage of a new scientific report, purporting to prove that “The planet-warming emissions of the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations”, as “the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal” due to “CO₂ from aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles, as well as emissions generated by making and exploding the bombs, artillery and rockets”.
The IDF’s chief allied imperialist lackey running-dogs did not escape responsibility for such sins against the planet either: “Almost half the total CO₂ emissions were down to U.S. cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.”
A sceptical response to this might be “Well, Hamas shouldn’t have provoked the emission of all this nasty CO₂ by attacking Israel in the first place”. As the Israeli Government’s official X account had previously put it in a tweet aimed female Gollum lookalike Greta Thunberg, who had previously blindly spoken out against Israeli actions in the region whilst simultaneously leaving their enemies’ own crimes strangely unmentioned, “Hamas doesn’t use sustainable material for their rockets”.
Yet the 2024 report’s authors had already anticipated such an obvious response, providing a convenient counterargument of their own: “Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the same period generated about 713 tonnes of CO₂, which is equivalent to approximately 300 tonnes of coal [compared to Israel’s 150,000 tonnes] – underscoring the asymmetry of each side’s war machinery.” What a plucky little underdog Hamas is, in CO₂ as in everything else!
The clear implication of such research is that, even if distant Western readers don’t care about the IDF killing Palestinian kids, they should care about the IDF killing their own kids by proxy, via a kind of global warming-based whole-planetary climate genocide. “The military’s environmental exceptionalism allows them to pollute with impunity, as if the carbon emissions from their tanks and fighter jets don’t count. This has to stop, to tackle the climate crisis we need accountability,” argued one of the researchers responsible for the report.
Yet it seems as if “accountability” is only to be apportioned one way. Building Israel’s Iron Wall of (hoped-for) protection against Hamas was estimated to have generated about 274,000 tonnes of CO₂. Yet the Iron Wall is clearly needed to protect Israel’s population against further October 7th-style Hamas attacks.
By contrast, Hamas’ own ‘Gaza Metro’ network of underground tunnels – which are needed only to protect Hamas terrorists from being taken out by the IDF before they can perpetrate any further pogroms – was guessed to have generated perhaps 176,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. One of these two major construction projects is sadly necessary; the other is not (unless by ‘necessary’ here, you mean “necessary to facilitate the planning of yet more acts of mass antisemitic rape and murder”).
Poisonous Narratives
The Israeli Government was even blamed in the Guardian’s report for its engineers’ likely future actions in rebuilding Gaza and its homes and infrastructure once the assault is eventually over, something which will “generate at least 30 million metric tonnes of warming gases”, something “on a par with New Zealand’s annual CO₂ emissions”.
Maybe the Israelis should just leave it all unbuilt forever then, and make the Palestinians inhabit perpetual tents like Bedouins, in order to save our vulnerable planet? Next these people will be blaming the Jews for the intolerably high CO₂ emissions from the smokestacks at Auschwitz.
For what it’s worth, I do not dispute that wars emit CO₂ – “an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget”, according to one UN spokesman cited – but simply note the blatant double standards involved in such reporting.
Other outlets picked up on the Guardian’s initial story and ran with it; even the Jerusalem Post spoke of an “emissions asymmetry” between the two warring parties (eco-friendly paragliders are just so much less polluting than fighter-jets, aren’t they?) Meanwhile, Al Jazeera went with the following truly laughable angle on matters: “Israeli bombing has damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings, many of which were roofed with solar panels.” No doubt a windmill or two were damaged at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that was hardly the most significant part of the tragedy. Maybe an eco-friendly heat-pump got trashed somewhere on 9/11, too?
Where are all the equally anguished articles about the presumably equally huge amounts of CO₂ being emitted by, amongst others, current conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar? Nowhere, because, in those wars, Jews aren’t the ones primarily responsible for doing the polluting.
There is even a large subsidiary aspect of this whole narrative which blames Israel (not entirely without reason, to be fair, although Hamas shares much responsibility for the issue too) for the pollution of Gaza’s water supply, rendering much of it undrinkable and unusable, even for agricultural purposes. Yet, in many accounts, these tales appear to slip uneasily into a resurrection of the false medieval myth of evil Jews deliberately poisoning Christians’ wells across Europe to kill off their religious enemies en masse, a time-honoured variant of the Blood Libel specifically spread in the past by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader in the West Bank, during a 2016 speech to the European Parliament.
The Gaza Strip’s water-table is indeed in a very poor state, but the fact that, for example, other states than Israel are also partially responsible for this, with Muslim Egypt having flooded Hamas-controlled tunnels with crop-killing seawater from 2013 themselves, is also usually conveniently ignored.
The true wells which are being poisoned here, I think, are those of contemporary public discourse.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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