Journalists from Al Jazeera reported that “according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip since October 7th, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.” The technology of chemical warfare such as the white phosphorus used in the Bunker Bombs that the United States has supplied to Israel can cause burns and irritation, liver, kidney, heart, lung, or bone damage, and death according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). 

The radiation of missiles and bombs along with heavy metals and chemicals such as Uranium-235, a chemical agent used in nuclear bombs that has a half-life of 700 million years – the time any substance takes to decay by half of its original amount –  according to the CDC, all have an unfathomable impact. These bomb components seeping into the ground, and running off into drinking water with the rains are enough to impact generations to come with fatal cancers and altered genetics of plants, animals, and the very ecosystems they all need to survive.

Though the British had to exercise a bit more ingenuity than just direct bombings when they began genociding the Indigenous peoples of “North America” in 1587, certain parallels are gut-wrenchingly similar.

When colonizers came to Turtle Island (what’s now known as the “United States”) from Spain in 1492, followed by several other invading nations, and ultimately the British, Indigenous Nations experienced agricultural and environmental devastation. The loss of over 90 million acres of ancestral lands, displacement, population devastation brought on by diseases like smallpox – which the government harnessed as warfare against the Indigenous Nations of the time – and invasive species of animals such as pigs and sheep from the white settler Occupation brought “the old ways” of indigenous living and thriving to an end as our ancestors knew it. 

Pigs from Europe for example quickly grew in population size and destroyed crops and ecosystems. As Climatehub cites, “They are a destructive, invasive species that cause extensive damage to natural ecosystems, croplands, pastures, and livestock operations.” Along with the desecration of the earth for its riches and natural resources by the settlers, and the ramifications of colonizer warfare, the environmental impacts of these industrial sins such as deforestation, and lost crops, seeds, plants, and grasses, are ones that we are still healing from, and working to reverse today. 

While it’s a known fact that governments profit from war, the burden of healing and creating anything in the way of sustainability always falls back on the people who are suffering the most. Consistently with little to no accountability or help from said government. With examples such as the survivors of the 1945 American bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki according to Time Magazine, the gravity of grown men playing war games and the Hell on earth that its victims are made prey to are agonizing facts of war and occupation.

Though Jews and Arabs may have commingled in Palestine for thousands of years, perhaps we’re unclear on what an Occupation is. Israel forcibly removed Palestinians from their ancestrally owned homes and lands in 1948 so that Jewish families could live in those homes, along with the ethnic cleansing of such Palestinian villages, and Israel imposing and enforcing its government infrastructure on the Palestinian people is an Occupation. 

Similarly, Indigenous people in Turtle Island were forced from their lands, put into holding camps, and herded onto reservations to endure the newly imposed infrastructure of the United States government. Surviving off of small government rations, the irreparable results were starvation and a deep traumatic loss of a people and their way of life such as the outlawing of Indigenous spirituality and ceremonies, possession of sacred objects, and songs and traditions, with no corrective action taken by the American government until the Religious Freedom Act of 1978 as cited on GovInfo.gov. 

As Gaza experiences one of the most horrific genocides in modern history with more than 29,000 people killed since Israel’s war strikes began in October according to PBS.org, 2.2 million people are in crisis or worse levels of food insecurity, and 576,600 people face catastrophic hunger and starvation in Gaza as cited by wfp.org. Islamic-relief.org states, “On the internationally recognized 5-phase scale used to classify food crises, more than half a million people in Gaza – a quarter of the entire population – are now believed to be at the most severe Phase 5 ‘catastrophic’ level, meaning a high risk of mass starvation and death.”

The fact that these unspeakable humanitarian and environmental atrocities are being allowed to happen anywhere is a threat to all of us everywhere! As Samira Homerang Saunders, a researcher at the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at Queen Mary, University of London cited, “War creates a toxic biosphere . . . In 2013, the head of Oncology at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza said he expected the cancer rates to double within five years after Israel used uranium in the 2008-2009 war. He referred to that campaign as an ‘environmental catastrophe’.” The West Bank in Palestine has had its share of strikes from Israeli forces also, but with the last being in December of 2023, it’s clear that Gaza is being disproportionately targeted.

A 2017 census reported Gaza’s total population to be 590,481 people. That means almost a quarter of Gaza’s population has been systematically wiped out. A haunting echo of America’s original sins, as over 10,000 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, Seminole, and other Native American nations died on the Trail of Tears forced removal according to the National Parks Service. Just a fraction of the American government’s total colonization body count.