I ask my mother if the Iron Dome is carbon-neutral. She replies that “the resulting explosion is tiny and probably negligible,” and asks me in return if I’m aware the Dead Sea is dying, the water receding. To prompt her into talking — that is, so I could get away with being as small and unassuming in this conversation as can be — I answer with a “yes, why?” She says “well obviously because of the drilling, people all over the world use Dead Sea Salt.” I ask her — and this is the most extremist, terrorist answer you can give in my household — “isn’t that a little fucked up?” She says “well, yeah, it’s fucked up, but the skin and health benefits are so unique.”

Despite having been raised in the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Ma’ale Adumim, I never considered myself an inherently Israeli person. Don’t get me wrong, I had many experiences in those first eight years of my life that could certainly classify me on paper as a “sabra”. I had the experience of school-mandated “rocket drills”, the absence of which surprised and baffled me when I moved to the US. I went on school field trips to Jerusalem and family outings to Eilat. The label just never stuck, mostly because my neighborhood was primarily a Russian one, my preschool teachers spoke to me in Russian, and I only actually spoke any Hebrew for the last two years I spent in Israel. I could never understand, on a fundamental level, what it was that made a culture, a people “Israeli”, and I thought this made me broken.

We moved to America in 2013. My parents, out of fear of being shamed by other Israelis for leaving the Jewish homeland, swore me to secrecy. I didn’t get to say “goodbye” to any of my Hebrew school friends, or “toda raba” (thank you very much) to my teachers. For the first few years I spent in the US, I spoke with a Russian accent. I fff’ed my th’s and was used as the class example in Spanish class when it was time for everyone to roll their Rs. I wrote in my diary and spoke to my parents mostly in Russian. And yet, occasionally came reminders that other people perceived me as Israeli, not Russian or even Slavic. In 2014, my reading teacher would put the news on. Israel constantly showed up. All I could understand with my broken English was that there was some kind of fighting going on. She asked me what my opinion was. I said “I don’t know, I’ve never heard of this fighting. I just heard about the rockets to Israel because we did rocket drills.” I felt so small and clueless at that moment — reminded of my status as a mere uninformed child.

One day in 2016, my nightly Wikipedia rabbit hole took an unexpected turn. Gaza-Israel conflict. I saw ratios of numbers my brain could not even comprehend. 100 to 5. 2000 to 70. Until that night, I had never even heard the term Palestinian. I had heard — been told — of Arabs, usually as an overarching classification for any Israeli that wasn’t already classified as a Jew. I tried not to think too much of it, but sometimes it would just pop up in my head, like a scab I had to pick at forever.

As I grew up, my parents made sure to shower me with stories of Israel’s heroic environmentalism. They taught me all I would, at the time, think there is to know about trickle irrigation: the Israeli-developed technique that utilises a plastic emitter to transport water to crops. What they failed to mention was that this technique has been called in research studies the “most effective means of land takeover in the West Bank.” They told me of Israeli pesticide strategies, but not that the lack of an Arabic translation on pesticides puts Palestinians who cannot speak Hebrew or English in harm’s way, with there being a proven correlation between Palestinian farmers’ usage of these pesticides and cancer hospitalisations. They told me about waste-treatment facilities, omitting the fact that the waste from the largest of these Israeli treatment facilities is processed in the occupied Jordan Valley, with other waste transferred to the West Bank — a practice that violates humanitarian law. I was told everything but what I needed to know, with Palestinian lives relegated to the fine print I’d only squint my eyes to find years later.

Time passed by, and suddenly, I was in college, working in an extremely prestigious research lab in partnership with an Israeli sustainability startup. I still had no real opinion on anything, including what I was, if not Israeli or Russian or American. But I knew I was on the green side. I was on the side working to preserve the trees, the earth — the life. And for me, that was enough.

I watched my parents become different people before my very eyes after the seventh of October. I periodically hit refresh on my dad’s Russian forum profile to watch him update his mega-thread on why killing every person in Gaza is the only option if Israelis want to survive, watch him block everyone who even “understands both sides” or “thinks about all the women and children in Gaza.” My mom’s rants about wanting to drown that Muslim family sitting in the county park got more and more heated. My WhatsApp family group chat flooded with memes about all the idiotic little blue-haired “queers and transes screaming free free Palestine.” My cousin added me to his Instagram Close Friends story where he regularly uttered racial slurs. And still, after all the hatred they regularly spewed, my family felt that Israel’s mere existence had done even the physical soil a favor. “The Jews took dry, arid land and made it bloom with green,” my mother repeats like a mantra. We are on the planet’s side. We can do no wrong.

As Denise Hoffman Brandt writes in the book Open Gaza, the UN declared in 2015 that Gaza would be out of water come 2020, but the UN’s efforts to remedy this crisis were stalled by Israel’s blockade. She writes further on the consequences of the blockade,

The bombs and blockade have created a consumer market for water from Israel’s desalination plants— constructed unimpeded by bombing or power cuts—or taken from the Mountain Aquifer lying under West Bank Palestinian communities.

In July of this year, the World Health Organization declared it is “extremely worried” about the possible spread of polio virus in Gaza. Not long after, an epidemic began to break out, twenty-five years after Gaza was declared free from the disease. Water, sewage and healthcare infrastuctures in Gaza have met a complete collapse since October of 2023; there are absolutely no safeguards keeping Palestinians from the mass-scale polio outbreak that is already beginning. The war machine marches on, covered in strikingly green paint.

This connection between ecology and colonial domination has been widely discussed in environmental philosophy — most famously in Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology. Here, Bookchin argues that the ecological crisis is inherently also a social one, with practices that dominate the environment inextricably linked to those that dominate people:

With the rise of hierarchy and domination, however, the seeds were planted for the belief that first nature not only exists as a world that is increasingly distinguishable from the community but one that is hierarchically organized and can be dominated by human beings.

It is in such a society that disregards nature, Bookchin claims, that social structures leading to “murderous warfare, genocide, and acts of heartless oppression” are established. Ecological domination cannot and must not be separated from social domination, and this can be clearly seen today in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

I love my family deeply, and believe that at the core, they are good people. However, as I’ve learned more about Gaza and what it means to be Palestinian today, I’ve acknowledged the true name for what I experienced at the hands of my Israeli upbringing: brainwashing, omission of vital facts, and constant misinformation. No environmentalism is “heroic” when it causes other people to be put in harm’s way, whether through the lack of proper translations or the mass displacement of marginalised groups. We must work towards a green Earth for all — one that comes without a catastrophic death toll.

Image: a date palm plantation outside Eilat