Weapon of distraction: How Israel uses greenwashing to mask its climate crimes

Weapon of distraction: How Israel uses greenwashing to mask its climate crimes

Submitted by Asma Barakat on Fri, 09/04/2026 - 15:49 Israel's illegal occupation and destruction of Palestinian land are incompatible with environment justice. Consumers must wake up to this fact A fire blazes in an olive grove in the village of Salim, in the occupied West Bank, after an Israeli settler attack on 25 May 2025 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP) Off

For decades, Israel has projected a narrative of being a beacon of sustainability. A major part of this facade is its food tech industry, particularly its latest advancements in lab-grown and cell-cultivated foods.

This past April, Israeli food tech company Celleste Bio reportedly produced the world’s first lab-grown chocolate bars. The company touts a proprietary technology that enables it to eliminate the cocoa industry’s “costly reliance on fragile rainforests”. 

Celleste Bio is backed by Mondelez International, a multibillion-dollar parent corporation of brands such as Cadbury and Oreo, making the possibility of lab-grown chocolate on consumer shelves closer than ever.

Israel has frequently been ranked among the world’s top global food tech start-up nations. Its champions assert that lab-grown foods require fewer resources than traditional agriculture, and can offer alternatives to the slaughtering of animals - all amid the continuing genocide and starvation campaign in Gaza.

Foodwashing, or the use of sustainable food harvesting methods to distract from crimes against humanity, is a key part of Israel’s broader greenwashing agenda. The state promotes “environmentally friendly” initiatives to mask its human rights abuses against Palestinians. 

Yet Israel’s illegal occupation and destruction of Palestinian land are incompatible with climate justice, systematically wreaking havoc on the environment. Israel’s food tech industry, as with all other aspects of the state, was built on the theft of Palestinian resources, undermining Palestinians’ own sustainability efforts.

The water and energy that Israel boasts about conserving are redirected from Palestinian communities, who are then denied access to their own natural resources. 

Ecological collapse

Israel’s wars further damage the environment. In September 2025, the Palestinian Initiative for Climate Strategy found that Israel and its allies owe $148bn in “military and conflict-related climate reparations” to the Palestinian people, dating back to the 1948 Nakba. Since then, Israel has continued bombing Gaza.

Throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, it has dropped more than 200,000 tonnes of explosives on the enclave, resulting in ecological collapse. In July, an Oxfam-commissioned report found that over the past three years, Gaza’s wastewater treatment facilities have been decimated, fuelling an environmental and public health crisis.

“Sewage treatment facilities have been destroyed, resulting in the discharge of hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of untreated wastewater daily into the environment and the Mediterranean Sea, creating both a public health emergency and an ecological catastrophe with consequences extending well beyond Gaza’s borders,” the report noted.

Should any entity that has manufactured a catastrophic starvation crisis in Gaza deserve any role in our food supply chain?

Israel’s determination to destroy the environment across occupied Palestine long predates the current genocide, including through its routine practice of spraying chemical herbicides on Gaza’s agricultural lands, destroying thousands of dunums of farmland.

In addition, Israel’s policy of water apartheid actively harms the environment. Human rights organisation Al-Haq has explained how Israel’s denial of fresh-water access pushes Palestinians to rely on desalination, a process that “can cause substantial damage to marine ecosystems and ocean health”.

At the same time, the Israeli occupation sabotages Palestinian sustainability practices. Najla Abdellatif, the founder of Zero Waste Palestine, an environmental advocacy initiative, told Middle East Eye that she has met affected Palestinian farmers whose groundwater sources were diverted by Israel’s state-run water company.

“Their water pipes are also continuously targeted and stolen by nearby settlers, making them even more water insecure and unable to buy back their own water sources at the elevated prices that are offered,” Abdellatif said. “This is affecting their whole ability to sustain their farms and their livelihoods.”

Resource deprivation

Israel’s cultivated foods industry further helps to normalise the occupation of Palestine, Abdellatif said. 

“It’s a way to greenwash their oppression and colonialism, and distract the world with an image that is ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’, without also addressing that they are inflicting great harm on the environment in Palestine and the people living in it,” she said.

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A representative from a farm in the village of Bilin, near Ramallah, told Middle East Eye that the farm - located just metres from the apartheid wall - is affected by land confiscation due to settler-colonial expansion, as well as Israeli raids.

“We are deprived of the [bare] minimum resources because we are in Area C,” said the representative, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

“We don’t have decision-making power to decide how our own resources are used. We don’t have the freedom to choose what to do with our waste or how to move it … [Israel continues to] dump its waste, especially highly toxic waste, in our land. The occupation makes our climate crisis worse and worse.”

Greenwashing is weaponised against Palestinians to exclude them from the world stage, the representative added, noting that the West’s refusal to boycott Israeli delegations from environmental initiatives makes western states complicit: “The West continues to adopt Israel’s greenwashing language, and uses it against us to exclude us from places where we can participate and create influence.”

In the absence of concerted action by governments, consumers must begin engaging with this issue directly. They must look at where their food originates, and ask themselves: should any entity that has manufactured a catastrophic starvation crisis in Gaza deserve any role in our food supply chain?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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