Andreas Malm

Israel's pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this book, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue dure analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire's first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain's fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today.

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

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The road to free trade in the Middle East had been cleared. This was the great achievement of the steamers, widely praised for their efficiency: they ‘continually shifted their positions during the action, and threw in shot and shells, whenever they saw the most effectual points for doing execution’, observed one report, noticing that ‘it is rather remarkable that not one of the four Steam ships had a single man either killed or wounded’.44 If the men went through the action without a scratch, however, another resource was nearly exhausted: fuel. After the battle, not one of the four steamers had more than one day’s supply onboard. Practically all the stored coal had been burnt in the pulverisation of Akka.

But steam power would never have made an imprint on the climate had it stayed inside the British Isles. Only by exporting it to the rest of the world and drawing humanity into the spiral of large-scale fossil fuel combustion did Britain change the fate of this planet: the globalisation of steam was the necessary ignition.

Palmerston wrote to Ponsonby, the ambassador in Istanbul: ‘This is a great triumph to us all’ – the fall of Akka, a few weeks old – ‘especially to you, who always maintained that Mehemet’s power would crumble under “a European attack.’ And then he went on:

Pray try to do what you can about these Jews; you have no idea to what extent the interest felt about them goes; it would be extremely politic [if we could make] the Sultan give them every encouragement and facility for returning and buying lands in Palestine; and if they were allowed to make use of our consuls & ambassador as the channel of complaint, that is to say, place themselves virtually under our protection, they would come back in considerable numbers, and bring with them much wealth.53

Fifty-seven years before the first Zionist congress, seventy-seven years before the Balfour declaration, 107 years before the partition plan, the chief architect of the British Empire near the summit of its power here laid down the formula for the colonisation of Palestine.

This Churchill was well aware that there was no, as he put it, ‘strong notion among Europe’s Jews to return to Palestine’.62 The desire of Jews to stay where they lived frustrated him.

This, then, was the moment of conception for two interrelated principles: one, no people exists in Palestine; two, the land must be taken with the force of technology running on fossil fuels. As for the former, contemporary Zionists debate who first came up with the slogan ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, but there is a consensus that it happened around the year 1840.

Zionism did not take material form in 1840, as the exercise of steam-powered violence did. We might conclude from this that the latter had causal primacy in history. Zionism first existed at the level of superstructure, on the base of the fossil empire.

English Jews could only be embarrassed by the suggestion that they were waiting to go back to Palestine.’88 Before Zionism was Jewish, it was imperial.

In The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post–Cold War Order, Paul Thomas Chamberlin describes how the US regarded Palestinian liberation as a threat to the domination of the Middle East as a whole, with all its invaluable oil reserves. Conversely, ‘Israel was fast proving its value as a key strategic asset in the Middle East and a model regional policeman in the Third World.

This is the political economy of the Abraham Accords and its expected sequels: a unification of Israeli and Gulf capital in the process of making money by producing oil and gas. This is the political ecology of normalisation: a sacralisation of business as usual that destroys first Palestine and then the earth.

For the first time, the formula in place since 1840 was ripped apart: Palestinians themselves smashed through the technological apparatus dominating and destroying them. One searches in vain for a similarly sharp inversion of a similarly wide asymmetry in the annals of anticolonial insurgency. The Tet Offensive has been invoked; but the Vietcong was a military force far better equipped than the Palestinian resistance.

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