Environmental justice as decolonization: rethinking justice in occupied Palestine

Abstract

In November 2023, during the Amsterdam Climate March, Greta Thunberg invited a Palestinian and Afghan guest speaker on stage. Thunberg argued that it is important to “listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed”. Shortly after, she was disrupted by a man, taking away her microphone saying: “I have come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view”. This interruption was met with the following response, from Thunberg herself as well as people from the crowd: “No climate justice on occupied land” (Middle East Eye, 2023). This sentence is at the heart of this research: the possibility – or rather impossibility – of environmental justice under conditions of systemic oppression.