« The climate crisis and the crisis of settler colonialism (with a chapter on the ‘History of Settler Colonialism’): Sarah Haley Knowles, Diminished Prosperity: How a Warming Planet Impedes Healthy Families, Communities, and Economies, Palgrave, 2025
The active archive: Rose Miron, Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, University of Minnesota Press, 2024 »

Always beware of the green settler: Grey Weinstein, Angel White, ‘Green Technologies, White Colonies: Zionism and the Colonial Uses of “Indigeneity” and “Environmentalism”’, Critical Zionism Studies, 2, 1, 2025

06Jan26

Abstract: This paper explores two competing liberal Zionist discourses which attempt to justify the Zionist project by invoking a unique relationship between settlers and the land. First, we examine how despite its enactment of environmental harm and ecological apartheid, contemporary Zionist discourse frames the Israeli state as a global leader in environmentalism, positing the Zionist settler as a civilizing force over a “savage” landscape. Second, we analyze a competing Zionist discourse that frames Zionism as an Indigenous land sovereignty movement. Taken together, we demonstrate how adherents of liberal Zionism simultaneously view themselves as Indigenous stewards of the land, and as settlers whose technological superiority to the Indigenous “other” justifies their control of the land. To understand these ecological discourses, we analyze liberal Zionist writing and place it in conversation with Indigenous scholars’ understanding of Indigeneity as founded on resistance to colonialism. Contextualizing the narrative of the Israeli state as a pillar of environmentalism within a broader history of colonial environmentalism, we demonstrate how this narrative is both factually inaccurate as well as a continuation of the colonial aims that founded the environmentalist movement. Despite their blatant and inherent contradictions, these two strands of liberal Zionist discourse operate together to disguise the colonial nature of the Zionist project while continuing to perpetuate that very colonialism. We identify three central mechanisms that liberal Zionism uses to accomplish this: 1) it posits a post-politics framework that naturalizes the Israeli state’s colonial expansion; 2) it imposes a white supremacist view of natural and racial purity onto Palestine’s ecology; and 3) it re-embraces the terra nullius view of Palestinians as invisible. These mechanisms demonstrate the centrality of racism to liberal Zionist discourse and spotlight the structural flaws in liberal and leftist conceptualizations of Indigeneity and the environment. We conclude by calling on environmentalists and anti-Zionist critics to engage with how liberal Zionism continually weaponizes appeals to sustainability and decolonization in service of white supremacy.


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