Tuesday, November 10, 2026
Elder of Ziyon |
Za’atar or Syrian oregano in springtime. Image by Davidbena at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. |
9. Vultures
advance Zionism
Israel sits directly beneath one of the planet’s busiest bird migration corridors. Roughly 500 million birds pass through this narrow airspace annually — a bottleneck that, alongside expanding military and civil aviation, once triggered catastrophic mid-air collisions. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli Air Force lost more aircraft (including F-15s and Skyhawks) and pilots to bird strikes than to enemy fire.
The breakthrough came in the 1980s via a pioneering joint research initiative between ornithologist Yossi Leshem and the Israeli Air Force, aided by enthusiastic Arab birdwatchers. By mapping the flight paths of key migratory species, they established designated aerial bird corridors, kept clear at specific times and altitudes. This intervention slashed collisions by over 75%, and the protocol was subsequently adopted by neighbouring states and NATO.
These bird
collisions also threatened the native Griffon vulture population. Establishing
flight corridors alongside a meticulous captive-breeding programme dramatically
improved the species’ survival prospects. The breeding initiative employed a
double-clutching technique, triggering females to lay a second egg by removing
the first. These collected first eggs were artificially incubated, and keepers
raised the fledglings wearing vulture disguises to prevent human imprinting. In
2020, an orphaned wild vulture chick was even fed for weeks with a military
drone after operators perfected their technique on mock targets.
 |
| Griffon vulture in flight in Israel by Artemy Voikhansky via Wikimedia Commons |
Why go to such lengths? Could it be that some Israelis genuinely care about wildlife? Or perhaps fighter jets are simply eye-wateringly expensive? Not exactly!
According to environmental antizionism, vulture conservation is merely a calculated strategy to greenwash aggressive colonial expansion.
‘The Zionist project of vulture conservation is therefore not only an environmental enterprise, nor is it solely about the land or even the animals and plants who dwell on it. It is, additionally, about the instrumentalization of nature to advance the Zionist mission: (...).’
8. Desalination is a PR exercise
According to certain academics, Israel champions seawater desalination as an exportable, universal technical fix primarily to camouflage its political machinations. They argue that technological solutions emerging from resource allocation policies in the Palestinian territories are conveniently rebranded as neutral narratives of technical prowess and regional cooperation. In their view, modularity itself constitutes an offence.
‘Alternatively, settler modularity articulates how climate adaptation solutions can arise from settler-colonial projects, by compressing and naturalizing colonial domination into interchangeable, comparable environments, (...)’
7. Territorial expansion by free-range chicken
In 2021, a research team constructed an elaborate theoretical reading of Jewish organic farming in the West Bank. They asserted that ‘settlers’ graze goats to ‘self-indigenize’ (premised on the notion that pastoralism belongs exclusively to Palestinians and that Jews are not indigenous to Judea). Meanwhile, free-range chickens supposedly ‘accommodate the logic of territorial expansion,’ while earthworms, used to produce organic compost, ‘embody the placeless detachment from the specificities of local soil’.
6. Creating flammable landscapes
Framing pine trees merely as instruments of land appropriation is apparently outdated. A recent academic theory posits that planting pine forests in Israel was an intentional strategy of ‘colonial pyrotechnics’ designed to create ‘flammable landscapes,’ effectively turning fire into a ‘weapon of terror and dispossession’. (Meanwhile, Palestinian arson attacks are viewed as expressions of political dissent, or dismissed as ‘settler arson paranoia’.)
5. Veganwashing colonial control
An Australia-based academic argues that Israel promotes plant-based gastronomy to obscure the intersections of racial and colonial dominance. The evidence? An Israeli vegan conference lacked a significant presence of Palestinian animal rights organisers, several Jewish activists view animal advocacy as apolitical, and in 2018, Sara Netanyahu publicly opposed live animal transport. The narrative considers the connection settled.
‘In other words, the ‘beauty’ of animal rights and the genuine enactment of love and care for animals, is used to obscure other intersections of racial and colonial domination.’
4. Deploying agent Bambi [1]
In December 1978, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, four Persian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) were flown from Tehran to Tel Aviv aboard one of the last commercial flights in a rescue operation well known in Israel. This laid the groundwork for an ambitious reintroduction project — a standard conservation practice akin to the reintroduction of the beaver or the bison in the UK.
Naive conservationists wouldn’t celebrate the deer’s return if they suspected that the fallow deer is a sinister proxy for territorial displacement.
‘The deer are thus Israel’s proxies, their bodies and movement across the landscape sending a powerful nonverbal message that this landscape is changing and that traditional Palestinian practices of hunting and herding must now alter to accommodate the wild old-newcomers. Israel’s reintroduced deer are therefore agents of “normalization”— technologies for rendering banal, innocuous, and even natural Israel’s conservation agenda that is closely aligned with its colonial control over the land.’
3. Botanical colonisation with wheat
Wheat supplies 20% of global caloric intake, sustains over 35% of the human population as a primary staple, and covers 16% of all cultivated land worldwide. Unsurprisingly, global research is vast: hundreds of senior researchers across the world collaborate on its genetics, more than 130 breeding programmes operate globally, and international research consortiums invest tens of millions annually.
Predictably, Jewish scientists have long contributed to this field. The conclusion? Wheat breeding is a Zionist conspiracy to reshape the region’s ecology through the ‘systematic manipulation of plant life itself.’
‘My claim is that rather than a byproduct of colonization, wheat research served to remake Palestine as a biophysical region in need of improvement and colonization.’
2. Burning tyres is pollution redistribution
Tyre burning has long been a tactic during protests and border clashes in Gaza and the West Bank. A 2024 academic paper reframes this practice, categorising tyre burning as an expression of a ‘doomsday economy’ resisting settler capitalism:
‘Among the many
functions of tire burning, it also functions as counter-violence in a global
environmental scope. Within this scope, though on a small scale, tire burning
(re)distributes toxins and pollutants – a (re)distribution that accelerates
climate change.’
1. The Gaza war is the destruction of Earth
In his recent book, a Swedish Marxist academic equates the conflict in Gaza with the destruction of the Earth itself. The underlying rationale? Both involve the burning of fossil fuels.
Alongside this
assault on formal logic, the author openly ponders joining groups such as the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) or the Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) — proscribed terrorist organisations
responsible for aircraft hijackings, bombings, and civilian massacres.
How do these narratives take root?
Nature conservation is a balancing act between preserving endangered species and sensitive habitats while accommodating human livelihoods and local traditions. The process causes serious social frictions. Managing tourism in nature reserves, reintroducing apex predators, or regulating foraging are constant sources of regulatory tension globally. Renewable energy brings its own dilemmas: solar installations can disrupt fragile grassland ecosystems, while poorly planned wind farms interfere with avian and bat migration corridors. The trade-offs are endless, making it easy to co-opt and weaponise complex dilemmas into ideological talking points.
Most environmental professionals, particularly at national levels, are trained in the life sciences — ecologists, biologists, ornithologists, chemists, geographers, and engineers. Consequently, they lack the historical, geopolitical, and interdisciplinary grounding required to dismantle antizionist falsehoods.
Organisational
dynamics observed in progressive Western environmental NGOs show that emotional
leverage, ideological purity tests, and a lack of geopolitical literacy among
scientific staff create environments highly susceptible to vocal, activist-led
hijacking.
***
Author’s note: The publications cited in this article are authentic, peer-reviewed academic works or widely referenced scholarly sources. This piece employs satire and measured irony to examine their conclusions. The author is a biodiversity policy expert.
***
Bibliography
●
Braverman,
Irus (2024). ‘Green Gold: The Akkoub’s Settler
Ecologies’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, 19 LA+ 38.
●
Braverman,
Irus (2023). Mother Drone, Mother Nature: The
Griffon Vulture and Israel’s Military, Social Science Research Network.
●
Holmes,
J., and O’Neill, B. F. (2026). Constructing
Comparability: Climate Change Adaptation and the Transnational Settler
Modularity of Desalination, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 51(2),
337–374.
●
Grosglik,
Rafi et al. (2021). ‘Soil, territory, land: The
spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(5), 906–924.
●
Nieuwenhuis,
Marijn and Joronen, Mikko (2025). ‘Colonial
pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and fiery dispossessions’,
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Alloun,
Esther. (2018). ‘That’s the beauty of it, it’s very
simple!’ Animal rights and settler colonialism in Palestine–Israel, Settler
Colonial Studies, 8(4), 559–574.
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Alloun,
Esther. (2019). ‘Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty
Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel’, Journal Of
Intercultural Studies 41(1), 24–41.
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Braverman,
Irus (2021). Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler
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Andreas (2024). The Destruction of Palestine Is the
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[1] The researcher mockingly calls the Persian
fallow deer Bambi, even though Bambi is a roe deer in Salten’s book and
white-tailed deer in the Disney film. These are three different species.
