Scorched earth: How Israeli war on Lebanon targets both people and the land

By Denijal Jegić

With the latest escalation of the imposed war on Lebanon, the US-backed Israeli regime has expanded its ecocide, the deliberate annihilation of the environment, as part of its broader destruction of land and infrastructure in the Arab country.

The Israeli ecocide in Lebanon is a result of the regime’s genocidal warfare and part and parcel of the Zionist settler-colonial conquest of the region.

In fact, the Israeli campaign of death and destruction in Lebanon has not only led to the martyrdom of thousands of people and destroyed civilian infrastructure to a considerable degree, but it has also destroyed the land and the environment.

Continuity of Israeli aggression in Lebanon

Since the Zionist regime launched its aggression on Lebanese territory and sovereignty during the 1948 Nakba, the Israeli regime’s aggression in Lebanon has always, like in Palestine, targeted the people and their land.

The history of Israeli colonial violence in Lebanon is marked by daily breaches of Lebanese sovereignty. It has entailed brutal and illegal military occupation, torture, genocidal massacres as well as continuous violations of the most basic human rights.

During the latest brutal escalation of the war against Lebanon in late 2024, the Israeli regime killed than 2,700 people in Lebanon and injured thousands. An estimated 1.5 million people, approximately a third of Lebanon’s population, were displaced.

Large parts of the country, in particular the South and the Bakaa, were destroyed in the Israeli assaults. The regime also targeted Lebanon’s health and media infrastructure, killing numerous medics and journalists.

This destruction of civilian infrastructure is constitutive of Zionism. In fact, the term used by the Israeli regime to refer to its strategy of indiscriminate bombing of densely populated civilian areas, the Dahiye doctrine, was coined after the Israeli aggression on the Beirut suburb during the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, in which more than a thousand Lebanese were killed.

The current reality in Lebanon is shaped by an ongoing Israeli military occupation. The Israeli regime continues to violate on a daily basis the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on November 27, 2024. Thousands of Israeli violations by land, air, and sea have been documented.

In these more than 4,000 Israeli aggressions since the supposed end of the war in November, the Israeli regime has killed more than 200 people and injured hundreds of others.

Israeli destruction of Lebanon’s environment

In its ongoing destruction of the environment of Lebanon, the Israeli regime has burned land, trees, and entire forests, leading to damage to agriculture and devastation of the country’s ecosystem.

The regime has destroyed archeological sites and targeted areas around UNESCO World Heritage sites. The regime also regularly kidnaps Lebanese civilians to occupied Palestine.

As it had been doing for decades, the regime continues to use internationally banned weapons like white phosphorus in its aggression against Lebanon. There were also reports about the potential use of depleted uranium, which leads to the poisoning of the land, water and people.

Besides the deteriorating security situation under Israeli occupation, the Israeli ecocide further leads to the destruction of the ecosystem and economic development of Lebanon and hinders any prospects for recovery.

Ecocide as a realization of Zionism

The Israeli regime’s deliberate annihilation of land, nature, environment, and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon is a logical realization of Zionist settler-colonialism that seeks to eliminate everything that stands in its way.

Ecocide has always been central to the Zionist settler-colonial project. For decades, settlers have been stealing and destroying the land of Palestine and Western Asia, and plundering its resources, including land and water.

Built on the colonial ideology of Zionism, the Israeli entity is a violently implemented Western imperial outpost in the region. In fact, Israeli settler society is ideologically and quite literally founded on the genocidal destruction of Palestine.

During the 1948 Nakba, Zionist Jewish forces used various forms of terrorism to ethnically cleanse Palestine, destroying hundreds of villages and expelling the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homeland.

The Nakba is an ongoing epoch of genocide that extends into the future, as the Israeli colonial conquest and racist vision of a so-called “Greater Israel” continues.

Ecocide has been integral to this settler-colonial conquest. Following the genocidal destruction of 1948, Zionists planted trees and forests and constructed national parks in the destroyed Palestinian villages.

Just like the settlers themselves, these trees were not indigenous to the region but were imported European species. The planting of fast-growing trees on ethnically cleansed and destroyed Palestinian villages and mass graves served to conceal evidence of the genocidal atrocities of the Nakba.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist organization deeply involved in promoting and facilitating Jewish colonization in Palestine, has played a key role in this cover-up up which aims to destroy Palestinian presence and history in Palestine.

Genocidal propaganda

At the same time, the Israeli regime has, in its propaganda attempts, which are seemingly aimed at Western audiences, branded itself as an environmentally friendly entity.

As with all of the various crimes it commits, the regime attempts to market its genocidal violence as part of a “civilizational” mission. Indeed, the propaganda strategy of Greenwashing has been central to the regime’s promotion of ethnic cleansing.

In their colonial fantasies, early Zionists had pictured Palestine as “a land without people”, dehumanizing the indigenous Palestinians who would stand in the way of the colonial conquest and become targets of genocide.

Zionist fantasies are an example of the Western Orientalist discourse that dehumanized people of the region and portrayed them as primitive and undeserving. In the hegemonic Orientalist discourse, Jewish settlers made the desert bloom and brought civilization to a neglected place.

These myths continue to dominate hegemonic Western discourse today. The racist fantasy that Jewish settlers “made the desert bloom” obscures the existence of Palestinians and simultaneously markets the genocidal settler-colonial destruction as an ecological and civilization advance.

This fantasy is part and parcel of the narratives provided by the Western enablers of the Israeli regime. For instance, in her praise for the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli entity and thus the Nakba, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, herself a staunch Zionist, proudly proclaimed that Jews “made the desert bloom”.

Zionism’s expansive character

Palestine, Lebanon, and Western Asia, with their land and environment, are thus discursively abused for Orientalist constructions of a civilized and superior Western self. These colonial fantasies are integral to Western political discourse, which serves to shield the Israeli regime and reproduce racist justifications for the continuous genocidal expansion of Zionism.

As a colonial and capitalist phenomenon, Zionism’s expansive character depends on the continuous plundering of indigenous resources. In its colonial advance, it aims to destroy everything that stands in its way and that cannot be co-opted for colonial purposes.

This includes both the people and their land. This is also the existential paradox of the Israeli entity. Void of an actual connection to the land of Western Asia, settlers are aggressively destroying the same land that they fantasize belonged to them. Unable to connect to the land, the Israeli entity destroys it through environmental warfare and exploitation.

Denijal Jegić is a researcher and author based in Beirut. He holds a PhD in American Studies. His work focuses on colonialism, resistance, and media representations with a particular emphasis on Palestine. He is the author of the book “Trans/Intifada: The Politics and Poetics of Intersectional Resistance.”

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir