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Review

Andreas Malm wants to fuse two struggles that the Western left has spent decades keeping in separate compartments. The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth extends an argument Malm has been building across multiple books: that fossil capital is not an economic sector but a mode of planetary violence, and that the climate crisis cannot be understood apart from the imperial order that coal and oil made possible. The book is a polemic, a lecture delivered at the American University of Beirut in April 2024 and expanded with two appended responses to critics. Its most distinctive move is to refuse analogy in favour of identity. The pulverisation of Gaza and the pulverisation of the climate system are not, Malm insists, comparable catastrophes that happen to exhibit similar features. They are the same catastrophe, traceable to a single origin point, driven by the same agents, and reversible—if at all—only through the same kind of counter-action: the dismantling of the infrastructure that produces both. This is an audacious thesis, and the book's achievement is to make it feel less like rhetorical overreach than like a hypothesis the evidence has been demanding all along.

The argument's centre of gravity is historical. Malm locates the joint inception of fossil-fuelled war and the Zionist project in the bombardment of the Palestinian fortress-town of Akka on 3 November 1840, when the Royal Navy's steam frigate Gorgon and three sister ships shelled the town's powder magazine and produced what eyewitnesses described as a beach "for half a mile on each side strewed with bodies." The claim is precise: this was the first time the British Empire deployed steamboats in a major war, and it was, in Malm's reading, a test-case for "military omnipotence" unconstrained by wind and weather.

Steam, even now, almost realizes the idea of military omnipotence and military omnipresence; it is everywhere, and there is no withstanding it

The historical reconstruction is the strongest section of the book, and it is worth dwelling on because it reveals both Malm's method and its limits. He works by close reading of nineteenth-century British sources—despatches, memoirs, the periodical press—and his eye for the telling quotation is sharp. Admiral Charles Napier, who commanded the Gorgon squadron, supplies the book with its recurring motif: "Steamers make the wind always fair." Napier is a gift to an essayist. His letters home veer from strategic triumphalism to something approaching horror at what he has done, and Malm uses both registers. The strategic register gives him the thesis: fossil fuel detaches imperial violence from the contingencies of nature, enabling a kind of destruction that can be projected anywhere, on demand. The horrified register—Napier writing to his wife that he "witnessed a sight that never can be effaced from my memory"—gives him the moral claim: even the agents of fossil empire could see, in 1840, what they had unleashed. The section on the deindustrialisation of Egypt is a necessary complement. Muhammad Ali's import-substitution project, built on animate power because Egypt had no coal, collapsed after 1840 into the "most extreme deindustrialisation experienced anywhere in the nineteenth century." Malm draws on Amr Khairy's work to show that access to coal "determined the fate of nations," and the implication is clear: the fossil-fuelled violence that pulverised Akka also locked the periphery into a position of single-crop dependence that persists into the present. This is the materialist spine of the book: fossil capital is not just a source of energy but a structure of domination that organises who can industrialise and who must submit.

From this historical core, Malm spirals outward. The chapter "Steps of Dual Destruction" traces what he calls moments of articulation between the destruction of Palestine and the expansion of fossil empire through 1917 (oil, the Balfour Declaration, the Kirkuk–Haifa pipeline), 1947 (Western support for the new state shaped by oil interests), and 1967 (the US takeover of the patron role from Britain). The present-day section documents what Malm calls "Fossil Israel": German warships sold to defend the Karish and Leviathan gas platforms, Israeli gas exported to the EU from 2022, Chevron's resumption of production at the Tamar field five weeks into the Gaza war, BP awarded new exploration licences off Gaza's coast the day after the ground invasion began, and the Tel Aviv–based Ithaca Energy operating what Malm describes as North Sea carbon bombs. The "political ecology of normalisation" is not a background condition of the genocide, Malm argues; it is the genocide's economic substance. The war's military emissions—equivalent, in the first sixty days, to the annual output of between twenty and thirty-three low-emitting countries—are not a byproduct. They are the point. Drawing on Neta C. Crawford's "deep cycle" thesis, Malm holds that the US military is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world, and that its dependence on petroleum generates the imperative to defend access to it, which in turn generates the imperative to maintain Israel as what Biden, in 1986, called "the best 3-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region."

This Biden quotation—cited repeatedly, almost as a refrain—does heavy argumentative work. It is the centrepiece of Malm's case against the Israel lobby theory associated with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Ghada Karmi, and it is the pivot on which the book's most contentious theoretical move turns. Malm does not merely argue that the Mearsheimer thesis is incomplete or overstated. He argues that it is "empirically and conceptually sterile"—that it axiomatically rules out the possibility of a convergence between imperial and Israeli interests, and that it cannot explain the historical record. British support for Zionism in 1840, when no lobby existed. West German backing after 1948, without an American-style domestic lobby. The repeated statements, from Biden and others, that Israel serves American interests directly. Malm's alternative is the instrumentalist reading he traces to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's 1969 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, which defines the enemy as a "dialectical unity of global imperialism and local settler colonialism," and to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's "trinity" formulation: oil companies, weapons industry, Christian Zionism. The argument is that Israel is a tool of empire—not a client that has captured its patron, but an instrument the patron designed and maintains for its own purposes.

This section is forceful, and it benefits from Malm's willingness to name exactly what he thinks the lobby theory gets wrong: it "axiomatically rules out a convergence of imperial and Israeli interests" and therefore "cannot explain anything about the history of the alliance." The critique of Ed McNally's Jacobin piece is particularly sharp—Malm notes that McNally ends up concluding Israel is "strategically superfluous to the American empire" at the very moment the empire is organising a transnationally coordinated genocide through it, which is a conclusion so implausible that it amounts to a reductio of the premises that produced it. Malm's alternative is more parsimonious: the empire backs Israel because Israel does what empires need done. When Biden said the US would have to "invent an Israel" if one did not exist, he was, Malm argues, stating a structural truth the lobby theorists cannot absorb.

The book's other major theoretical contribution is the coinage "technogenocide." Malm defines this as a genocide executed by the most advanced military technology and at least partly animated by the drive to restore that technology's supremacy after a humiliating challenge. The definition is layered. On one level, it names the AI targeting systems—"Gospel," "Lavender," and "Where's Daddy?"—that Malm describes as a "mass assassination factory" in which soldiers are "judged according to how many targets we manage to generate." On another level, it names the psychological and strategic dynamic that Malm sees as specific to this war: the Palestinian resistance's negation of Israel's technological supremacy on 7 October, the humiliation of a surveillance and targeting apparatus that was supposed to make the Gaza perimeter impenetrable, and the subsequent drive to "rehabilitate our technology by reactivating its full capacity for annihilating life." The comparison with the 2006 Lebanon war—when three soldiers killed and two abducted was deemed sufficient to warrant the destruction of much of Lebanon—is meant to show that the pattern predates 2023 but that the scale of this response is unprecedented because the humiliation was unprecedented. The resistance, Malm writes, did not just breach a fence. It breached two centuries of accumulated technological domination in a few hours, and the punishment must therefore be limitless.

This is a provocative argument, and it is characteristic of the book that Malm does not hedge it. He is explicit that he supports the armed resistance—the al-Qassam Brigades, the al-Quds Brigades, the PFLP, the DFLP—and that he regards them as "the nonpareil heroes on Earth today." The appended response on this question is the book's most personally revealing section. Malm recounts his entry into Palestine in the late 1990s, his first book written after the April 2002 assault on Jenin refugee camp, and his role in helping extract a wounded Islamic Jihad leader, as the source of his conviction that "the meaning of life is to never give up." The defence of the resistance proceeds on several fronts. Against the charge of "messianism, authoritarianism, and sectarian manipulation," he marshals the scholarship of Sara Roy, Tareq Baconi, and Somdeep Sen to document what he calls Hamas's "steady secularisation"—the abandonment of martyrdom operations in favour of classic guerrilla warfare from tunnels, the openness to the PFLP and DFLP, the contrast with the "police non-state of Abbas." Against Bashir Abu-Manneh's Jacobin argument that 7 October triggered the genocide and was therefore a mistake, he draws the analogies of the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the anti-Mubarak struggle, insisting that "to thus distribute culpability for the extreme excesses of repression is to blame the victims, and the fighters." Against the objection that the resistance is "soaked in fossil fuels" via Iranian and Qatari funding, he draws the analogy of the Soviet Union's fossil-fuelled crushing of Nazism and its funding of the NLF, ANC, and PFLP.

The book's weaknesses are the weaknesses of its form. It is a lecture—or rather, a lecture with two appended polemics—and it bears the marks of the genre. The historical argument about 1840 is self-described as "sketchy and partial." Malm concedes that Arabic sources have not been used, and a reader who knows the Ottoman or Egyptian archives will likely find the account thin in places. The leap from the Palmerston letter to the claim that the Zionist project was "conceived" in November 1840 is a leap, and Malm's argument that the letter has "never been cited in the entire historiography" is the kind of overclaim that makes historians twitch. The broader thesis—that the destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the earth share a single point of origin in the Akka bombardment—is suggestive rather than definitive. It works as a polemical frame, and it is genuinely illuminating as a reading of the British imperial imagination in the 1840s. But it flattens the contingent, multi-causal history of both Zionism and fossil capitalism into a narrative in which everything follows from a single founding event. The "steps of dual destruction" chapter gestures at 1917, 1947, and 1967 but does not develop them with anything like the same archival density, and the reader is left with the sense that the case for the later periods is asserted rather than demonstrated.

The conceptual coinages are a mixed achievement. "Technogenocide" does real work: it names something new about the AI-mediated character of this war, and it connects the targeting algorithms to the broader argument about fossil-fuelled destruction in a way that illuminates both. "Paupericide"—the term Malm and Wim Carton proposed in Overshoot for the cumulative, depopulating violence of fossil capital, the kind of killing that "does not intend to kill anyone per se" but becomes "more purposeful with every passing year"—is less successful. The concept is important, and the book's treatment of the Derna flood, which killed 11,300 Libyans on 11 September 2023, twenty-six days before the Gaza assault began, is a powerful demonstration of the argument that "bourgeois coldness" unites the climate and colonial catastrophes. But the term itself feels like an unnecessary addition to an already crowded lexicon, and it risks blurring the distinction between the intentional, industrialised murder of a genocide and the structurally-produced lethality of fossil capital that Malm elsewhere insists on maintaining.

The book's most significant internal tension concerns the status of destruction. Malm's argument, drawing on Herzl's 1896 formulation—"If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct"—is that destruction and construction are "interpenetrating opposites." The destruction of the planet is the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure; the destruction of Palestine is the construction of racial colonies. Limiting, stopping, or reversing either therefore requires the decommissioning and, where necessary, the physical destruction of the underlying infrastructure—"fossil installations on one side, racial colonies on the other." This is a bracing conclusion, and Malm is candid that it will strike many readers as beyond the pale. The parallel between the COP process and the "peace process"—both inaugurated in the early 1990s, both sustained the illusion of mitigation, both ended in vacuity—is effective as polemic. But the prescription is asserted rather than developed. What does "destruction of racial colonies" mean, operationally, in a world where the "racial colonies" are inhabited by millions of people? Malm's defence of the armed resistance and his invocation of the Algerian, Haitian, and South African analogies suggests an answer, but the book does not spell it out, and the rhetorical force of the "destruction" language may alienate readers who are otherwise sympathetic to the analysis.

Still, a polemic should be judged by what it makes possible, and this one opens ground that has been carefully avoided. The climate left has spent three decades trying to make the destruction of the earth feel urgent. The Palestine solidarity movement has spent seven decades trying to make the destruction of Palestine feel visible. Malm's argument is that these are the same project—not because the rhetorics are analogous, but because the material structure that produces one produces the other, and has done so since 1840. This is a Marxist argument in the classical sense: it traces a political and military apparatus to its economic foundations and refuses to treat the ideological superstructure as an independent variable. The book's most uncomfortable implication—for the Western left, for the climate movement, for the reader who wants to oppose genocide without endorsing armed resistance—is that the "peace process" logic and the COP logic are versions of the same mistake: the belief that a structure can be reformed from within when the structure's defining characteristic is the destruction it exists to produce.

The book's placement in the intellectual landscape is clear, and its debts are acknowledged. The Frankfurt School lineage is most visible in the closing invocation of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin's Benjaminian reading: denial of the link between Western bourgeois civilisation and genocide "can only end in destruction." The Fanonian framework—the colonist as exhibitionist, violence against settlers as an inherent feature of anti-colonial struggle—runs through the sections on the resistance. The longue-durée historical materialism owes an explicit debt to the PFLP's 1969 Strategy, which Malm treats not as a period document but as an analytical framework that has been vindicated by events. This is a book that names its enemies—Mearsheimer, Karmi, Abu-Manneh, McNally—and its allies—Nasrallah, Albanese, the PFLP and DFLP, the student encampments in New York. It does not pretend to neutrality. It is written from inside a political commitment, and its argument is that political commitment, honestly acknowledged, produces better analysis than the affectation of disinterest.

What Malm has produced is not a balanced assessment of the Gaza war—it does not aspire to be one—but a statement of what it would mean to take the war seriously as a fact about the world. The book's most durable contribution may be the simplest: the insistence that the destruction of Gaza is not a regional conflict with humanitarian consequences, but a global event whose dynamics are continuous with the dynamics that are destroying the planetary life-support system. Malm does not prove this thesis in the sense of exhausting the evidence. He sketches it, in a lecture, with the candour that the sketch is partial and the conviction that partiality is not the same as error. Readers who demand a monograph will be frustrated. Readers who want an argument they can test against their own knowledge of the climate crisis, the history of empire, and the texture of the present genocide will find a formidable interlocutor. The book's final provocation is its refusal of consolation. There is no peace process to return to, no COP mechanism that can be made to work, no reform of an infrastructure that exists to destroy. What remains is the choice Malm names and does not soften: the dismantling of the structure, or the continuation of what the structure does.

Notable Quotes

There are no limits to what the state of Israel can get away with.

Preface, written July 2024. Malm's refrain after cataloguing the statistics of destruction: 38,794 killed, 16,172 of them children, 150,000 housing units destroyed, 610 mosques, 206 archaeological sites. — impunity, genocide, settler colonialism, limitlessness

The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonised out loud: 'Here I am the master.'

Quoting Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth to explain Israel's compulsive repetition of atrocities as assertions of unlimited mastery. — colonialism, domination, Fanon, settler colonialism

Steam, even now, almost realizes the idea of military omnipotence and military omnipresence; it is everywhere, and there is no withstanding it.

Quoting the Observer newspaper's commentary on the 1840 British campaign in Palestine, celebrating fossil-fuelled warfare as irresistible force. — fossil fuels, military technology, imperialism, steam power, omnipotence

Know it is in the power of England to pulverize you.

The British consul-general's warning to Muhammad Ali before the 1840 war, encapsulating the imperial logic of fossil-fuelled destruction. — imperialism, British Empire, fossil empire, destruction

Steamers make the wind always fair.

Admiral Charles Napier's summary of why steam-powered warships were superior to sail -- coal liberated naval warfare from weather, launching the fossil fuel age of military conquest. — fossil fuels, steam power, military technology, naval warfare

Coal! Coal! Coal! That is the one thing needful for me.

Muhammad Ali's exclamation to a British visitor after his defeat in 1840 -- his proto-empire crumbled because Egypt lacked the fossil fuel reserves to match Britain's steam power. — fossil fuels, coal, Egypt, deindustrialisation, energy geopolitics

This time, unlike in 1948 or 1950, however, the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different but related process of destruction: namely, that of the planet's climate system.

Main text, establishing the central thesis that the destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the earth are structurally linked. — climate crisis, Palestine, destruction, historical parallel

Fresh rubble is always poured over the Palestinians. Destruction is the constitutive experience of Palestinian life because the essence of the Zionist project is the destruction of Palestine.

After quoting Liyana Badr's description of Beirut 1982, tracing the eternal recurrence of Palestinian dispossession from 1948 to the present. — Nakba, settler colonialism, destruction, Palestinian experience

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.

Lord Palmerston's letter of 25 November 1840 to Ambassador Ponsonby, written in the euphoria after the destruction of Akka -- which Malm claims has never been cited in the historiography. — proto-Zionism, British Empire, Palmerston, Palestine colonisation

Before Zionism was Jewish, it was imperial.

Malm's summary after demonstrating that the 1840 proto-Zionist mania was entirely a gentile, Christian, Anglo-Saxon project in which actual Jews played no active role. — Zionism, imperialism, British Empire, Christian Zionism, origins

Imperial support for the Zionist entity is a structure, not an event.

Paraphrasing the motto of settler-colonial studies to argue that Western support for Israel operates as a deep structure forged by fossil-fuelled power over two centuries. — settler colonialism, imperialism, structure, longue duree

There is no apology to be made for Israel. None! Israel is the best 3-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.

Joe Biden's 1986 statement to Congress, which Malm uses to demonstrate that empire-entity relations are driven by imperial interest, not lobby manipulation. — US imperialism, Israel, strategic asset, Biden, lobby theory critique

There is a misconception prevalent in the Arab world regarding Israeli-US relations. We keep hearing this lie about the Zionist lobby -- that the Jews rule America and are the real decision-makers, and so on. No. America itself is the decision-maker.

Quoting Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's rejection of the lobby theory, which Malm endorses as consistent with the classical analysis of the Arab left and the PFLP. — lobby theory, US imperialism, Nasrallah, anti-imperialism

The steps along the way to the destruction of Palestine were simultaneously steps along the way to that of the earth.

Summarising the historical argument: 1840 (coal and steam), 1917 (oil and mandate), 1947 (petroleum order), 1967 (oil defence) -- each pivot in Palestine's colonisation advanced fossil fuel extraction. — climate crisis, Palestine, fossil fuels, historical dialectic

If you're doing something that hurts somebody, and you know it, you're doing it on purpose.

Quoting prosecutor Steve Schleicher's closing argument against Derek Chauvin, applied by Malm to fossil fuel companies whose continued extraction knowingly kills people in the Global South. — intentionality, fossil fuels, climate violence, accountability

The US military is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world and thus the world's single largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Citing Neta C. Crawford's research on what she calls 'the deep cycle' -- the military-fossil fuel feedback loop where war drives extraction and extraction drives war. — US military, fossil fuels, emissions, militarism, climate crisis

The great affront of Tufan al-Aqsa was to shatter the complex of qualitatively superior military technology built up over two centuries: and because this must not be allowed, the punishment would have to be limitless.

Explaining the technogenocide thesis: the October 7 operation negated two centuries of fossil-fuelled technological domination, triggering a genocidal reassertion of supremacy. — October 7, technogenocide, military technology, deterrence, settler colonialism

A technogenocide would be defined as a genocide that is 1) executed by means of the most advanced military technology, and 2) at least partly animated by the drive to restore its supremacy after a humiliatingly successful challenge.

Malm's coinage of a new concept to distinguish the Gaza genocide from Bosnia (handguns), Rwanda (machetes), and the Holocaust (not triggered by Jewish challenge to German technology). — technogenocide, genocide, military technology, AI warfare, Gaza

I have come to think that the meaning of life is to never give up -- no matter if it is too late to prevent catastrophe; no matter how many disasters pile up; no matter how overwhelmingly powerful the enemy.

Personal reflection in the essay on resistance, connecting the Palestinian spirit of refusal to the climate struggle's imperative to fight regardless of the odds. — resistance, hope, climate struggle, Palestine, perseverance

Destruction and construction are interpenetrating opposites that presuppose one another: the destruction of the planet is the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure; the destruction of Palestine is the construction of racial colonies.

Near the conclusion, articulating the dialectical relationship between building settlements/pipelines and destroying land/climate. — dialectics, destruction, construction, settlements, fossil infrastructure

The Zionist project is the project of a settler-colonial invasion, based on the organic link with the forces of Western colonialism, which worked to get rid of the Jews and to solve the 'Jewish problem' in Europe by planting an entity for the Jews in Palestine.

Quoting Islamic Jihad's 2018 political document, which Malm endorses as consistent with the instrumentalist theory of the empire-entity relationship. — Zionism, settler colonialism, Western imperialism, Islamic Jihad

If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.

Quoting Theodor Herzl from 1896, used by Malm to show that the logic of destruction was explicit in Zionism from its founding, and to draw the parallel with fossil fuel infrastructure. — Zionism, destruction, Herzl, settler colonialism, construction