Description:

Review

Andreas Malm's The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth is a searing polemic that traces the intertwined roots of two planetary catastrophes: the ongoing destruction of Palestine through settler colonialism and the destruction of the earth's climate system through fossil fuel extraction. Originating as a lecture delivered at the American University of Beirut in April 2024, six months into what Malm identifies as the Gaza genocide, this pamphlet-length work combines historical materialism, environmental analysis, and fierce anti-colonial commitment into an argument of startling coherence.

The book's most original contribution lies in its excavation of the year 1840 as a pivotal hinge in world history. Malm demonstrates that the British bombardment and destruction of the Palestinian city of Akka was the first major deployment of steam-powered warfare, with Admiral Charles Napier's coal-burning steamships -- particularly the Gorgon -- proving devastatingly effective against Egyptian-held fortifications. The pulverisation of Akka served twin purposes: it opened the Middle East to British free trade, destroying Muhammad Ali's independent cotton industry in Egypt and reducing the country to a raw-material periphery, while simultaneously giving birth to proto-Zionist fantasies of colonising Palestine with Jewish settlers under British protection. Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Colonel Churchill, George Gawler, and various Christian Zionists all articulated, in the euphoric aftermath of Akka's destruction, the formula that would guide the next two centuries: Palestine was "a land without a people," to be claimed with the force of fossil-fuelled technology.

Malm's method is dialectical in the deepest sense. He identifies "moments of articulation" where the destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the earth reciprocally determine each other: in 1840 with coal and steamships; during the British Mandate with oil pipelines running from Iraq to Haifa's refinery; in the post-1967 era with petroleum geopolitics and Israel's role as regional policeman for American oil interests; and today with Israel's emergence as a gas exporter from the Levant basin and an investor in North Sea carbon bombs through companies like Ithaca Energy. The genocide in Gaza, he argues, is itself a massive carbon event -- its first sixty days generating emissions equivalent to the annual output of twenty to thirty countries -- while AI-driven targeting systems like "Lavender" and "The Gospel" represent the fusion of petroleum's destructive muscle with algorithmic intelligence.

The text mounts a sustained rejection of the Zionist lobby theory, arguing instead -- drawing on the PFLP's Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and Joe Biden's own repeated assertion that "were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel" -- that Western support for the Zionist entity is a deep imperial structure, not an externally imposed distortion of American interests. Three supplementary essays respond to critics: one defends the Palestinian resistance and its left currents (PFLP, DFLP) with historical analogies ranging from the ANC to the Haitian Revolution; another dismantles Ed McNally's restatement of the lobby thesis in Jacobin. Malm introduces the concept of "technogenocide" to describe Gaza's unique status: a genocide executed by the most advanced military technology, partly animated by the imperative to restore that technology's supremacy after the October 7 operation shattered it in a single morning.

The writing is urgent, sometimes raw, occasionally repetitive in the manner of a speech expanded rather than fully rewritten. The historical analysis of 1840, though Malm himself calls it "sketchy and partial," is the book's strongest section, unearthing documents -- including a Palmerston letter he claims has never been cited in the historiography -- that reveal the imperial genome of the Zionist project decades before any organised Zionist movement existed. The later sections on the lobby debate and the armed resistance are more polemical than analytical, better understood as interventions in an ongoing argument within the left than as definitive treatments. Yet the book's power lies precisely in its refusal of balance, in the relentless, almost overwhelming force of its central insight: that the same fossil-fuelled imperial machinery that is destroying Palestine has been, since 1840, destroying the earth itself -- and that the parallel between ever-expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and ever-expanding racial colonies is not merely metaphorical but structural, material, and historically traceable to the same moment of imperial violence.

Reviewed 2026-04-06

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