Greta connected climate change to Palestine
...and the media didn't like it.
Greta Thunberg was once the poster child for the climate movement.
For years, her face was plastered on magazine covers and front pages around the globe. She spoke at the UN, met with world leaders, and inspired millions of young people to skip school for climate protests.
The media loved her simple, urgent message: the planet is burning, and adults need to act now.
But recently, something changed.
Greta started speaking out about Palestine.
She began marching in solidarity protests in Sweden, and regularly donned a keffiyeh. Her placards no longer focused solely on carbon emissions – they called out colonialism, genocide, and military occupation.
As I write this, she’s aboard the Freedom Flotilla, sailing toward Gaza to deliver aid and break Israel’s siege.1 She’s on the frontlines, risking her life.
And just like that, she’s disappeared from the front pages of the news.
The moment Greta’s message evolved from "we need to save the Earth" to "the Earth is dying because of systems of violence and exploitation", she became politically inconvenient.
Her new critiques don't just target fossil fuel companies, you see – they implicate the very governments, militaries, and economic systems that fund mainstream media. Outlets like the BBC and CNN that once elevated her voice now show little interest in her message.
Greta’s no longer just a climate activist. She’s become a systems critic.
And that makes her dangerous.
Many people were confused when Greta started advocating for Palestine. To them, it seemed as though she was abandoning climate activism for political causes.
But Greta’s support for Palestine wasn’t a departure from her climate work – far from it. It was a deepening of it.
She wasn’t changing course. She was connecting the dots.
As she widened her lens, it became clear that the very forces destroying ecosystems were the same ones enforcing borders, fuelling wars, and displacing entire populations. By standing with Palestinians, Greta made visible the ways in which environmental and political liberation are inseparable.
It reminds me of how Martin Luther King Jr. connected the dots between racial injustice and capitalism.2 He understood that these weren't separate issues – they were symptoms of the same disease. And the moment he started saying that out loud, he became a threat to those very systems.
Climate and Palestine
The climate crisis connects directly to what's happening in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and across the Global South. Just as it connects to racial injustice, inequality, immigration, and displacement. These aren't separate struggles – they're manifestations of the same systems of exploitation.
Here are some of the ways Palestine and climate justice are intertwined:
Colonialism
Israel is a settler colonial state,3 using the same playbook that was used in the Americas, South Africa, and Australia:
Dehumanise the indigenous population
Steal their land
Displace them through violence and aggression
Palestinians lose their olive groves, water sources, and ancestral territories – just as indigenous communities worldwide lose theirs to mining, drilling, and industrial agriculture.
In both cases, land becomes a commodity. People who have cared for that land for generations are treated as obstacles to profit, and are ultimately displaced. Any resistance is then met with violence.
Capitalism
The Israeli occupation is deeply profitable. Surveillance tech, military innovations, and settlement real estate form a booming economy.4 Israel markets its weapons as "battle-tested" on Palestinians, then sells them worldwide.
This mirrors how the climate crisis is driven by extractive capitalism5 – a system that treats the Earth as a resource bank (and poorer countries as sacrifice zones). It’s no coincidence that the same companies profiting from war often fight against environmental regulations and fund climate denial.
Military-Industrial Complex
Military activity is one of the largest contributors to global emissions, yet it's rarely counted in climate agreements. The first 15 months of Israel's assault on Gaza alone produced more planet-warming emissions than 100 individual countries generate in a year.6
The military-industrial complex doesn't just fuel conflict – it's literally cooking the planet. The U.S. and U.K. – Israel's biggest supporters – are also (coincidentally) the world's top arms dealers. Follow the money, and you'll see the same patterns everywhere.
White Supremacy
Palestinians are constantly labelled as terrorists, while Israeli violence is justified or ignored. This echoes the anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and Islamophobic rhetoric that underlies state violence worldwide.
When climate disasters hit, people are forced to flee their homes. But when they migrate from poorer countries, they are typically treated as security threats, rather than victims of a crisis they didn't create. Their displacement is met with walls, camps, and militarised borders. The same racial hierarchies that justify occupation determine whose lives matter when the climate hits hardest.
Connecting the dots
By advocating for Palestine, Greta didn’t just take a political stand – she revealed how the system works. She showed us that you can't solve climate change without confronting the structures that drive environmental destruction in the first place.
Her silence in mainstream media is not that of irrelevance, but of threat.
A young white woman with global recognition who's willing to name uncomfortable truths about power. That's not someone those systems want to amplify.
What this means
In the end, Greta reminds us that true climate justice will never be polite or apolitical.
It demands not just cleaner energy and fewer plastic straws, but the end of settler colonialism.
Not just electric cars, but the demilitarisation of the planet.
Not just net-zero emissions, but liberation.
The Earth is dying because of systems of greed, domination, and violence. Systems that are on full display in Palestine right now.
And Greta, no longer on the front pages, continues to call them out.
The question for the rest of us is: are we ready to follow where that logic leads?
Thankyou for sharing this and writing in the way you do, it’s so clear, grounded, and easy to take in. I find a lot of content out there and publications can feel overly academic or full of jargon, which makes it hard to connect with or even understand. Yours feels human and relatable, which makes such a difference especially with topics as important as this xx