On Palestine

Below we share the statement ‘On Palestine’ published in July 2025 by our friends and colleagues at Research & Degrowth International. As the degrowth.info collective, we fully endorse the statement and urge the wider degrowth community and aligned friends and colleagues to do the same, and unite behind its calls to action

Dear colleagues and friends:

We, the members of Research & Degrowth International (R&Di), write from a place of deep sorrow, moral urgency, and collective outrage. For 22 months now, we have been witnessing a live- streamed, systematic genocide of the Palestinian people. We have been watching in horror as international powers have actively supported the genocide and “business as usual” with Israel. They have prioritised trade, colonial agreements, and racist policies over human lives and ecological stability. We know that Israel (backed by the US, UK and most EU countries) is using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons. With global superpowers and multi-national businesses not just supporting but profiting from these atrocities. As the political elite abandon even rhetorical commitments to sustainability, equality, and peace, it falls to civil society to urgently pursue the goals of environmental and social justice for humanity’s survival.

Our stance

As R&Di, we stand in unconditional solidarity with Palestine and with the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Because their freedom is bound up with the freedom and survival of all oppressed peoples. Because there can be no Degrowth future without freedom for Palestine. Because Degrowth is fundamentally a liberation struggle; liberation from the Growth paradigm which relies on a colonial system of extraction, exploitation and vast inequalities in order to function.

Historical background & context

What is happening now is not an isolated conflict—it is the continuation of 75 years of apartheid, colonization, and occupation perpetrated by the State of Israel. Israel today is not just a state; it is an illegal occupation backed up and legitimised by a wider network of global oppression. A network that includes arms dealers, banks, surveillance companies, media outlets, tech platforms, and the political establishments of so-called liberal democracies, which contribute to funding and enabling the current genocide. Although finding effective paths to oppose resistance is profoundly challenging, we must not shy away from this task, otherwise we are complicit. Boycotting, divesting and sanctioning companies that support the Israeli war machine is one way we can exercise our power.

The post-war European and US powers engineered the conditions for the Nakba and have purposefully conflated anti-semitism with opposition to expansionist forms of zionism. The conflation of anti-semitism with anti-zionism has become a strategy to gag anyone who opposes a racially pure Israeli state. In effect this has created a weaponization of Jewish historical suffering to legitimize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The use of the Shoah/Holocaust as political justification for ethnic cleansing is a perverse inversion of justice—exploiting the memory of one genocide to perpetrate another. We categorically condemn this manipulative politicization of the Jewish people’s historical and current suffering. We stand alongside the many Jewish people who are joining their voices against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Palestine.

The destruction of Gaza is a systematic extermination of the Palestinian people for the future habitation by colonial settlers. It is a necessary condition to achieve the Zionist vision of ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It is being perpetrated by (internationally wanted) war criminals. The repeated bombings of densely populated areas, the destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities, the systematic killings of journalists and medics, the intentional production of mass starvation and the blockage of humanitarian aid, are irrefutable evidence of genocide.

We therefore condemn, in the strongest terms:

1. Israel’s Colonial Project: An apartheid regime enforcing institutionalized segregation; unlawful imprisonment of Palestinians, including minors; systemic discrimination; and land expropriation.
2. Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank: Relentless settlement expansion, destruction of Palestinian agrarian livelihoods, and state-sanctioned violence displacing entire communities.
3. The Genocidal Assault on Gaza: The deliberate targeting of journalists, medical workers, and civilians—including children—and the complete decimation of civilian infrastructure.
4. The fact that Western countries continue to arm, fund, and politically shield Israel amid such atrocities: The persistent failure to equally uphold the rights of Palestinians reveals a profound hypocrisy. Once again, the lives of racialized people are treated as expendable.
5. Western countries refusal to sever economic, cultural, and sports ties with Israel: Even though Israel has one of the worst track records in upholding international law and human rights, Western countries continue their economic, and cultural cooperation with Israel.

The genocide is unfolding in the context of rising militarization and the resurgence of far-right nationalism, globally. Countries with fascist histories—such as Germany and Italy—are re-arming rapidly while edging closer to handing power to ultranationalist forces. The West’s role in this horror is not unprecedented: it echoes its support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its violent suppression of anti-colonial struggles across the Global South, and the ongoing eradication of indigenous peoples and cultures.

The industrial military complex, which includes Israel’s weapons industry and its global arms networks, plays a central role in the destruction of land, water, and life. The continued growth of military industrial complex is accelerating the exceeding of planetary boundaries—fuelling the sixth mass extinction, driving climate collapse, and creating permanent cycles of ecocide. Israel’s security policy, frequently involving military aggressions against neighboring states, is a significant driver of regional instability and a major obstacle to lasting peace. While Israel frames these actions as preemptive or retaliatory, they perpetuate cycles of violence and deepen hostilities. Compounding this, Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal – developed outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and without full International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards– creates persistent insecurity and fuels a regional arms race.

Our call to colleagues

Standing with Palestine needs to involve action, using the privilege we have. As researchers, teachers, activists and practitioners of degrowth we must:

• use our individual and collective platforms to put pressure on governments to stop Israel’s genocide on Gaza with immediate effect and allow humanitarian aide to enter the region.

• educate ourselves, our students and people outside of the classroom on decoloniality and ecological economics and how these relate to the Palestinian people’s inherent rights to life, land and resources. The ecological transition to a postgrowth world is impossible without the liberation of the peoples under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.

• bridge the gap between the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and western societies and cultures, a divide deliberately widened over centuries by Western elites to justify imperialism. Racist idealogies used to dehumanise, demonise and “other” those who are not white and in power are still deeply embedded in our economic, political, educational, and social systems. To change these unjust systems our institutions must decolonize knowledge frameworks and curricula: starting with prioritising marginalized, Indigenous, and non- western cultures, values and knowledge systems.

• put aside small ideological differences and work together as a movement to fight all forms of oppression including colonial, patriarchal and imperial oppression. These are intrinsically bound to the destruction of living systems, maintain extreme inequalities, and the primacy of the growth imperative.

• actively join the BDS and Palestine solidarity movement to condemn Israel in its destruction of Palestine. We must support activists on BDS and solidarity initiatives internationally and in our local contexts.

We stand in solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian people. We assert that the liberation of the Palestinian people must be self-determined and unconditionally supported, and it is not our place to judge the means to achieve it. Our enemies are united (zionists, imperialists, fascists) and they want us disunited in our support for the cause of Palestinian liberation. But Palestine is today the litmus test of our collective moral compass. We do not have the right to remain neutral or passive about it; instead we have the responsibility to use our privileged positions to support the Palestinian cause.

In solidarity for a Free Palestine!