The Destruction of Palestine is The Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm

The Destruction of Palestine is The Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm (Verso Books, 2025)

This 2025 pamphlet from Verso books was originally written and published in a slightly reduced online format only around six months into the (theoretically now paused) formal Israeli invasion of Gaza, which has since come to be classified – by numerous human rights organisations – as a genocide. Malm – most famous for his brilliant and provocatively titled 2021 book How To Blow Up A Pipeline (see my thoughts here) – uses “title as statement” here in a similar way, promising to produce a document that offers a conclusion that the reader therefore already knows.

Malm addresses this idea by looking at history, offering a detailed and intriguing exploration of what (he argues) was a highly significant moment for the Eastern Mediterranean and for global geopolitics more generally, that of the 1840 short British war against the forces of Muhammed Ali, pasha of Egypt, which ended with huge amounts of civilian and infrastructure destruction when the English used (then new) steam powered warships to decimate coastal and slightly inland areas.

Malm argues that, like now, the increasing pace of development of mechanised and technologised weaponry advanced beyond the ability of sovereign states to organically (that isn’t the word he uses, I don’t think) begin wars, and that the need to test out steam powered battleships precipated the need to find somewhere and someone to fire them upon…

And the ability to wrest mass destruction on the land generally then known as Palestine permitted the beginning of the mythologies that would be used – by groups as varied as extreme anti-Semites, wildly literal fundamentalist evangelical Christians and, slowly at first in the mid-19th century, the Jewish diaspora itself – to claim that here was empty, free, available land, and it should be settled by the world’s scattered Jewish peoples to rebuild a homeland promised to them – the mythology runs – by God.

This myth – like so many involved in nation and empire building – was not true. Of course there were people living in the land generally then known as Palestine; these are the people whose descendants, until recently, were living there still…

Malm’s central argument is contained in and extrapolated from the title, yes, that the current and historic violence on this land in the Eastern Mediterranean is merely part and parcel of the sociocultural and ecological collapse wrought by many decades (several centuries?) of capitalistic and military aligned governmental and economic focuses on relentless and unsustainable growth. We must fight more wars, fire more bullets, drill more oil, quarry more rare earths, control more people, control, exploit, control, exploit… The sores that arise from this friction appear in the increased frequency of ecological catastrophes and emergencies we see all over the world, and, so too, in armed conflict, as resources become scarce[r] due to the hoarding that continues to take place (and accelerate) around the globe.

What is happening to the Palestinian people, Malm argues, is not fundamentally distinct from what happens each time hundreds of people drown in flood waters or of malnutrition or from preventable disease. These are all evidence and examples of acquisitive greed on an industrialised scale wreaking its blunt human cost.

And this might sound – the way I’m summarising it, not the text itself – like it’s dismissive of the Palestinian cause in its own right, but that isn’t the case at all. Malm isn’t stating that the right to life of the people of Gaza is something we shouldn’t care about as it’s “just another sign of a fucked planet”; he’s arguing the complete opposite: that we must care, we must care, because it’s all linked.

Most of us in the world are victims of ecological disaster – to greater and lesser extents, though one can argue it’s eventually coming for every single one of us who lacks the power to control self-sustaining and fully staffed underground bunkers with private militias – and to fail to hold solidarity with any other victim group permits, ignores and passively condones the status quo that allows these immediate and graphically violent horrors to take place.

Genocide in Gaza is the result of the same root cause[s] as flooding in small European towns that don’t expect flooding.

Selfishly, then, everyone who cares about the preservation of their own life and landscapes should care about this slaughter.

Warfare is a symptom and a sign of unsustainable and destructive perpetual-growth focused economic models. It reveals the violence that is always there, clarifying the lies and subterfuge that the smartphones and streaming services and chatbots and defanged oligarch-controlled social media is/are meant to distract us from. As we are led towards forgetting and normalising acts of genocide, we continue to forget and normalise acts of ecological destruction.

It must all be opposed, en masse, together. There is no safe future for anyone if there is precarity for any group[s]. If any home is under threat, everyone’s home is under threat. And if – or as – the world seems to once again be swinging towards a fascistic international ideology claiming that might is right, this is something that must be meaningfully – and unilaterally – condemned. And not in part, not in isolation. In whole.

Though do blogs and articles and pamphlets and speeches – only really looked at by people who already agree – do much? Probably not. But doing “not much” is probably better than doing nothing. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe we do need to follow the implications of How To Blow Up A Pipeline and create the change the world needs…

Malm is not opposed to violent struggle, and in a fascinating appendix to this book he writes about how this comes from his long-term engagement with the Palestinian cause.

Witnessing direct colonial violence and resistance as a young man led him to understand the impetus to fight back, to resist, directly and by whatever means are available. Something that made this pamphlet very striking is that it’s one of the few examples of writing [I’ve encountered] about the recent horrors in Gaza that doesn’t offer apologies for the civilian Israeli deaths that Hamas has caused, especially the very many that happened on October 7th 2023. Malm doesn’t praise and doesn’t explicitly condone this particular violence, but he does explain why (in his opinion) it happened and why it was inevitable…

It has become so commonplace (certainly in the UK) to accompany any even slightly Palestinian-sympathetic commentary on the events in Gaza with a condemnation of Hamas in particular, that attempts to create solidarity with suffering humans is often watered down before it has begun. Malm looks at who and what this censorship serves, and is able to argue for the Palestinian people as a whole without revelling in or praising any actions that tend to get leaned on when trying to justify acts of violence against them.

It’s important, engaging, writing and thought, looking at patterns and histories and similarities, building solidarities between struggles and acknowledging alignments between seemingly disparate world events. By aligning the destruction of Gaza with the destruction of the world, Malm isn’t simplifying anything, he is showing how complex, yet bleakly consistent, it all is.

We must resist, he reminds us, we must resist it all.

Deeply, deeply serious stuff.

Order direct from the Verso website here.