Israel is looking ahead. The year 2050 is a central theme of the Ministry of the Environment, linking the destiny of Israel to the planet’s future. Climate experts predict a humanitarian disaster if we continue to burn fossil fuels, which are the main cause of global warming. The temperature has already risen one degree Celsius above the pre-industrial level (the year 1850), and an additional degree by century’s end will doom the earth.

On December 9, 2018, the United Nations will launch its 24th climate conference in Katowice, Poland. Many eyes are on this event, trusting that world leaders will take decisive steps. However, the debate goes on. US President Donald Trump denies global warming. Another absurdity is that the host country, Poland, refuses to close its fossil fuel (coal) power stations because they employ 110,000 coal miners. Germany likewise refuses to close them, for it employs many thousands in mining.

Israel is not indifferent to climate change. This week the third Israeli climate conference was held in Tel Aviv with about 500 participants. The attendance of NGOs, MKs, academics, directors-general, and government representatives, including Environment Minister Ze’ev Elkin, attests that a large part of the public takes interest in environmental issues. Although Israel is a tiny country and its influence on the climate is slight, its desire to contribute is clear. Its goal is to formulate a master plan that will respond to the challenges facing Israel in 2050.

Those who missed the third climate conference and want to learn more can attend a discussion entitled “Environment 2050”, which will be held in Tel Aviv on January 15, 2019. Industry leaders, senior government officials, heads of venture capital funds, start-ups, innovation managers, representatives of environmental organizations, academics, and citizens will participate. The race for 2050 has already begun, and all sectors want to be at the starting gate.

The problem is that while the world seeks to battle against a one-degree rise in temperature. Israel is grappling with an equally complex problem not raised at the third Israeli climate conference: In 2050, experts say, there will be 16 million Israelis. But what about the 10 million Palestinians next door in Gaza and the West Bank? How many of the 16 million Israelis will be settlers? What will happen in Gaza when the wells dry up and sewage flows freely? How much electricity will the Gazan power plants generate? How will the city of Jerusalem function with a million Palestinians (whose poverty rate even now is more than 70%)? What kind of transportation network will serve the 5 million West Bank Palestinians in 2050? As work gives way to robotics and artificial intelligence, will there be jobs for them? How many walls and fences will there have to be, and how high, to prevent desperate Palestinians from surging into Israel looking for jobs? Can the start-up nation continue to flourish when the surrounding region is poverty-stricken and backward?

The presence of Environmental Protection Minister Ze’ev Elkin at the third climate conference may signify a bold approach to the future, but that future is conceived as if there were no Palestinians. Elkin told the conference that Israel disagrees with Trump on climate change, but he neglected to say that it agrees with the American president on all other issues, including nationalistic ideology, xenophobia, and the Occupation. Elkin makes no secret of his views. What counts most is not what is good for the earth, but what is good for the Jews according to the Trumplike principle: Israel first.

Considering the precarious political situation, the question is where Israeli environmentalists stand—in other words, what happens to an enlightened Israeli civil society that wants to save humanity but has lost the courage to face local reality? During the 20 years of right-wing government, the word “Occupation” has become a shibboleth, used, in the view of the ruling coalition, by traitors. Proponents of Palestinian rights are perceived as extremists. Right-wingers like Elkin are prepared to act for the sake of the environment and in the same breath to deprive Palestinians of their rights.

Palestinians, like most of the poor and forgotten in the third world, are paying the price of globalization and neoliberal economics. They have no environmentalist movement. Their struggle to put bread on the table leaves little room for the welfare of the planet. They have already lost their country, and with it their dignity. It suffices to look at Gaza today to see what the future holds.

If the right-wing Zionist ideology continues to dictate Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, Israel will be a footnote to history in 2050. However, if Israelis can have enough foresight to worry about the planet, then let them have enough to create a new political reality; they must see Palestinians as partners not only to save the planet but also to build a modern society for the benefit of both peoples.

Two worldviews are struggling over humanity’s fate. On the one hand, there is the racist nationalism of Trump and his supporters, both in Europe and Israel. On the other hand, there are those who support international solidarity. These consist of governments and movements that advocate cross-border cooperation for the benefit of humanity and the planet. Contemporary Zionism, in the form of both the ruling coalition and the opposition, has chosen to sidestep the Palestinian issue because an outdated national ideology leaves no room for compromise. Whoever wants to save Planet Earth must direct national interest toward a greater interest. Whoever wants there to be an Israel in 2050 must forgo the narrow national interest in favor of a common destiny for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

* Translated from the Hebrew by Robert Goldman

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Hurricane Irma, rapidly approaching the coast of Florida, is a meteorological phenomenon. But its political implications are equally far-reaching.

At this writing (September 8, 2017), the world is watching with horror as Irma, with winds of up to 175 miles an hour, continues to tear through the Caribbean. Television plays smart-phone recordings that compare the force of the wind to the power of a jet plane taking off. Forecasters explain that wind is not the main problem, rather water. Cities are flooded while infrastructure, homes, and everything on Irma’s path are destroyed, as we saw with Katrina in 2005 and Harvey recently in Texas. Irma is the most powerful hurricane in recorded history, and it won’t be the last. Two others are making their way through the Gulf of Mexico. It is in transition seasons, when the ocean temperature reaches 26 degrees centigrade, that conditions are created allowing for hurricanes of unprecedented intensity.

So what’s the connection between this and politics? Hurricane Katrina was a negative turning point for the presidency of George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump is facing a similar challenge. He’s so concerned about possible blowback that he sided with the “loathsome” Democratic congressional leaders to deliver an urgent aid package for repairing the destruction that Harvey left in Houston. Indeed, just a few months ago, Trump announced his withdrawal from the Paris agreement which President Obama had said was a “turning point for our planet.” The agreement aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and extreme phenomena such as these storms.

As is generally known, Trump is a climate change denier, saying that data on global warming is bogus. Moreover, he has mobilized the “working class” with claims that climate change is a “Chinese hoax” – a conspiracy against them in the name of the environment. In fact, Trump is indeed a friend of oil companies and high-polluting heavy industry. In the name of the American worker, he has repealed regulations intended to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Ironically, Hurricane Irma slammed into Trump’s estate on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, valued at $18 million.

You can fool most of the people most of the time by using the word “fake” to dismiss scientific knowledge. But you cannot fool the wind. There are even those who have discovered that you can harness the wind instead of fighting it, and this is happening in Scandinavia. The Swedes and Danes believe in science. They are taking action to wean themselves from oil by 2050. For this purpose, they are setting up giant wind turbine farms off the coast of the North Sea. It turns out that renewable energy is not simply a way to save the planet from global warming, but an efficient and inexpensive way to generate energy. The technology of renewable energy is in lockstep with the tremendous progress in the development of the electric motor and the autonomous vehicle, which will replace air-polluting private cars in the foreseeable future.

In the German city of Stuttgart, home to Mercedes and Porsche, a court has ruled to prohibit the use of polluting diesel engines. Angela Merkel tried to reassure the owners of Germany’s approximately 15 million diesel cars by promising to do “everything in our powers to make sure there won’t be such bans.” Supported by Daimler Benz, she is trying to delay the inevitable. Europe as a whole (including the United Kingdom) is moving away from fuel-powered cars toward electric cars.

Although the USA lies beyond the ocean, and the warm Middle Eastern temperament is a far cry from the Scandinavian persona, the north wind has a direct connection to the winds blowing in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf. The Swedish decision to be the world’s first oil-free economy is a real threat to the Saudi kingdom, where oil prices are falling. Oil producing countries, from Putin’s Russia to Maduro’s Venezuela, are approaching a deep economic crisis that threatens their rule.

The Saudi kingdom looks around and realizes that change must come sooner or later, and therefore it is taking hesitant steps to revamp its economic structure, which is built on oil, oil, and more oil. So far, oil has allowed Saudi citizens to laze about, not pay taxes, and live on state subsidies that buy social tranquility. However, Prince Mohammed, the son of the elderly King Salman, is now the young heir to the throne. He began a series of reforms called “Vision 2030,” the first and foremost of which aims to privatize the Aramco oil company.

Trump’s election initially brought a flush of joy to Saudi cheeks, but the destructive power of Hurricane Irma is a harbinger that oil’s time is over. Twenty-five years late, the Saudis realize that they must privatize the economy in order to save the regime: airports, transportation, water, schools, everything is up for grabs, but there are no buyers. Privatization requires modernization. And how does modernization jibe with sharia law, with a ban on women working, with millions of foreign workers and servants lacking rights and citizenship? If Saudi Arabia wants to privatize, it will have to shake loose its reactionary regime. If and when that happens, don’t be surprised to find the Arab Spring knocking on the Saudi door.

The wind and the (Arab) Spring are the sworn enemies of the oil industry and the reactionary Saudi regime, which has become bogged down in feverish efforts to prevent the Spring from spreading throughout the Arab region. This is the basis of the conflict with neighboring Qatar, which has long understood that the wind and the Spring cannot be stopped, and the best-case scenario is to contain them both. Thus, the Qataris are buying up whatever they can, from abstract art, soccer clubs, banks, and real estate to a political party in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi enemies – Hamas, Sheikh Raed Salah in Israel, and even Azmi Bishara are in Qatar’s pocket. Meanwhile, to protect outdated regimes, Saudi Arabia does all it can to prop up al-Sisi in Egypt and friendly regimes in Libya and Yemen, trying to push Iran out of Syria and Iraq. But both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are out of step with the times.

It transpires that the same wind that supplies renewable energy in distant Scandinavia is breathing down the neck of out-of-date Arab regimes and revitalizing young forces seeking democracy and progress. Arab intellectuals, who rose up against the old and corrupt regimes in 2011, were the result of a global technological revolution that connected them through social media with likeminded youngsters in European capitals. Both groups are fed up with neoliberalism, which uses science to deprive the young of their future, helping the 1% to control half the world’s wealth.

Saudi money backed Egyptian youngsters to form the “Tamarud” movement, which overthrew the democratically elected Mohammad Mursi, and to support the military coup of General Sisi. Saudi money also bought jihadist militias who wiped out the Syrian revolutionaries. This has had a devastating effect. The world is rapidly changing and Information can’t be blocked. Technology is altering the world order. The desperate attempt by the Arab regimes, especially the Gulf kingdoms, to forestall social change will not work.

It seems that, like the diesel engine, the “Sunni axis” is also becoming obsolete. The crisis between Qatar and Saudi Arabia reflects the depth of the crisis. The Gulf States are imploding. Israel is a high-tech superpower, but in the political sphere, it is doing its best to buy time and cling to the old world order. The view is that we should ally ourselves with the “moderate Sunni axis” instead of ending the Occupation and giving millions of Palestinians a future of hope in a modern and democratic state.

The Sunni axis creates the illusion that the status quo is possible, and our situation could never be better with Trump, while the Saudi king promises that there will be no pressure to reach a solution with the Palestinians. But this will not stop global warming – or the changes happening around us and in the wider world. Not only is the earth warming up, with Trump footing the bill for the victims, but the Middle East too is changing. The winds of the Arab Spring that blew in the summer of 2011 might have died down, but they will return.

The absurdity of the situation in Washington, and the shameful spectacle in Jerusalem of senior officials close to the prime minister being marched to interrogation rooms, prove that the old regimes and old technologies are on their way out. Change is inevitable. The bloody Occupation will also pass. Israelis and Palestinians will need to find a way to merge into the modern world, if they do not want to be knocked down by the wind.

* Translated from the Hebrew by Robert Goldman

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