Words: Chelsea Monique Daniel (she/they)
Every olive tree torn from the earth, every sacred site destroyed, and every forest decimated is an act of violence.
CW: Colonisation, oppression and mention of genocide
‘Once the olive grove was green.
It was, and the sky
A grove of blue. It was my love.
What changed that evening?’
These are excerpts from Victim #18, a poem written by Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish in 1980. Darwish weaves the motif of the olive tree throughout the poem to mourn for the prosperous sea of green that once covered his land. Olive trees no longer flourishing in Palestine is no accident. The destruction of the crop is a vital part of Israel’s genocide, alongside the bombing of infrastructure and homes. Whether it be during the Nakba, or as recently as 12th November 2025, Israel has destroyed Palestinian olive tree farms time and time again.
Why is it that Israel is so intent on destroying Palestinian agriculture? In The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, Andreas Malm draws parallels between capital, colonisation, and environmental degradation to show how the destruction of the environment is integral to the success of the colonisation project. In order to conquer a people, first a coloniser has to decimate their land. As historian Patrick Wolfe argues, ‘…land is necessary for life’. It is what nurtures a people, both spiritually and literally. No one understood the relationship between land and people better than Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, who stated in his manifesto: ‘If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct’. In the name of demolishing before they construct, Israel has enacted an unprecedented attack on Palestinians. This has pushed Malm to ask: ‘[w]ill people ever be able to live again in Gaza?’
Palestine is not the only colony that has faced environmental attack from its oppressor. Until the Australian Native Title Act was passed in 1993, the continent was legally a “terra nullius”, meaning it didn’t belong to a state. This categorisation gave England the prerogative to colonise and decimate land. Supported by legislation like the Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1861, colonisers undertook intense land clearing to ‘make way’ for farming. This involved removing families from their land, and children from their families. Most land has still not been returned. The overturning of this “terra nullius” was meant to revolutionise Indigenous land rights in Australia by giving Aboriginal traditional owners the right to make legal claims over their own land. However, the act was covertly amended by the conservative Howard government to protect mining giants.
Australia is a prime example of Wolfe’s thesis of invasion as a structure rather than an event. Over time, colonisation in Australia has mutated, but environmental destruction has remained constant. In May 202
0, mining giant Rio Tinto blew up the Juukan Gorge, a sacred site for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Aboriginal people. We can, and should, apply Malm’s argument on Gaza to the case of Australia. In both places, the link between environmental destruction, colonisation, and capitalism cannot be severed.
Another way colonial regimes force both land and people to suffer is through chemical weapons. Before its use in the Vietnam War, one chemical similar to Agent Orange, known as Trioxone, was used by the British government in the Malay Peninsula to quash Malayan resistance. This was undoubtedly an act of colonial control, one intent upon destroying the communist guerrilla effort that had been levelled against the regime. The goal was to defoliate rural areas and push the population to move into the cities, where they could be more easily surveilled by the colonial entity. The number of civilians who died due to Trioxone itself is contested since the effects of chemical weapons can be hard to detect in the short term. One truth, however, is clear. The release of Trioxone and the soil erosion that occurred afterwards rendered the land completely unlivable without the coloniser’s support.
It is hard to quantify how deep the pain from Trioxone’s use in Malaysia goes. There is an unspeakable horror in the diasporic trauma experienced by Malayans who cannot laugh and farm where their grandparents once did. It is the same horror experienced by First Nations people as they walk across the rubble of their sacred land, flattened by a mining monopoly. It is the same horror of future generations of Gazans, who may never be able to plant an olive tree in their own soil.
Colonial projects sustain themselves by decimating land and people, side-by-side. Too often, we overlook the physical cost of colonialism. In order to fight colonial regimes, first we must understand how they operate. This involves us seeing how they violate the sanctity of the natural, as well as the physical. Every olive tree torn from the earth, every sacred site destroyed, and every forest decimated is an act of violence. When people lose their very own Garden of Eden, what do they have left?
‘Once the olive grove was green.
It was, …’
