by Franklin Dmitryev

Greta Thunberg’s participation in aid flotillas to Gaza highlights the climate justice movement’s inherent impetus to broaden its scope beyond a narrow focus on greenhouse gas emissions and their direct impacts. Thunberg has said that anyone who does not speak out against the genocide in Gaza should not be called a climate justice activist.

The August to October 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla (Sumud means steadfastness in Arabic), the second flotilla in which Thunberg participated, was meant to break Israel’s draconian blockade of Gaza by bringing in tons of food and other humanitarian aid.

The incredible devastation of the occupied territory makes the need for such aid obvious. That was not ended by the advent of a ceasefire on Oct. 10, though a respite from active bombing was welcomed with relief. Not only did Israel almost immediately announce that it will allow only half the already inadequate amount of aid it agreed to in the “peace plan,” the ceasefire is very uncertain and hardly ensures the possibility of reconstruction. Furthermore, it does not allow the slightest hint of actual self-determination for the Palestinian people. Far from bringing “peace in the Middle East,” as President Donald Trump bombastically bragged, it sets the stage for recurring conflict.

AN UNCERTAIN AND PARTIAL CEASEFIRE

One glaring element of the ceasefire is that it is broken into phases. If it did ever reach further phases, Palestine would be burdened with a “Board of Peace” headed by war criminals Trump and Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister, acting as a colonial government, and dreaming of turning a Gaza Strip cleansed of Palestinians into a Riviera of the Levant, which is what they call “economic development.” Some previous agreements never reached phase 2. Israel has even assassinated the other side’s negotiators at times, to prolong the fighting, since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu up to now has banked on unending war to keep himself in power and out of prison.

This time, Trump—seeing worldwide revulsion at the genocide being perpetrated by Israel and supported by the U.S. and other countries, and also in his thirst to co-opt the Nobel Peace Prize into his Orwellian empire that decrees that war is peace—enticed Netanyahu into agreeing to a ceasefire with the prospect of using the freed hostages to prop up his election prospects, and by putting pressure on Israeli institutions to drop corruption charges against his partner in crime. Will the world forget so quickly that Netanyahu passed up previous chances to get the hostages released just so that he could keep the destruction going?

The reality on the ground undercuts the claims that this ceasefire will lead to lasting peace. Immediately following its announcement, Israeli soldiers went on a rampage across Gaza City, burning down homes, food stores, and the last remaining sewage treatment plant in the area. During the first 11 days of ceasefire, Israel killed at least 80 Palestinians in Gaza (some killed by drones), while Hamas staged summary public executions of alleged collaborators, and violence continued in the West Bank, including an 11-year-old boy shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian captives returning to Gaza described the severe torture they had endured, while many bodies returned to Gaza under the ceasefire deal showed signs of torture and execution.

Not only did Israel fail to fully lift restrictions on aid, soldiers tried to enforce continued starvation. One soldier, for example, “posted a photo showing himself standing in front of a set of burning wooden pallets,” with the caption, “On Friday, just before departure. Burning food so that it won’t reach the Gazans, may their names be erased.” And an Israeli colonel bragged, “We are leaving behind us only dust. There’s nothing here.”

THE DEVASTATION OF GAZA

Gaza’s ruin remains overwhelming. For one example, the medical journal Lancet published a study showing “a clear link between Israeli restrictions on supplies entering Gaza and levels of malnutrition among children….Almost 55,000 children under the age of six in Gaza are estimated to be acutely malnourished,” which is potentially lethal. Even children who survive are likely to suffer lifelong debilitating effects. According to the human rights group Amnesty International, Israel has been deliberately starving Gazans.

In addition, over 68,000 people are officially counted as dead. That total does not include the thousands and thousands more who have died of hunger and disease or whose bodies still lie buried under the rubble. More than 168,000 have been wounded.

Some 95% of the population, 2.1 million people, have been driven out of their homes, and 92% of homes have been damaged, many of them utterly destroyed.

Israeli officials from the beginning, immediately after the Hamas-led atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, announced their intention to lay waste to the strip and leave it unfit for human habitation, and they have achieved more than 90% success in reaching that goal. That includes destroying 90% of schools and many of the hospitals, while healthcare facilities that remain are straining to function under severe shortages of energy, supplies, water, food, and medical staff. Care workers as well as journalists and even children have often been targeted for execution.

Agriculture and fishing have been made almost impossible—98.5% of cropland has been rendered unusable. Bakeries and other food processing businesses have mostly been eliminated, so that humanitarian aid from abroad has become vital, but Israel almost completely blocked that aid, replacing it with U.S.-run aid collaborating with the Israeli military that acts “as an instrument of control, dehumanization, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military.” The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” was revealed to have hired members of an Islamophobic hate group for its “security” thugs shooting at hungry Gazans.

MILITARY ASSAULTS ON AID FLOTILLA

Israel treated the aid flotilla as a military target. Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir called the humanitarian activists “terrorists,” as he had done the first time Thunberg sailed in a Freedom Flotilla in June. Ben-Gvir is an actual fascist, an open advocate of genocide who recently proclaimed, “the only aid that should enter Gaza is for the purpose of voluntary migration.” (To the Israeli fascistic Right, “voluntary migration” means the expulsion of all Palestinians under the compulsion of violence, starvation, and total destruction of the infrastructure of human life.) Israeli military forces have attacked all the ten Gaza Freedom Flotillas since 2010, when they killed nine civilian activists on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara.

In the case of the current flotilla, Israel began with drones dropping bombs, trying to light ships on fire with people aboard, and escalated to raids taking over all the ships and throwing all the participants into prisons normally reserved for people accused of being terrorists. All of this occurred in international waters and was illegal according to international law; but Israel expects to act with impunity, given the total support it receives from the U.S. and several European countries—and in light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s deadly attacks on several non-military Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, which was illegal under both international and U.S. law.

The 450 captives were then held in conditions that could reasonably be described as torture. Terror supporter Ben-Gvir ranted, “Anyone who supports terrorism is a terrorist and deserves the conditions of terrorists.” Turkish journalist and flotilla participant Ersin Celik reported that he had witnessed Israeli forces “torture Greta Thunberg.”

In protest against Israel’s military assault on the vessels and mistreatment of the captives, a national general strike was held in Italy, along with demonstrations in many countries.

When she was finally expelled from Israel and landed in Athens, she told a crowd there that she could “talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. But that is not the story. What happened here was that Israel, while continuing to worsen and escalate their genocide and mass destruction…they once again violated international law by preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza while people are being starved.”

CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT’S IDEAS DEEPEN

As the climate movement has evolved, so have its concepts. It started out by largely focusing on climate action—that is, reforms needed to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, beginning with phasing out the use of fossil fuels, deforestation, and other agricultural and land use practices that add to the carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, plus industrial activities that emit those and other planet-heating gases. All this is vital, but it is not the whole story.

While this narrow focus seemed to predominate, there were always wings of the movement calling for an examination of the deep economic and social roots of the crisis, and the social transformation that requires. In the early 1990s, many activists tried to silence that, but the need to get rid of capitalism was brought up more and more as the years went by.

This included anti-capitalist concepts of “just transition”—which means the need to minimize harm to workers and communities in any transition of technology, energy, structures, and social organization for climate and ecological purposes—but the dominant concepts of just transition remain reformist, such as emphasizing job retraining and unemployment benefits.

At the same time, the movement’s more radical wings sought to give a deeper meaning to the official formula of “common but differentiated responsibilities” between “developed” and “developing” countries—that is, they pointed out the imperialist relationship inherent in that division, not accepting it as some accidental given fact of history.

The 2016 struggle at Standing Rock, N.D., against the Dakota Access Pipeline brought Indigenous revolt front and center, and greatly intensified the growing links between climate activism and land/environment/community defense by Indigenous and other people. Environmental justice organizing by Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities had been going on in the U.S. for decades but had not always been seen as integral to the climate movement. Indigenous and other environmental justice organizing tended to challenge the technocratic mindset that had always been prominent in the environmental movement and even to challenge the separation between mental and manual labor.

GRETA THUNBERG AND THE CLIMATE STRIKES

Thunberg began her school strike for climate, by herself in the beginning, in August 2018. Striking a chord, by Sept. 20, 2019, the strike events drew four million people in 163 countries. Thunberg did not set out to become a leader but she did, at first because she catalyzed these enormous events. Even more, it was due to her uncompromising insistence on telling the truth and calling out politicians and businesses. It was due to her refusal to separate scientific facts about the scale and effects of climate change from the fact that the greatest harms fall on those least responsible for the crisis, that the burden of responsibility falls most heavily on the rich and powerful as well as the most industrialized countries and their colonial projects, and, most importantly, not separating these facts from the need for deep social transformation.

Political leaders thought they could burnish their reputations by inviting her to speak at the UN or the World Economic Forum, but she bluntly criticized their inaction, hypocrisy, and cowardice. She pointedly insisted on the need for “permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

Thunberg and many of the other young activists of her generation compelled the movement to focus on climate justice, without abstracting from the divisions between classes and between countries. This did not often get spelled out as the need for revolution in the sense of a deep and broad transformation of social structures and relations, including getting rid of capitalism. But that is where the logic inexorably leads. Thunberg herself increasingly talks about “systemic transformations” and calls out colonialism, imperialism, oil-producing nations, and the few who “have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money” (No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, Penguin, 2019, pp. 17-18). In the book she edited, The Climate Book (Allen Lane, 2022), she declared again and again that the climate crisis cannot be solved “in the current system” or “systems” or “economic system.”

DIVISIONS ARISE WITHIN MOVEMENT

Divisions within the climate justice movement were inevitable, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza sharpened them. In October 2023, Thunberg and her group Fridays for Future (FFF) Sweden denounced the genocide as such and strongly expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people. Luisa Neubauer, who had superficially been called “Germany’s Greta” because she is also a young woman climate activist leader, and her group Fridays for Future Germany (the biggest FFF chapter), objected to going beyond environmental issues. Thunberg and other FFF Sweden activist wrote a piece explaining:

“Fridays for Future has not ‘been radicalized’ or ‘become political.’ We have always been political, because we have always been a movement for justice. Standing in solidarity with Palestinians and all affected civilians has never been in question for us.

“Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. That means speaking up when people suffer, are forced to flee their homes or are killed – regardless of the cause. It is the same reason why we have always held strikes in solidarity with marginalized groups – including those in Sápmi, Kurdistan, Ukraine and many other places – and their struggles for justice against imperialism and oppression. Our solidarity with Palestine is no different, and we refuse to let the public focus shift away from the horrifying human suffering that Palestinians are currently facing….

“The horrific murders of Israeli civilians by Hamas cannot in any way legitimize Israel’s ongoing war crimes. Genocide is not self-defense, nor is it in any way a proportionate response. It also cannot be ignored that this comes within the broader context of Palestinians having lived under suffocating oppression for decades, in what Amnesty International has defined as an apartheid regime. While all of this alone would be reason enough to comment on the situation, as a Swedish movement, we also have a responsibility to speak up due to Swedish military cooperation with Israeli arms companies, which makes Sweden complicit in Israel’s occupation and mass killing.

“We are now seeing a sharp increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic statements, actions and hate crimes in Sweden and the world. The leader of the largest member of Sweden’s rightwing governing bloc is speaking of demolishing mosques, and the Israeli flag was burned in front of a synagogue in Malmö. This is unacceptable. We unreservedly condemn all forms of discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. Everyone speaking out on this crisis has a responsibility to distinguish between Hamas, Muslims and Palestinians; and between the state of Israel, Jewish people and Israelis….

“Demanding an end to this inexcusable violence is a question of basic humanity, and we call on everyone who can to do so. Silence is complicity. You cannot be neutral in an unfolding genocide.”

What is implicit in this and similar statements, and in concrete actions, needs to be made explicit. Reaching out a hand of solidarity is not only about recognizing and opposing the suffering and demanding that human rights be upheld. It is a recognition, even if unspoken, that all freedom struggles are part of a unified dialectic of liberation. They are diverse and not identical, they do not act in unison, but they do more than intersect. Each one in its own different ways at different times opens up new subjectivities, pathways and ideas toward the future, toward a new, truly human society. That provides a springboard for all freedom movements.

The movement from theory has a part to play here too, by recognizing masses in motion—whether high school students on strike for climate or Palestinians resisting both genocide and oppressive relations within their society—as not only force but Reason, and by making that explicit, making a category of it as a basis for further thought and action.

Climate activists’ participation in the aid flotilla is one aspect of how the climate justice movement inherently manifests a reaching for a broader understanding of both the roots of the climate crisis and the need for a deep social transformation to abolish those roots—including capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and exploitation and oppression generally. The urgency of the ongoing genocide, with the complicity of powerful states across the globe—with or without a partial and precarious ceasefire—has necessarily brought taking a position on it front and center.

Now it is vital to develop these ideas beyond the first negation—opposition to genocide and oppression—toward a negation of the negation, the idea and goal of a fundamental social transformation, that is, revolution, to establish the opposite of this regime of destruction of humanity and nature, to build that opposite on a foundation of totally new human relations.