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'They said "Palestine is out of scope"'
Another climate activist resigns over Gaza
Alex McKinnon
February 26, 2024
A few weeks ago I spoke to Kavita Naidu, a climate campaigner who resigned from Climate Action Network Australia in January over the organisation’s silence on Gaza.
Now another climate campaigner has come forward, echoing many of Naidu’s criticisms of Australia’s mainstream climate movement — that the near-silence on Gaza from many climate organisations is a symptom of systemic racism across the wider movement, and that people of colour within the movement are tokenised and silenced. They’ve asked that they and their former organisation remain anonymous.
Felice* is an architect who has been organising in a faith-based climate movement for nearly five years. Recently they made the decision to resign after the organisation repeatedly refused to take a stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, support growing calls for a ceasefire, or even to encourage respectful and compassionate conversations about the issue.
“It’s untenable for me to be there and use my Muslim identity to organise and show politicians and whoever else that Muslims care about climate,” Felice says. “Rather than staying somewhere and trying to change an entrenched paradigm from within, I’d rather go out and find other people who I don’t need to convince to do the right thing. I feel that process is such a waste of time and energy. It doesn’t get anywhere.”
Felice asked the organisation to sign onto several statements calling for a ceasefire released by international climate movements, as well as one from 350 Australia. They refused.
“After a couple of attempts of seeking solidarity from a faith-based climate organisation to prevent the genocide of majority-Muslim peoples, they said ‘Palestine is out of scope’,” they said. “I was told that campaigning on Palestine would jeopardise their core mission. Reading between the lines, I did not feel welcome to bring it up again.”
“Every single member of the [management] committee told me that they personally have sympathy for the Palestinian people, but it hasn’t translated into strong organisational support. There’s no consideration of how to make the climate movement more welcoming to Muslims by talking about Palestine. They have chosen instead to safeguard their existing constituencies.”
Felice came to Australia in 2017 to study architecture. Their transition into climate work started after the release of the IPCC report in 2018.
“I was finding my feet a bit, trying to see where I fit into the movement,” they said. “In the more mainstream [climate] spaces I experienced some casual Islamophobia and casual racism that made me realise that the movement is very white and start asking: ‘where are the people like me? People from migrant backgrounds and Muslims?’ So I started looking for a reflection of myself in the climate movement.”
Felice encountered the organisation for the first time at the School Strikes in the Sydney CBD. The idea of a multifaith climate organisation appealed to them and, after inviting Felice out for coffee, the organisation’s president invited them to join their managing committee.
“At that coffee meeting I asked them about two things — if there were any other Muslims in the organisation, and how they dealt with the issues of Irian Jaya and Palestine,” Felice said. “It was a concern I had from day zero. They said there was no real consistent presence of Muslim activists in the organisation but they partnered with Muslim organisations. In terms of the Palestine question, they said they basically focused on climate and that it had never come up.”
Felice decided to join the managing committee despite their reservations.
“I thought it would be a good experience — an opportunity to explore a new career path,” they said. “The rest of the committee is mostly older, white, retired Christians and Buddhists, so I was a minority in many ways, but I reasoned that I should be able to work across these differences and that it would be a good thing to try.”
Felice’s involvement in the climate movement would deepen over the next few years. They became an experienced organiser, taking the lead on the organisation’s work with anti-coal movements like Stop Adani and Beyond Coal. In that time, they have experienced and noticed “a general dissatisfaction among people of colour organising in the climate space.”
“The racism people experience in the climate movement is a microcosm of the pervasive racism that occurs in Australia,” Felice said. “The movement might have a higher proportion of people who are supposedly ‘progressive’, but the ‘progressive except Palestine’ dynamic is very strong.”
“The element of white saviourism is quite obvious to me. The idea of ‘climate justice’ has only recently become a buzzword that people are jumping onto, but their idea of ‘justice’ is entrenched in that colonial white-saviour mindset. This applies to a huge chunk of the mainstream climate movement. The way some people talk about people of colour is a bit off, but they don’t realise because they’ve got the white-supremacy blinkers on.”
An indicative recent example of this is how Australia’s mainstream climate movement has belatedly begun engaging with Pasifika climate campaigners.
“It’s only recently that mainstream climate organisations started to get their shit together on showing solidarity with the Pacific, but the way they do that is still very extractive,” Felice said. “The conversation will go, ‘We want to invite Pasifika people to our event, so let’s get them to dance. Let’s design the flyers with lots of colour, they seem to like colour.’ It’s very embarrassing to be a part of that.”
Felice is now working with the Muslim Collective, a faith-based organisation campaigning for progressive social and environmental reform. So far they have found the Muslim Collective to be a far more supportive environment.
“The whole team believe that supporting Palestine is essential to building a climate movement that’s diverse and justice-oriented,” they said. “I don’t feel like everything I want to do has to be approved by a committee, which was always an exhausting process.”
“I feel very empowered seeing racial justice movements like Hue and Democracy in Colour becoming more prominent,” they said. “I do want to see more Muslims taking part in climate solutions in whatever ways would be meaningful to them. The Muslim diaspora is really energised on Palestine, and I think it would be a big mistake not to talk about the climate and nature and water devastation caused by the occupation and militarism.”
In response to questions, the organisation’s president said:
“[X] has been a highly valued employee who has opted to resign because the Management Committee — all volunteers — came to a different position from [X]’s on a matter of huge personal significance to them. We believe in good faith that our brief regarding multi-faith action on climate change meant it was unwise to take a formal stand as an organisation on the terrible suffering in Gaza, whatever our individual predispositions.
“We regret that [X] has understood certain pieces of communication in ways that were different to what was intended.
“What we can say unequivocally is that war always causes both tragic humanitarian disasters and terrible destruction to the climate. As such, we stand for nonviolent means of resolving human conflict.”
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