ECO-TERRORISM IN THE HOLY LAND

GUEST POST FROM MICHAEL BLOOMFIELD: ARSON AS TERROR IS A GLOBAL CRIME AGAINST NATURE.

Fires engulfed swaths of Israel last week.

Michael Bloomfield is founder and executive director of the Harmony Foundation of Canada and is a member of the board of directors of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Israel is again forced to battle raging forest fires. It’s not just trees that are burning — so too should be the moral conscience of the global community.

The current wave of wildfires tearing through northern and central Israel are not natural disasters. They are acts of eco-terrorism — deliberate, politically motivated arson meant to harm people and the environment. Yet, the world remains disturbingly silent.

These wildfires were intentionally set as tools of ecological and psychological warfare. The coordinated blazes, near Jerusalem, the Galilee, and the Negev, have forced evacuations, closed schools, and threatened lives. Thousands of acres of forestland reduced to ash will take generations to replace. Wildlife has been devastated. The economic damage is staggering — but the environmental toll is immeasurable.

This tactic isn’t new. Since the early 2000s, extremist Palestinian factions and allies like Hezbollah have weaponized fire. The 2016 wave of over 1,700 arson-driven fires devastated Haifa and displaced over 75,000 people. Today, we see the same deliberate tactics: multiple ignition points, use of accelerants and online encouragement from extremists.

Fire is a cheap tool capable of inflicting massive damage. It has devastating consequences: forests destroyed, wildlife incinerated, and people displaced and choked by toxic smoke. Ecosystems already threatened by climate change face obliteration.

Eco-terrorism is not merely an Israeli crisis. It is a challenge to the world’s commitment to universal environmental principles even when they intersect with political complexity.

If terrorists can torch ecosystems without consequence, that sets a dangerous precedent that endangers every nation vulnerable to ecological sabotage.

Why the silence?

When fires devastated the Amazon, northern Alberta, the Congo, Greece, or California, the world was alarmed. Where are those same voices when Israel’s forests and wildlife are burning?

The principles of environmental stewardship must apply universally, regardless of location — or they are meaningless. The deliberate destruction of forests anywhere in the world should evoke moral outrage.

We call on international organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the Climate Crisis Group, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Conservation International, Friends of the Earth, as well as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Red Cross — to speak out. We call on the media to report these attacks with the urgency they deserve. And we call on governments across the globe to denounce these attacks and cooperate with Israel to stop them. The tools are there: satellite imaging, forensic fire analysis, intelligence sharing. What’s needed is will — and moral clarity.

Israel will rebuild — as it always does after terror. However, forests take generations to recover and ecosystems are irreplaceable. A forest is not just a collection of trees — it is a living organism, comprised of interdependent species and ecological processes.

Terrorism targeting nature must be condemned with the same intensity as any assault on human life. Fire-bombing forests is not legitimate resistance — it is madness. It is biological warfare that must be exposed and stopped.

The time to act is now! Eco-terrorism must be condemned without exception. Silence in the face of deliberate ecological destruction is complicity. It not only betrays Israel but the world.