Colonial Climate Governance: Community Agency, Settler Violence, and Environmental Control in Moghayer Village, Occupied Palestine

This article advances the concept of colonial climate governance to explain how Israeli settler colonialism in the West Bank uses environmental control as a mechanism of political domination and governance. It asks how land, water, and ecological systems are organized to sustain colonial authority and how Palestinian communities, including women who shoulder unequal care burdens, sustain material and social life within this structure. The argument is that the climate crisis in Palestine is not an external or natural condition but a political design in which ecological systems are deliberately manipulated to secure territorial and demographic control. Drawing on Moghayer village as an empirical site, the study traces how land confiscation, water restrictions, and settler assaults fracture the social and ecological foundations of Palestinian life. The destruction of wells, crops, and solar networks undermines livelihoods and collective security, forcing families into deeper dependency on aid. These dynamics shape the entire community but are felt most intensely by women, whose responsibilities for water collection, food production, and caregiving place them at the front line of environmental collapse. Their exhaustion, improvisation, and collective organization reveal how ecological violence targets the very labor that sustains life, binding the colonial management of resources to the gendered management of care. Using feminist political ecology and settler colonial theory, the article examines how community members engage in collective repair, shared water management, and the preservation of seeds and kinship networks. The argument situates Moghayer within global debates on climate justice and political governance, showing how ecological violence, gendered dispossession, and militarized control sustain settler colonial power. The study concludes that decolonization is essential to environmental justice and that Palestinian communal practices articulate an ethic of care and endurance beyond domination.