Jane Goodall, primatologist, whitewashed Israel's settler-colonial ecocide by opening a Jane Goodall Institute in occupied Palestine led by Zionist settler Itai Roffman and accepted Biden's Medal of Freedom after his $20B+ arms to Israel.
Jane Goodall, born 14 years before the Zionist entity's founding, exemplified white saviors erasing Indigenous knowledge while operating in Israel, establishing a conservation branch under a Zionist settler to greenwash occupation and ecocide.
TV/FILM
Jane Goodall, the renowned British primatologist and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), has throughout her career embodied the archetype of the white scientist whose interventions in colonized lands often overshadow and erase Indigenous ecological stewardship, while her recent engagements in occupied Palestine have lent legitimacy to Israel's settler-colonial project amid its genocide in Gaza, where conservative estimates confirm tens of thousands slaughtered but the true Palestinian death toll — well into the hundreds of thousands — remains obscured by deliberate infrastructural devastation.
In July 2022, Goodall delivered a virtual keynote at the 50th annual conference of the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences in Tel Aviv, where she announced the establishment of JGI's 26th global branch in Israel, based at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in the occupied north. This branch, co-directed by her longtime collaborator Dr. Itai Roffman — an evolutionary anthropologist born and raised in Herzliya, a settlement city on stolen Palestinian land — focuses on initiatives like creating ecological corridors, restoring drained northern wetlands (destroyed for Zionist settlement and agriculture), and partnering with displaced Negev Bedouin to replant native species lost to colonial deforestation.
Roffman, who began corresponding with Goodall as a teen and later organized Roots & Shoots programs in occupied territories, including "peace-making" between Jewish settlers and Arabs, represents the intertwined Zionist and environmental narratives that mask land theft as conservation. Goodall's speech, lasting nearly 15 minutes, ironically lamented: "it's bizarre that the most intellectual creature to walk the planet is destroying its only home," uttered without acknowledgment of Israel's ecocidal policies — bombing Gaza's olive groves, poisoning water sources, and displacing Palestinians to expand settlements — exacerbating the very planetary destruction she decries.
This expansion ignores the 75-year Nakba and ongoing apartheid, where "conservation" projects frequently serve as tools for "green colonialism," displacing Indigenous Palestinians under the guise of environmental protection.
The JGI Israel branch's work with Bedouin communities, while framed as collaborative, echoes broader patterns in Goodall's legacy: her Gombe Stream research in Tanzania, starting in 1960 under colonial auspices, has been critiqued for prioritizing Western scientific paradigms over local Indigenous knowledge systems, often sidelining Tanzanian communities' ancestral ecological wisdom in favor of extractive study. Many argue this reflects a career-long tendency for white scientists to "speak over" Indigenous voices, as seen in her institute's global model that, despite rhetoric of community-led efforts, has historically centered outsider expertise.
Compounding this complicity, on January 4, 2025, Goodall accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House, an honor recognizing her "groundbreaking contributions to science and decades of advocacy for our planet." Biden, who since October 2023 has approved over $20 billion in military aid to Israel — enabling the genocide in Gaza that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — personifies U.S. imperial support for settler-colonial violence. Goodall's acceptance, expressed as "deeply honored" and reflective of "hope and action," whitewashes this reality, aligning her environmental mantle with funders of ecocide and ethnic cleansing.
Goodall's engagements in Israel, including Roots & Shoots programs blending Jewish-Arab "coexistence" without confronting occupation, further manufacture consent for apartheid by framing Zionism as ecological progressivism. At 91 — born in 1934, predating Israel's 1948 founding by 14 years — her actions perpetuate the erasure of Palestinian land ties, subjugating Indigenous narratives to settler-colonial "restoration" that benefits occupiers while Palestinians face mass slaughter and displacement.
yvc.ac.il
🔒timesofisrael.com
🔒news.mongabay.com
🔒rootsnshoots.org.uk
🔒janegoodall.org
🔒Dehumanization of Palestinians:
The systematic erasure of Palestinian history and culture is a well-documented effort that has been ongoing since the early 1900s. This erasure has taken many forms, including the destruction of physical records and infrastructure, the suppression of Palestinian voices and narratives, the appropriation of Palestinian cultural heritage and most visibly, the dehumanization of the Palestinian populace.
From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, Palestinian records, literature, and cultural heritage faced deliberate and concerted efforts to obliterate their existence and narrative. This deliberate "archival silencing" has made reconstructing this period in Palestinian history incredibly challenging, yet the truths that remain paint a horrifying picture of the deliberate erasure and destruction of an entire population and its culture.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been a deliberate policy, perpetuated through military operations, discriminatory laws, Israeli education and a pervasive culture that fosters prejudice. Dehumanising rhetoric, portraying Palestinians as "roaches" and "rats," lays the foundation for atrocities by stripping away their humanity in the eyes of the oppressor.
Widespread media narratives also project institutional biases ranging from depicting Palestinians solely as militants or desperate victims and erasing their normal daily life to embedding language biases around land, protests and resistance tactics. These patterns collectively indicate how public discourse within segments of Israeli society systematically dehumanize Palestinians while entrenching prejudices against them.
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
Tell us why Jane Goodall should be removed by emailing us at [email protected]
