On November 1st, 2023, three weeks into Israel’s war on Gaza, five days after the tanks began rolling into the Strip, the day after over 150 Palestinians were buried under one residential building in Nuseirat — roughly half of the victims being children, many of whom were playing football next to the house when the bombs fell — a distant actor announced its entry into the arena: Sintracarbón, the trade union for coal workers in Colombia. It issued a statement describing what was happening as a “genocide,” and called on the Colombian government to “suspend the shipping of coal to Israel.”
Closer to the bloodshed, Leyla, a Palestinian activist hailing from Gaza and living in Amman who requested a pseudonym, was electrified by the call. She was working for Disrupt Power, a Palestinian militant research collective looking for ways to throw spanners into the killing machine. Coal, she saw, would be the ideal target. “Coal imported to Israel goes straight into its unified electrical grid. It powers the settlements in the West Bank, the artificial intelligence used to bomb Gaza, the military factories, the bases — everything running on electricity,” she told us in a June interview. When Leyla and her colleagues began gathering data, they learned that more than 60% of this coal came from Colombia. They found the ships that transported the coal and the ports where those ships docked. Then, they passed on their research to the Ramallah-based NGO Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD). In the spring of 2024, Amira, a PIPD activist who also requested a pseudonym, left the West Bank on a mission: to help convince the Colombian government to keep its coal away from Israel.
Since the British first occupied Palestine, coal-fueled electricity has been a critical hinge for colonial acceleration in the region. In the early 20th century, Jewish settlements gained privileged access to Palestine’s newly established electrical grid, and by 1948, Jews — the majority of whom were recent settlers—made up one third of the population but consumed 90% of the electricity. All the way into the new millennium, imported coal remained the basis of electrical power generated and dispatched across the lands conquered in 1948 as well as in 1967. In the early 21st century, gas was discovered in the waters of historic Palestine, and Israel quickly ratcheted up extraction as it sought to shift its power plants onto this source. But it was an incomplete success: On the eve of the genocide in Gaza, between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s electricity still came from the combustion of coal — the bulk extracted from lands that have been violently depopulated in Colombia. In 2023, these companies shipped nearly $447 million worth of Colombian coal to Israel, accounting for roughly 5% of the former’s coal exports and almost half of latter’s imports.
This is the reality Amira had in mind as she traveled to Bogotá in early 2024, hoping to get Colombia to end a collaboration that had destroyed many lives on both sides of the Atlantic. She would be addressing a Colombian government that, for the first time in history, was made up of forces of the left. In 2022, Gustavo Petro, a former member of the leftist guerrilla organization 19th of April Movement (M-19), was elected president of Colombia, backed by a panoply of social movements including Sintracarbón and the organized working class, Indigenous groups, and environmental organizations. Petro had campaigned on the idea of a politics of life and a program for remaking the Colombian economy, including, most audaciously, weaning it off fossil fuels. After his victory, the government quickly launched a transitional program, the most radical so far in any fossil fuel-producing country: a complete ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure. Not a single contract would be issued for opening a coal mine, drilling oil, or exploring for gas, opening the possibility that Colombia’s role in fueling the world’s fossil economy might slowly fade away.
