I'm *wildly* excited to announce that my new book, 'Setting the Land Free – Visions of a Rewilded Ireland', will be published by Hachette on 27 August. We have a stark choice re our collapsing nature: the usual timid, token gestures, or real, gutsy ambition. This book makes the case for the latter.

I lived on a farm that had been 50 acres of fields. When tractors became the norm after WW2, most of it was too wet. All but 14 acres (unintentionally) rewilded. 50 years later, the forest had regrown from the seeds of the hedgerow trees and became a beautiful diverse forest. Nature finds balance.

Not for the Palestinians, it isn't different. Again: they were completely innocent of the terrible crimes done to Jewish people in Europe.

A agree that there's a huge risk here to Jewish people. But as ever more Jews are themselves now pointing out, the danger comes from constantly falsely equating Zionism, Israel, and all its horrific associated crimes, with Judaism. And from falsely labeling anyone who calls that out 'antisemitic'.

We wouldn't have worried about offending white South Africans opposed to apartheid (like my mum), because they would totally agree with the fact that apartheid *was* racist. Again, the exact same should be true of Zionism and Israel.

I'd start from the premise that recognising basic truths, eg that Zionism IS a racist ideology, is always vital to progressing a situation. If we were discussing apartheid South Africa, few would dispute calling apartheid racist, because it was undeniable. The very same is true of Zionism.

Zionism explicitly stated that, to create a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians living there would need to be persuaded or forced to leave. It didn't need to be like that: Jewish refugees could have lived alongside Muslim & Christian Palestinians, just as Jewish Palestinians had for centuries before.

The centuries of Jewish persecution in Europe that culminated in the holocaust were crimes of almost inconceivable proportions. But the Palestinians weren't to blame for any of it, yet have been treated as though they somehow were, being ethnically cleansed from their homeland from the very start.

100% Replace the word 'zionism' with 'apartheid', and there'd be no argument whatsoever. Despite the fact that, for example, Nelson Mandela said that what Palestinians were suffering *before* the Gaza genocide was already far worse than black South Africans under apartheid.

Zionism was conceived with the idea of driving native Palestinians out of Palestine to make way for settlers, and that is *exactly* what it has always done, and is still doing every day. Those are the only things we need to know, unless the aim is to complicate something that's really quite simple.

One thing I learned very forcibly researching the ecological history of where I live (Beara, West Cork) is that the forces and ideologies behind ecocide were one and the same as racist colonialism and genocide. Greta is 100% right: Gaza, racism, fascism, climate and eco-breakdown are ALL connected.

Cue multiple comments along the lines of 'Stick to rewilding and nature, that's what we follow you for.' Well, feel free to unfollow... Let me explain why.

Do you mean Darth Putin - the social media account - added Owen Jones to such a list?

It's impossible to understand the current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rampant ethnic cleansing and settlement on the West Bank, nor the forced displacement of most Palestinians in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel without acknowledging the driving ideology behind it: Zionism.