With foreign backing, Israel’s solar energy boom is powering apartheid
Israel’s self-branding as a pioneer in sustainability obscures how its ‘green development’ is fueling the takeover of Palestinian land and resources — and international corporations are helping to bankroll it.
This article is part of a project by the Caravan Collective called “The Occupation of the Sun.” Explore the interactive website here.
“How do you charge your phones?” we asked. “With the sun,” Ahmad replied, nodding toward the small cluster of solar panels behind him.
For 47 years, the tiny hamlet of Naba’a Al-Ghazzal, part of the community of Al-Farsiya, has survived on the northern edge of the Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Home to around 20 members of the Daraghmeh family — including Ahmad, the community’s informal leader — all of their electricity comes from a handful of solar panels. The community used to have a generator, but Israeli settlers destroyed it two years ago and they could not afford to replace it.
Al-Farsiya is one of the last remaining Palestinian shepherding communities in the Jordan Valley, after the majority were displaced through relentless state-backed settler violence and harassment, particularly since October 7. The Daraghmeh family counts a few hundred sheep and a small strip of barley fields, a livelihood steadily being strangled by nearby settlers who block access to grazing land and routinely damage crops by running their own flocks through the fields.
Tubas, the closest Palestinian town, used to be a half-hour drive away; these days, since the Israeli military keeps the nearby Tayasir checkpoint almost permanently closed, every trip requires a multi-hour detour.
Across Area C, which makes up more than 60 percent of the West Bank and is under full Israeli civil and military control, solar power is often the only available source of electricity for Palestinian herding communities like this one. Israel has refused to connect these hamlets to the grid, despite its obligation under international humanitarian law to provide basic services to the population under occupation.
Like many Palestinian communities in Area C, Al-Farsiya’s solar panels were installed by Comet-ME, an Israeli-Palestinian NGO that provides basic water and energy infrastructure to vulnerable villages. But these installations have become frequent targets.
“There’s the settlers, and there’s the army,” Ahmad, 32, told +972 Magazine. “Every other day they come to attack us.”
Solar panels in Al-Farsiya that were damaged by a settler attack, Jordan Valley, occupied West Bank. (Sofia Fani Gutman)
In September 2023, nine masked settlers assaulted him on his traditional grazing lands, breaking his hand with an iron bar and leaving him in a cast for weeks. Israeli police declined to investigate.
The violence escalated in April 2024, when dozens of settlers stormed Al-Farsiya at night, attacking residents, burning a car, destroying the generator, and smashing nearly every solar panel. Police again refused to open a case. Today, the shattered panels serve as makeshift fencing around their homes.
Just a few dozen meters away are water pipes and an electricity line, but these are of no use to the community; Israel built them to serve the nearby Jewish settlements, which are increasingly powered by large, internationally funded solar farms. Meanwhile, Palestinian communities in the same areas struggle simply to keep the lights on, and their small, improvised electricity systems are routinely demolished by the army (which deems them to be “illegal construction”) or vandalized by settlers.
The result is two starkly different energy realities in one territory, which some residents and activists are calling “energy apartheid.”
For Israel, the rapid expansion of solar energy in the occupied West Bank has become yet another tool of colonization. Packaged as “green development,” this greenwashing masks the process that is actually taking place on the ground, with significant foreign investment: a systematic transfer of Palestinian land and resources to Israeli and international corporations.
‘Draw a dollar sign — that’s their significance’
While Al-Farsiya struggles to keep a few fragile solar panels standing, international companies are profiting from the Israeli settlements around it. Just a 10-minute drive north lies Shadmot Mehola, and the contrast can already be felt on the road.
The dirt track leading out of Al-Farsiya gives way to a smooth, paved route that rises toward a half-kilometer stretch of gleaming solar panels. Noam Bigon, the settlement’s administrator, explained that these panels are connected directly to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), the national grid.
Founded in 1979 as part of a broader effort to create Israeli military infrastructure along the Jordanian border, Shadmot Mehola was converted into a civilian settlement in 1984 and is now home to roughly 650 residents. Four soldiers guard the settlement’s large electric gate.
A view of the Jewish settlement of Shadmot Mehola, Jordan Valley, occupied West Bank, October 8, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
Beyond the fence, the Jordan Valley’s desert topography seems to disappear. Flourishing foreign trees line the sidewalks. Manicured lawns surround neat, tiled-roofed houses. Even the air seems clearer inside the enclosure.
Bigon welcomed us into his air-conditioned office, offering tea and coffee in front of a large map of the settlement. He traced the locations of synagogues, community centers, schools, swimming pools, and an area zoned for 120 prefabricated housing units — single-family homes that, he said proudly, could be assembled in just two weeks.
“Families from all over the country want to live here,” he said. “There’s a calm environment.”
Sliding his finger toward the road we had driven on, Bigon pointed on the map to the Shadmot Mehola Solar Field. Built in 2016, the installation covers more than 50,000 square meters and has a capacity of five megawatts of electricity, financed by private Israeli investment worth NIS 40 million. The land on which it was built was confiscated from the Tubas governorate in 1997 and transferred to the settlement through the World Zionist Organization.
A newer project is also underway. In 2023, the Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s occupation — outlined plans for a “solar gate” that would encircle the entire settlement. “The settlement’s gate itself will be made out of solar panels,” Bigon explained. “It will produce its own security lighting. Come back in two years, and you’ll see.”
The solar field operates under a special arrangement approved by the Energy Ministry and the Electricity Authority for entrepreneurs in the occupied West Bank. Through this scheme, the Israeli government guaranteed it would buy electricity from the field for at least 20 years at an unusually high rate of NIS 0.51-0.54 ($0.16-0.17) per kilowatt.
When asked if the residents of Shadmot Mehola cared about the environmental significance of the panels, Bigon emphasized that, above all, they were a source of profit for the community. “On the panels, you can draw a dollar sign,” he said. “That is their significance.”
Shadmot Mehola Solar Field, in the Jordan Valley, occupied West Bank. (Sofia Fani Gutman)
But the relationship between Shadmot Mehola and Al-Farsiya runs far deeper than energy disparity and land seizure. According to evidence collected by the human rights group Jordan Valley Activists (JVA), settlers from Shadmot Mehola have for years been involved in violent attacks on the neighboring Palestinian community.
In September 2023, the settlers who broke Ahmad’s hand with an iron bar came from Shadmot Mehola. Among them, according to the JVA, were the Rosenberg brothers — the grandsons of the rabbi who founded the settlement’s religious school. The settlement’s security coordinator watched the attack without intervening. (An Israeli army spokesperson told +972 that Israeli soldiers had arrived in the area after reports of “friction” between Israelis and Palestinians, and that “further handling was transferred to the Israel Police.” The Rosenberg brothers did not respond to a request for comment.)
This was not an isolated incident. On June 15, 2024, settlers from Shadmot Mehola smashedthe windows of Ahmad’s car with rocks, and assaulted a JVA activist with a cattle prod, leaving him with severe electrical burns. (The army said “no suspects were identified.”) Less than a month later, a settler from the community stabbed Ahmad in the arm and stomach.
A year later, on June 9, 2025, two settlers descended from Shadmot Mehola to begin constructing a 150-meter fence just two meters away from Al-Farsiya’s homes, cutting off the village from its remaining land. (The army stated that this was “legitimate work that does not involve cutting off the village.”)
The brutal violence inflicted on Ahmad and his family is not distinct from the settlement’s glossy green energy projects. They are two sides of the same system, designed to remove Palestinian communities from the Jordan Valley and replace them with Israeli settlers. The men who engineered the solar panels and the men who attacked Ahmad live in the same neighborhoods, and work toward the same end.
Shining unequally
Israel has invested heavily in branding itself as a green pioneer since the early 2010s. In a 2015 speech to the UN, Israel’s ambassador boasted that the country had become “a hub for renewable energy research and development.”
“The same sun that shines equally on all of us, is owned by none of us, and can supply energy in abundance inherently promotes peace,” he continued.
But this self-branding became much more aggressive after 2020, when Israel announced its 2030 renewable energy targets. Since then, promotional coverage of Israel’s solar sector has flooded global media.
A 2022 New York Times feature on the “dazzling” solar tower in the Naqab (or Negev) desert, described as the tallest of its kind, read like a showcase of innovation. Its only fleeting references to Palestinians noted that thousands of Bedouin Arabs live nearby in impoverished, often unrecognized villages without electricity access, and that militants in Gaza might target the tower with rockets.
Bedouins are seen riding camels near the Ashalim solar tower in the Naqab, southern Israel, November 1, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
That same year, a Forbes opinion piece titled “The world wants Israel’s energy and environmental innovations” held up Israel as a model for climate-minded business and infrastructure. In recounting early Zionist settlement, it described Jewish immigrants “buying land” and developing water-harvesting techniques, framing a colonial history as an origin story for modern environmental ingenuity.
Similar narratives appear throughout tech and energy trade publications, which consistently promote Israel’s “energy tech” as a global climate leader worthy of investment. Virtually none acknowledge the human rights abuses endured by Palestinians as a means to obtain such an amenable, eco-friendly future.
The genuine need for sustainable energy systems is undeniable. But Israel’s self-portrait as a leader in sustainability also serves a political purpose, obscuring the extent to which its renewable energy drive simultaneously fuels and relies on the seizure of Palestinian land. Contrary to the ambassador’s words, in the occupied West Bank, the sun does not shine equally on all.
The structural imbalance stretches back decades. Following the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, Palestinians in Areas A and Area B (both under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority) have been forced to purchase most electricity from the Israel Electric Corporation. The IEC, for its part, sources power from industrial zones in both the West Bank and the Naqab — areas from which dozens of Palestinian villages and Bedouin communities have been displaced to make way for solar fields and related infrastructure.
Who Profits, an independent research center tracking corporate complicity in the occupation, described the Palestinian electricity sector as a “captive market” of the IEC, burdened by debt, supply restrictions, and total dependency on a foreign provider. Meanwhile, Palestinian communities in Area C of the West Bank have been barred from entering formal agreements with the IEC — and any alternative electricity infrastructure provider — because it retains de facto control over land use, building permits, infrastructure approval, and imported technology flows in this area.
These communities have been left to rely on costly generators and small, improvised solar systems that are frequently demolished by the Civil Administration or by settlers. According to the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, less than 2 percent of Palestinian permit requests for solar installations in Area C are approved, and even EU-funded solar projects are routinely dismantled.
Palestinians stand near destroyed solar panels in the aftermath of a settler attack in the Bedouin community of Jaba’, near Jerusalem, occupied West Bank, February 23, 2025. (Omri Eran Vardi/Activestills)
Solar energy should be a lifeline, with the Jordan Valley alone receiving more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year. Israel understands this well: Over the past decade, public-private partnerships have poured investment into solar infrastructure across the region, aiming to cover over 300 hectares with solar panels. Both Israeli firms and international companies, including Canadian Solar Inc., have committed to the expansion.
The results have been dramatic. Israel’s solar electricity generation grew from virtually nothing in 2008 to 10,793 gigawatts by 2024, accounting for 84 percent of the country’s renewable energy, and over 13 percent of its total energy output By 2030, Israel hopes for renewables to provide 30 percent of its electricity, primarily from solar power.
This rapid buildup hasn’t happened in a vacuum. It has been driven by an aggressive set of economic incentives designed to facilitate private investment into the solar market. Subsidies, long-term feed-in tariffs, guaranteed grid access, and streamlined permitting have turned renewable energy into a highly profitable venture.
As Who Profits reported in 2024, “between 2017 and 2022, the Israel Land Authority profited over NIS 184.5 million from solar field projects, approving 68 new transactions with a total capacity of 750 megawatts.”
Yet Israel’s renewable energy boom is deeply entangled with its settlement policy. As the government sets quotas for solar facilities, it continues to channel major projects into settlements across the occupied West Bank. Large industrial fields — such as those in the settlements of Netiv Hagdud and Kalia, near Jericho — have benefited from state backing and international corporate investment.
At the same time, settlers who install residential solar arrays can connect to the national grid and profit from the electricity they produce, as in Shadmot Mehola. This electricity is distributed to Israeli households on both sides of the Green Line, but not to Palestinians living under occupation. The green transition has thus become another mechanism subsidizing the movement of Israeli citizens into occupied territory.
International complicity
International corporations are deeply embedded in the solar infrastructure that is abetting Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land in both the West Bank and the Naqab. Across both sides of the Green Line, dozens of foreign companies manufacture, sell, and maintain solar systems that power settlements and industrial zones — either directly or through joint partnerships with Israeli firms. Through our own research, we have been able to determine that the most commercially entangled states are the United States, Germany, China, France, and Italy.
One of the leading players is SolarEdge, a U.S.-based company that has become a central supplier of solar technology panels to settlements such as Shadmot Mehola. Founded in 2006 by Guy Sella, a former member of Israel’s National Security Council, SolarEdge has receivedsubstantial funding from Israeli government ministries. It has been listed on NASDAQ since 2015, and is backed by major global investors including BlackRock, GMO, UBS, the Royal Bank of Canada, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, and Barclays. (SolarEdge did not respond to +972’s requests for comment.)
SolarEdge’s headquarters in Herzliya, Israel, August 3, 2022. (David Shay/CC BY-SA 4.0)
In Europe, EDF (Électricité de France) stands out as one of the most heavily invested companies in Israel’s solar sector. The French energy giant operates multiple fields across the Naqab with a combined capacity of roughly 160 megawatts, and recently won a tender to construct what is slated to become Israel’s largest solar facility — with a capacity of 300 megawatts — beginning in 2026.
EDF operates both directly and through subsidiaries such as EDF Energies Nouvelles Israel, and partners with firms like Solex. It also maintains a commercial relationship with Shikun & Binui, an Israeli company involved in the construction and management of solar fields across the occupied territories and abroad. (EDF did not respond to +972’s requests for comment.)
The Italian-linked Enerpoint Israel, originally founded as a subsidiary of Enerpoint Italy before becoming independent, is another major contractor in both the Naqab and the West Bank. In partnership with the Israeli company Green Is Us, it built the large Netiv Hagdud industrial solar field — one of the most profitable in the occupied territory. (Enerpoint did not respond to requests for comment, and its website has been unreachable since 2024, redirecting instead to the Israeli company Colmobil Energy.)
German capital is also deeply involved in Israel’s solar infrastructure. Siemens Project Ventures GmbH invested early on in the Arava Power Company, which launched one of Israel’s first large-scale solar fields in 2011 in the Naqab. In response to +972’s inquiry, a spokesperson for Siemens stated that the company sold its stake in Arava in 2014, adding that this disinvestment “was part of our ongoing active portfolio management.” Other German firms including PADCON (Belectric) and Refu Elektronik have directly supplied solar equipment to settlements such as Kalia and Netiv Hagdud. (Neither company responded to +972’s inquiries.)
Beyond these flagship actors, Israel’s solar fields rely on equipment from a wide network of multinational manufacturers. A 2018 report by Who Profits listed several more companies that had invested or supplied solar panel projects in the occupied territories, including First Solar(US), SunTech (China), SMA Solar Technology (Germany), and ABB (Switzerland and Sweden). (Since then, ABB “has divested engagements related to solar project sales in the West Bank,” a spokesperson told +972, adding that the company “does not have a presence in the West Bank.” The other companies mentioned did not respond to requests for comment.)
The result is a sprawling ecosystem of foreign-backed projects powering settlement expansion, including in hotspots of settler violence such as the Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills — areas where “green” infrastructure often precedes or accompanies violent displacement.
What is unfolding in the West Bank is not unique, with precedents in the Global South. Scholars increasingly refer to this phenomenon as “green colonialism”: the use of renewable energy to seize land, displace indigenous communities, and launder the reputations of states and corporations.
Israel has harnessed the international rush toward clean energy to entrench its hold over the West Bank, wooing foreign investors while presenting solar expansion as a symbol of environmental progress. In practice, these companies become direct sponsors of the Israeli colonial project in the West Bank.
In the Jordan Valley, this produces two parallel realities. For residents of Shadmot Mehola, daily life resembles that of Tel Avivians: state-subsidized infrastructure, freedom of movement, safety, civil rights, and access to water and electricity. For Palestinians like Ahmad, life is defined by a constant state of threat. Settler attacks can erupt at any time. Armed intrusions at night are commonplace.
He and his children have become accustomed to the violence, but economic strangulation may ultimately force them from their land. Without pasture, farmland, affordable water, or electricity, families in Al-Farsiya may soon have no choice but to leave. This is what the Israeli authorities, together with the settlers, are counting on.
“We need help,” Ahmad said, “or we will [have to] leave this place. I don’t have a plan for the future.”