Over the last century, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel have massively transformed the interface between human activity in Israel/Palestine and the natural systems on which it depends, from local “improvement” of soils to the rerouting of an entire river away from its basin. Unlike the modes of subsistence on which the Palestinian natives of the country had relied in previous centuries, the economy created by Zionism is rapidly exhausting the ecological substrate requisite for human life. This article interprets Zionism as a colonial undertaking which subsumed Israel/Palestine and its inhabitants under the capitalist mode of production, making it possible to explain local ecological degradation as an outcome of capitalism’s tendency to create a “metabolic rift,” in the words of sociologist John Bellamy Foster. After sketching the human ecology of Palestine prior to Zionist settlement, I describe the period preceding the establishment of the state, when Zionist organizations bought land on the market, while most fellahin and Bedouin managed to retain their tenure. In the first decades following the Nakba, the state and the “labor settlement movement” took over the lion’s share of farmland and undertook great ecological transformations, like the National Water Carrier, which destroyed indigenous ecosystems. Beginning in the 1970s, the main economic function of rural land shifted from a factor of production to a commodity in itself, as suburbanization replaced farming as the central strategy for gaining control of agrarian spaces. Drawing on the ample literature on land and ecology in Israel/Palestine, this article seeks to point out the analytical and political weakness of approaches which locate responsibility for the ecological crisis with an abstract and ahistorical “Anthropos.” Alternatively, I suggest, colonial capitalism should be identified as the social formation whose existence is undermining the possibility of continued human life in this country.