Is environmental injustice so widespread, and are its impacts so damaging, that it can be understood as ‘a totalitarianism of our time’? Could law—local, national, and international—be deployed to challenge environmental injustice if we accepted that communities are effectively “banish[ed]” (Arendt 1951) from society when incapacitating health impacts negate community members’ abilities to participate in public life? These questions draw on works of political theory, particularly Hannah Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, to develop a novel approach to understanding environmental injustice and the climate crisis in relation to citizenship, statelessness, de facto statelessness, and critiques about the international human rights regime. In this paper, I develop a framework to analyze deficiencies regarding local and international policies on environmental injustice and racism. Focusing on Palestine, I examine how environmental injustice is deployed to perpetuate and intensify the conditions of occupation and blockade. Regarding the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, environmental injustice is weaponized—including water access denial, land grabbing, and more—to unjustly deny Palestinian statehood. Regarding Iraq, I develop the original concept of ‘toxic saturation’ to examine how health destruction dominates the lives of civilians left behind in the toxins of war in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion and occupation. I address how environmental injustice can be so severe that it strips people of their “right to have rights” (Arendt 1951) and produces conditions of de facto statelessness in which communities who technically retain citizenship are, in reality, left rightless and without access to the human rights protections to which they are legally entitled. My research suggests that contemporary manifestations of environmental injustice are often examples of the “continuing effects” (Anghie 2004) of excluding certain groups from sovereign status—excluding them from citizenship, and, by extension, from international law. Environmental injustice’s dominance in marginalized communities is driven by legacies of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid. Lastly, I draw transnational connections between environmental injustice in the MENA region and communities affected by legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racism in the US, such as in Indigenous communities and in “Cancer Alley.” Where do ‘toxic saturation’ and climate vulnerability intersect? How do these overlapping forms of local and global “slow violence” render human rights meaningless in the face of unjust colonial pasts, presents, and futures? I draw from research in the Palestinian West Bank and at COP27 in Egypt. Works by Anghie, Arendt, Antoon, Césaire, Erakat, Alatout, Selby and others are analyzed.