From Gaza to California

The fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people and expansion over existence. This is the legacy of a worldview that has sought to silence indigenous people who understood what the so-called civilised people must learn now that the earth’s wounds are their own. The Californian flames, in reality, speak the language of destruction–colonial exploitation of people and nature. At the time of writing death toll rose to 24 while the fire fighters were able to contain only 11 percent of fires in Palisades—the most affected area.

The fire consuming America’s Palisades isn’t just a California wildfire–it’s a mirror reflecting a global crisis of connected catastrophes. Hills ablaze in California, olive groves burning in Gaza and historic Palestine, horizons choked with smoke that knows no borders. In just the first sixty days following October 7, the military response in Gaza reportedly generated more planet-warming gases than twenty climate-vulnerable nations emit in an entire year. In a single month–October 2023–Israel dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, releasing climate-warming gases equivalent to burning 150,000 tonnes of coal. American cargo flights delivering weapons consumed 50 million litres of aviation fuel by December, spewing 133,000 tonnes of CO2 into the shared atmosphere–more than the entire nation of Grenada emits annually.

But this environmental catastrophe didn’t begin with the current Israel-Hamas war. Since 1967, Israel is said to have systematically uprooted at least 2.5 million trees in the occupied Palestinian territory, including nearly one million olive trees, which were a primary source of food and income for many Palestinians. Israel replaced these trees with imported European vegetation, perhaps reflecting their own European roots. This destruction has led to habitat fragmentation, desertification, land degradation, and soil erosion that affect the entire region’s climate resilience.

When the climate cost of war infrastructure is included–the tunnels, the walls, the military installations–the total rises to 450,000 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent, exceeding the annual emissions of 33 countries. Each bomb that falls on Gaza sends ripples through humankind’s collective future, its impact felt in rising seas, warming temperatures, and yes, in the fires that now threaten California’s hills. For all practical purposes the world is moving in dangerous territory–perhaps more quickly than previously thought.

Earth’s average temperature climbed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024. Climate scientists announced the breach recently, signaling that the world has failed, at least temporarily, to avoid crossing the threshold set by the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 to avert the worst impacts of global warming. Now 2024 is confirmed the hottest ever year. It’s a physical reality. With Trump in the White House the Paris agreement is likely to get buried.

Ironically, the Wonderful Company, controlling nearly 60% of California’s water through the Resnick family, pumps millions into supporting the very territorial expansion that has turned Gaza’s landscape into an environmental catastrophe. They are funding the flames that will eventually reach their own doorsteps.

The environmental wounds in Gaza will not heal easily. The reconstruction of Gaza’s 100,000 damaged buildings, as per conservative estimates, may generate 30 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases–equivalent to New Zealand’s annual emissions and higher than 135 other countries, including Sri Lanka and Lebanon. This is a climate debt people all must pay, a fire all must fight.

The flames consuming Los Angeles carry echoes of Gaza’s suffering: homes turned to ash, landscapes transformed, lives upended. But they carry something else too–an urgent warning about the humankind’s shared fate. When they permit the bombing of Gaza’s aquifers and the poisoning of its soil, they accelerate the climate crisis that now sends California up in flames.

 [Contributed] 12-01-2025