American website: Fires in California and Gaza are symptoms of one disease

The American website Mondoweiss published an article in which its author compared the California fires to the raging hell in the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli aggression, drawing some lessons and morals.

The American writer of Palestinian origin, Ahmed Ibsis, began his article by saying that for 15 months he had watched - via television screens, smartphones and news headlines - the land of Gaza and its people burning.

He added that he is now watching an American city, Los Angeles, with tongues of smoke covering its sky, noting that despite the distance between these two disasters, one "painful" fact links them together, which is that these fires speak the same language of destruction.

Global crisis

He considered that the fires devouring the neighborhood of celebrities and the wealthy in the Pacific Palisades area are not just a huge fire in California, but a mirror that reflects a global crisis of interconnected disasters.

He said that when he closes his eyes, the images seem intertwined: there are hills burning in California, olive groves burning in Gaza and historic Palestine, and horizons choking with smoke that knows no borders.

Israel and America

Ipses pointed out that research conducted by Lancaster University in Britain revealed that Israel released more greenhouse gases during the first 60 days of its aggression on Gaza, which followed October 7, than 20 countries emit in a whole year.

Israel - and this is still the author's story - dropped about 25,000 tons of bombs on Gaza in October 2023, which led to the emission of greenhouse gases equivalent to burning 150,000 tons of coal.

In another comparison, Ipses noted that US cargo planes delivering weapons to Israel consumed 50 million litres of jet fuel by December, spewing 133,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into our collective atmosphere – more than the entire nation of Grenada emits annually.

Enemies of the environment

However, the writer does not believe that this catastrophe began with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, noting that the Palestinians have always worked, coexisted with and preserved their environment, and cultivated a variety of crops from watermelons to olives, which “are an essential part of Palestinian culture and identity.”

According to the data provided by the author, since 1967, Israel has systematically uprooted 2.5 million trees in the occupied Palestinian territories, including nearly one million olive trees, which were a primary source of food and income for many Palestinians.

He said that Israel had replaced these trees with imported European plants, in a move that perhaps reflected its European roots, which had led to environmental fragmentation, desertification, land degradation and soil erosion, all of which affected the entire region's ability to adapt to the climate.

Adding the cost of the war on infrastructure—destroying tunnels, walls and military installations—the tally rises to 450,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, more than the annual emissions of 33 countries.

Destruction of water sources

According to the article, satellite images show a barren land that was once lush gardens. After the Israeli army destroyed 70% of the water wells in northern Gaza and demolished thousands of greenhouses, the fertile soil turned toxic. The Israeli aggression also destroyed 80% of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The "bitter" irony, Ipses says, is that the mayor of Los Angeles cut $17.6 million from fire departments' budgets while California sent $610 million in taxpayer money to Israel.

The writer revealed that the Los Angeles-based food and beverage company Wonderful, which controls nearly 60% of California’s water, is pumping millions of dollars into supporting Israel’s encroachment on Palestinian land, which has turned the Gaza scene into an environmental disaster.

To make matters worse, 130,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage are pouring into the Mediterranean every day, not because the Palestinians chose this destruction, as the article states, but because Israeli violence has shattered their infrastructure and their ability to care for their land as they have done for countless generations.

One disease

Ipses believes that the fires in Gaza and Los Angeles are just symptoms of a single disease: a global system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, and expansion over survival.

He concluded that this was the “legacy” of a worldview that sought to silence the voices of indigenous people who understood what we must now learn, that “the wounds of the Earth are our wounds.”

Source: American Press