Wildfires and Wild Accusations: Blaming Israel for the LA Fires

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By | Jan 16, 2025

In the midst of the devastating wildfires that have been burning in Los Angeles County since January 7, social media, too, has been ablaze—with anti-Israel rhetoric. Some pro-Palestine organizations, activists and others have been posting on X, TikTok and Instagram, claiming that Israel is to blame for the LA wildfires. They allege that the war in Gaza has worsened climate change, charge that U.S. tax dollars allocated to Israel are somehow being taken away from fire victims, and evoke a power that’s perhaps even bigger than the constantly invoked “global elite”: “karma.” 

On January 8, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, the City University of New York School of Law graduate who made headlines in May 2023 for her anti-Israel commencement speech, wrote on X that “dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on Gaza, turning it into a blazing inferno, has consequences that extend beyond our moral condemnation—there are climate consequences that will find us all.” The post garnered over a thousand likes and over 450 retweets. (This is the same person who said, in a May 29, 2024, post commenting on a video of the Israeli embassy in Mexico City being set on fire by pro-Palestine demonstrators, that “a single spark can light a prairie fire, may this be the spark.”) 

Multiple opinion articles have since attempted to connect the Israel-Hamas war and Southern California’s wildfires. “From Gaza to California: the flames that connect us all” published on Mondoweiss (an independent news site focusing on Israel/Palestine and related U.S. foreign policy), asserts that the bombings in Gaza contribute to rising sea levels, warming temperatures and the wildfires threatening California. Similarly, Aaron Kirshenbaum’s “The Fires in Gaza are the Fires in LA,” published by the woman-led anti-war organization Code Pink, claims that “For 15 months, the U.S.-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell.” These pieces cite a study published by the Social Science Research Network which found that emissions from the Israel-Hamas conflict have notable environmental effects. “This study is only a snapshot of the larger military boot print of war…a partial picture of the massive carbon emissions and wider toxic pollutants that will remain long after the fighting is over,” Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and coauthor of the research told The Guardian. The study, which was downloaded more than 4,500 times, focuses solely on the environmental impact of the Israel-Hamas conflict without addressing the broader scope of global environmental consequences from all warfare.

Code Pink also took to Instagram to imply the fires were some kind of karmic retribution: “When U.S. taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home.” Over six thousand people liked the post. After facing criticism and being accused of antisemitism by Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY), The Times of Israel, JNS and The New York Sun, Code Pink posted another video claiming that “anti-Palestinian groups really don’t want people making the connections between the U.S. [and] Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the climate crisis.”

Continuing the theme of karmic payback, another post on X by @Kashurkongposh read, “Hello America. this is what u get for, fueling conflict, Supporting & supplying weapons to Israel to bomb Gaza, Los Angeles has been wiped off the map, reduced to ashes due to the massive wildfires. Doesn’t it look like Gaza. Devine action, Karma on schedule.”

While the Los Angeles Fire Department is funded primarily by the city of LA, military aid to Israel comes from the U.S. federal government. Yair Rosenberg, writing in The Atlantic, cautioned against scapegoating foreign powers like Israel for local issues such as wildfires, highlighting the fact that, despite the U.S. government’s military aid to Israel, California remains one of the wealthiest states globally, with a strong economy and tax revenue base. Rosenberg notes that claims about U.S. military aid being a root cause of California’s emergency preparedness failures oversimplify the situation: “Simply put, the federal government using a fraction of a percent of its $6.8 trillion budget for Ukraine and Israel is not why one of the richest state governments in the country was unprepared to deal with a very plausible emergency.”

There are also people peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories connecting individual Jewish Americans to the LA County wildfires. More Perfect Union, a progressive media and activism organization, in an Instagram post with more than 47 thousand likes, insinuated that Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the Jewish owners of the multi-billion-dollar Wonderful Co. (which markets brands such as Wonderful Pistachios and Fiji Water) own “a massive share of the state’s water system,” which the post claimed wasn’t going toward fighting the wildfire. Wonderful Co. does have a majority stake in a San Joaquin Valley water bank, but Politifact has posted that these allegations are false, writing, “The claim that the Resnicks own nearly all—or even a large portion—of California’s water is a massive exaggeration.”

One particularly antisemitic comment from a now-deleted X account, @JediNoticer, went so far as to say that Zionism was the cause of the LA fires. “LA had the second highest population [of] Jews in the world and it’s no wonder they turned it into a shithole,” he wrote, adding, “The cradle of Marxism/Wokism. They have occupied our government. It’s not Democrats versus Republicans. It’s Americans versus Zionists.” The post included images of senior FEMA officials who are Jewish.

These inflammatory posts and opinions reflect the complex and often volatile nature of political discourse in the digital age, where global conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war are sometimes used to justify or explain local tragedies, such as the LA wildfires or the New Orleans attack on January 1, 2025. These assertions, however, distract from a nuanced understanding of both the wildfires and broader geopolitical issues. 

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