While Israelis and Palestinians fight, climate change threatens the land
A century ago, Egyptian explorer Ahmed Hassanein found pictures of animals carved in rock in the depth of the Libyan desert. “There are lions, giraffes, ostriches, and all kinds of gazelles,” he recorded. It was evidence that the surrounding area had once been verdant savanna. A prehistoric shift in climate, from natural causes, had made the land unlivable for beasts and humans.
I thought about that desolate place recently as I looked at the pale splotch of the sun behind clouds of smoke from a forest fire west of Jerusalem. I imagined explorers coming here in 500 years from temperate Greenland or Antarctica, looking at the desolate hills of the once-fertile land. In place of carvings of giraffes, they may find inscriptions in Hebrew and Arabic, commemorating victims of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, which ended when the land itself died.
The climate is shifting, this time because of human negligence.
In December 2010, when a huge forest fire raged through the Carmel range above Haifa, it seemed like a unique disaster. Then, in November 2016, came major blazes both in the Haifa area and the hills near Jerusalem. A wave of fires in 2019 was followed by another in 2020, and then by this month’s firestorm outside Jerusalem. What was unique has become annual.
As usual, allegations of arson followed the latest blaze. Police and firefighters reportedly asked the Shin Bet security service to join the investigation, given suspicion of “nationalist motives” — meaning Palestinian terror. Palestinians, meanwhile, pointed to photos of the denuded hillsides. The fires, they said, revealed agricultural terraces of pre-1948 Palestinian villages, which had been hidden by Israeli forestation. Both reactions neatly fit the disaster into the familiar frame of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I don’t make light of that conflict, or of the complicated history of 1948. But attention is a limited resource, and both Israelis and Palestinians should be devoting much of our attention to whether any of us will be able to live here in 2048. [Continue reading…]