What does Gaza have to do with the Los Angeles fires?

The insanity displayed by the pro-Hamas crowd never ceases to amaze. But the latest salvo feels extreme even by the extremist standards that have come to define the global political climate post-October 7. According to some of the most vocal online anti-Zionists, the raging inferno now overwhelming much of Los Angeles is not the result of government neglect or poor urban planning or even climate change. No, the thousands of homes and tens of thousands of acres now destroyed across Southern California are the handiwork of Jews and Zionists and Israel. 

There are many streams leading to this nonsensical conclusion — all rooted in time-worn tropes of nefarious Jewish alliances and global domination. And most — as evidenced by a post referencing the fires on X by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine declaring “on our small planet all injustices are connected” — betray the misguided intersectionality and debased purple thinking.

Take the Instagram account CodePink, run by self-described “transnational feminists for peace.” In a post from Wednesday, the group spoke about how desperate folks in California are being “evacuated” just like people in Gaza have been “evacuated for the past fifteen months.” It’s a clever linking of verbs and verbiage, except that Californians are being evacuated because of raging fires, not because their leadership invades neighboring states and rapes and murders its citizens. The same week, CodePink posted another IG missive in which they declared the “Climate catastrophe is cased by war” and “US war & genocide is driving the climate crisis.” 

Then there’s Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a blogger and Instagrammer often found in posh global hot-spots, who wrote on his Substack this week about “The Inferno of Capitalist Priorities” and their linkages “From Palestine to Los Angeles.” Digging deep into his well of speciousness and bluster, Eldin writes, “The images of a burning California, in many ways mirrors the devastation in Gaza, where bombs rain down, turning homes into rubble, erasing entire families, neighborhoods and releasing obscene plumes of carbon into the air.” Like the CodePink gals, Eldin is working hard to link completely different disasters in completely different parts of the world with completely different causes, outcomes and solutions. 

He compares increased US funding of Israel to Los Angeles’s increased funding for the police — never mind that Israel is fighting an existential battle on nearly all of its fronts or that Los Angeles (like so much of urban America) is mired in a crime crisis fueled by homelessness and drug addiction. Both the Gaza and California “infernos exposes a failing system hellbent on prioritizing capitalist and colonial interests, and exploitative extractive policies that value profit over people, endangering us all.”

Eldin’s words reveal an extreme vein of intersectionality that is at once desperate, deranged and dangerous. Desperate because it exposes the sheer obsessiveness of anti-Zionists and their intractable insistence on viewing everything — politics, culture, the climate — through the lens of Israel. Deranged because how else would you describe the manufactured conjoining of geopolitical events that have literally nothing in common. And dangerous because such relentless mindlessness is already leading to craven and potentially punitive conclusion.

A post on Instagram by the MorePerfectUnion (a “nonprofit newsroom”) on Wednesday detailed — selectively, of course — the property and water rights portfolio of grand-scale agricultural couple Stewart and Lydia Resnick, who are the largest farm-owning family in California. The couple also appear to control, in some form, vast amounts of the state’s water system. Oh, and they’re also Jewish and ardent Zionists. 

The Instagram post didn’t explicitly align the Resnick’s business activities with their ethnic identity — but they didn’t have to. Their audience knew. The comments are full of anti-Zionist vitriol. And just like calls for Israel to withdraw from Gaza and “decolonize” Palestine, the demands that the Resnick’s “return California’s water” will inevitably be forthcoming. They may already be taking place — as might acts of arson perpetrated by “globalize the intifada” types hellbent on adding an added layer of chaos to the existing unimaginable chaos. 

More than a year after Hamas’s October 7 attack — with thousands of Palestinians dead and Gaza mostly flattened — the pro-Palestinian crowd should have learned by now that logic-less rhetoric serves no one, particularly folks in Gaza. Indeed, the only ones benefiting from connecting Palestine with Pacific Palisades are self-indulgent activist-narcissists like Eldin, who endlessly milk the lucrative anti-Zionist gravy train without ever actually setting foot in Gaza (perhaps because Eldin is worried the Gazans would kill him for being gay).

Nearly everyone now agrees that Israel’s war in Gaza should end. But equating fires along the Pacific for battles along the Mediterranean simply distracts from the real causes of the war and the real solutions required for its conclusion. Most notably, an end to Hamas weaponry, militarism and terror. End Hamas — and you end the war and end the damage it is doing to the environment. That’s almost certainly unlikely to end the suffering in California — but it will help end it in Gaza.