As fires burn the planet, settler-colonialism looks the same everywhere

Reflections on the California fires, eucalyptus wildfires in Palestine and the use of controlled burns in traditional agricultural practices.

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Above: US Army soldiers burning date palm trees in Iraq, 2000s.

Fires are raging in California right now, with no way to tame the fire. Helpless responders can only wait until the Santa Ana winds die down. Tens of thousands of acres have already been burned down by the fire. Entire town blocks have been reduced to ashes by the flames. Several deaths have been confirmed as people scramble to brave the coming flames and evacuate their houses. This is all happening right now.

When ‘Israelis’ left Europe to settle into Palestine in 1948, they brought with them European plants to remind them of ‘home’ — as they were fleeing this home they said did not accept them.

The second purpose was to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree that the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in ‘Israel’ as the Jewish Tree (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonizing of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually end up carving a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — think of pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine first and foremost concealed the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba, making it impossible for residents to return or even remember their history.

Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. But legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, the common settler response — who thinks of everything as something waiting to be exploited — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us adorning the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone had to till the land, someone had to plant the seeds, someone had to water the sprouts, and someone had to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so that we can eat them.

We thus think of land in the abstract. We think, naturally, that there will always be food on the shelves waiting for us, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and still today for a vast portion of the world) this was not the case. It became instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood. [PDF study]

This is all I can readily tell you about this practice. Some ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from the British and is painted through their worldview. Then, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of his destructive practices.

By definition, a system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. It’s not true that settlers “made the desert green.” Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean throughout history. Even today, the only use ‘Israelis’ have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wishes to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, colonial landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not show up on any maps (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this is not entirely a mystery, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up all the water they find and this can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities, forcing them to eventually abandon their homes. In parallel, eucalyptus trees have been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the tree explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this is directly imputable to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Imported Mexican Fan palm trees exploding in Los Angeles, California, January 2025. Only the Californian fan palm tree is native to the area.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. The settler is not interested in cultivating olives for himself; he prefers to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain and becoming the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world in the process. The settler state turns into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

At the same time, fire officials in Palisades, California reported that fire hydrants had little water coming out of them when they tried to use them just the other day to fight the wildfires.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces his power and ensures that the native population will never be a problem for them, in many different ways. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when they do, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” Because to say otherwise would mean to recognize that this land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they must be uprooted and severed from the land they own so that they can make no more claims to it — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership, at least partly, and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in this land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and simply how to survive here.

A wigwam, a traditional Massachusett dwelling, also used by other tribes on the eastern coast of North America. A wigwam could be used for generations and be made at any size to house several families.

In Salem too did the settlers drain the swamps that they wanted to build houses and industry on, despite the Naumkeag living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for hundreds of years because they understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills formed not part of the landscape that one had to learn to live alongside of, but another place to destroy, flatten and pave over to make more of the same — and in fact this rocky and marshy land west of Salem Village formed the basis of the Witch Trials come 1692.

Native Americans have long used controlled fires to help with agriculture. When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness: huge forests and marshes greeted them.

But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as bread baskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that they were able to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought drying out this vast vegetation and starting wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wondering how much we must have messed up that it has come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are being kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in this system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmons indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the US government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams so we can dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls so we can retain more water away when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built. Build…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres as they pleased.

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