
© California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection/Cal Fire/FLICKRThe Palisades Fire that started in the City of Los Angeles • January 2025
The fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease:
a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, and expansion over existence.For the last few days, I have stared at my phone watching houses, history, and memories burn. But this time, it wasn't Gaza.
I was watching the Palisades burn. The hills are alive with fire, a haunting echo of another inferno raging thousands of miles away. For fifteen months, I've witnessed Gaza's land, and people, burn through screens and headlines, and now as I watch the skies over an American city fill with smoke,
the distances between these catastrophes collapse into a single, searing truth: these flames speak the same language of destruction - colonialism.The fire consuming the Palisades isn't just a California wildfire -
it's a mirror reflecting a global crisis of connected catastrophes. When I close my eyes, the images blur together: hills ablaze in California, olive groves burning in Gaza and historic Palestine, horizons choked with smoke that knows no borders.
Comment: More on love from Paul to the Corinthians: