all jokes aside. this is what is expected in times of social, political, and ecological unrest. right wing governments around the world, worsening economic prospects, upward mobility less and less attainable — these are the classic conditions that breed antisemitism. but this (the accusation that israel is setting fires in argentina) is the clearest example i’ve yet seen of climate change fueling it. the mechanism here is simple, i think. people see something unusual, a change that doesn’t fit the pattern — in this case, worse wildfires than usual — and when people don’t have an easy immediate explanation they turn to blame the jews.

of course the immediate explanation is climate change, but maybe that’s too abstracted, and people need something that feels more concrete — if the fault is the amorphous trajectory of the agricultural revolution and then industrial revolution and the structures that that encourage humanity’s consumerism and overconsumption, as egged on by capitalism and the power granted to those who’ve acquired capital, that’s too diffuse and it also implicates them. it’s an easier, cleaner-feeling anger to just point to a single group of people or a single country and decide they’re the evil villains of the world. and if the ideas you trade in lead to some of their deaths, well, you already decided they deserve to die. the worse pain you’re in, the more you hate them, and the less you can listen.