The fire came in late April of 2025. That’s how they always
start these stories, don’t they? Like some goddamn fairy tale. Once upon a
time, in a faraway land. But this ain’t no fairy tale, friend. This is
Jerusalem, and Jerusalem’s burning.
You want to know the truth about why the hills west of
Jerusalem light up like the Fourth of July every couple years? Why the skies
over the Holy Land turn the color of a three-day-old bruise? Buckle up. I’m
gonna tell you a ghost story—only in this one, the ghosts are real, and they’re
buried under a million pine trees.
***
The temperature that April hit triple digits, the kind of
heat that makes the air shimmer like bad reception on an old TV set. Hot enough
to make even the devil sweat. The winds blew hard and steady, like God Himself
was stoking the flames with His divine breath.
I remember standing on my balcony in Tel Aviv, watching the
smoke rise over the highway to Jerusalem. Thick and gray, twisting up into the
sky like the souls of the damned reaching for heaven. The news was calling it “the
largest in Israel’s history,” but that’s what they always say, isn’t it? Short
memories, these media types.
Because I remember the Carmel fire in 2010. We all do.
Forty-four lives snuffed out because some kid couldn’t properly put out his
hookah. Twelve thousand hectares of forest—gone. And the one in 2016? Worse.
Thirty-two thousand hectares across the country turned to ash and cinder.
But there’s something the newsreaders don’t tell you when
they’re standing there with their perfect hair, pointing at maps with those
solemn faces they practice in the mirror. They don’t tell you about the why.
You see, these aren’t just fires. They’re ghosts coming back
to haunt us. They’re history’s revenge, served piping hot.
***
Let me take you back a ways, back to when the first Zionist
pioneers laid eyes on Palestine. In their letters home, they described it as “bleak,”
“disgusting,” “barren.” A neglected wasteland waiting for salvation.
Now, I’m not one to call folks liars, but truth’s got a
funny way of bending when you need it to. Those pioneers needed this land to be
empty—figuratively and literally. They needed it to be a blank canvas for their
dreams.
Enter the Jewish National Fund, established in 1901 with all
the pomp and circumstance of a royal coronation. Their mission? To buy up land
in Palestine and transform it into the “eternal property of the Jewish people.”
Noble enough, I suppose. We all want a place to call home.
But what happened next is where our ghost story really
begins.
See, when you’re building a nation from scratch, you’ve got
to look the part. And what looks more like home to a bunch of European
immigrants than good old-fashioned pine forests? That’s right—they started
planting trees. Millions of them. By 1935, they’d stuck 1.7 million saplings
into Palestinian soil.
The tree of choice? Pinus halepensis—the Aleppo pine,
sometimes called the Jerusalem pine, though there ain’t nothing Jerusalem about
it. Fast-growing, drought-resistant, and—here’s the kicker—European enough to
make homesick settlers feel like they never left the old country.
I can see them now, those early planters, backs bent under
the Middle Eastern sun, thinking they were doing God’s work. Making the desert
bloom. Bringing life to a dead land. Except the land wasn’t dead. It was just
different. Mediterranean, not European. Olive groves, not pine forests.
But aesthetics was only part of the equation, my friend.
Only part of it.
***
After 1948—after what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the
catastrophe—those pine trees took on a new and darker purpose.
Imagine, if you will, a village. Stone houses clustered
around a well. Ancient olive trees, some older than America itself, their
gnarled trunks twisted by centuries of sun and wind. People living, loving,
dying. A history as deep as the roots of those olive trees.
Now imagine that village empty. The people gone—fled or
forced out, doesn’t matter which version of history you subscribe to. Houses
crumbling. And then imagine bulldozers coming in, knocking down what remains,
and an army of planters following behind, sticking pine saplings into the
freshly disturbed earth.
Fast forward fifty years, and what do you have? A lovely
pine forest. Maybe with a sign saying “British Park” or “Canada Park.” No trace
of what came before. The perfect cover-up. Mother Nature as accessory after the
fact.
Over 500 Palestinian villages disappeared this way. Erased.
Not just from the map, but from the landscape itself.
If you listen closely in these forests, on nights when the
wind blows just right, some say you can hear the whispers of the displaced. The
ghosts of memories buried under pine needles and political expediency.
The olive and the pine. Two trees, two peoples, two visions
for the same patch of earth.
The olive: ancient, enduring, native. Its roots go deep,
holding fast to the soil through drought and storm. Fire-resistant, its silver
leaves shimmering in the Mediterranean sun for thousands of years.
The pine: fast-growing, aggressive, foreign. It doesn’t sink
roots—it spreads them wide across the surface, choking out competition. And it
burns, oh how it burns. Loaded with resin, dropping dry needles year after
year, building up a tinderbox on the forest floor, just waiting for a spark.
Here’s the cosmic irony that keeps me up at night: those
pines, planted to “redeem” the land, to stake a claim, to erase the past—they’re
like time bombs. Biological Molotov cocktails planted across the landscape,
just waiting for the right combination of heat, wind, and human stupidity to
explode.
The Aleppo pine’s got this thing called serotiny—its cones
stay closed until a fire comes along. Then, in the heat of the flames, they pop
open and spread their seeds. The tree literally needs fire to reproduce. It’s
evolved to burn. Think about that for a minute. The very mechanism of its
survival is destruction.
***
So when I stood on my balcony in Tel Aviv, watching
Jerusalem burn in the distance, I wasn’t just seeing another forest fire. I was
watching history come full circle.
Those flames licking at the sky weren’t just consuming
trees. They were consuming choices made a century ago by men who never stopped
to think that maybe—just maybe—nature doesn’t give a damn about your politics.
That maybe when you try to erase the past, it finds ways to come back and bite
you in the ass.
Climate change? Sure, that’s part of it. Humans being
careless with cigarettes and campfires? That too. But the real story, the one
they don’t tell you on the evening news, is that Israel’s vulnerability to
these massive fires was built into the landscape itself, tree by tree, forest
by forest, choice by choice.
The ghosts of those 500 villages, buried under pine needles
and political convenience, are getting their revenge in the only way they
can—by burning. The land itself rejecting a vision imposed upon it.
I can see them now, the JNF planters of today, rushing to
replant after each fire. More pines, more of the same. Like a man who keeps
buying the same lottery ticket, expecting different results. The definition of
insanity, according to Einstein, who’d probably have something profound to say
about this whole mess if he were around.
But here’s the thing about ghosts—they don’t just go away
because you ignore them. They linger. They wait. And sometimes, when the
conditions are just right, they burn with a fire hot enough to melt away the
comfortable lies we tell ourselves about how we came to be where we are.
As I watched Jerusalem burn that day in 2025, I couldn’t
help but wonder: How many times will this story have to repeat itself before we
learn?
How many fires will it take before we understand that you
can’t plant a European dream in Middle Eastern soil and expect it not to catch
fire?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in that hot, dry wind from
the east. And it smells like smoke and pine resin and the ghosts of olive trees
long gone.
Sometimes, the dead do come back.
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