Abstract:
In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.