From Appalachia to Palestine, our future is connected
The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected but they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization and refusal to work toward a just global future.
October 16, 2024
MONDOWEISS
MONDOWEISS
US-70 in Burke County, North Carolina following Hurricane Helene, on September 27, 2024. (Photo: North Carolina Department of Transportation/Flickr)
On Thursday, September 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall along the Florida Gulf Coast. Before making landfall, rain had already begun in Southern Appalachia, a tortuous and mountainous region full of streams, rivers, and dammed reservoirs. Flooding began that evening. By late Friday, over a foot of rain fell across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rivers overflowed, inundating low-lying areas. The Swannanoa River, which flows past my home in Asheville, NC, crested at 26.10 feet, 6 feet above the all-time record and 16 feet above flood stage. The town of Chimney Rock, NC, was almost completely wiped out. Electricity, cell phone service, and access to clean drinking water and food are only now returning to pre-storm levels. Interstates 26 and 40 were damaged and stretches of them still remain closed. While the flood waters have receded, cleanup has begun, and aid is arriving, it will take months to pick up the pieces.
There was no way to predict this level of devastation in Southern Appalachia. Helene has been called a 1-in-1000-year event. At over 2,100 feet above sea level and nearly 300 miles inland, Asheville, NC, is not exactly what one would call hurricane country. While the region is used to remnants of storms and the rain and flooding that come with them, this is abnormal. Asheville has even been called a climate change haven. But that is becoming increasingly less true.
While residents in Appalachia are suffering the worst aspects of our climate future, on the other side of the world, the United States continues to provide military and financial aid to Israel as it wages bombing campaigns on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.
In August, the United States agreed to send Israel $3.5 billion to spend on weapons; in September, this aid package was upped to $8.7 billion. This is on top of the billions of dollars in aid Israel receives annually from the United States, to say nothing of the intelligence and military aid it receives from other allies. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, and now thousands of Lebanese killed. Nearly 2 million Gazans and over 1 million Lebanese citizens, nearly 1/5 of the country’s population, have been displaced. While Israel and the United States submit that their targets are Hamas and Hezbollah and they are carrying out strategic strikes, such claims given the civilian causality toll and physical destruction of whole city blocks are an insult to basic human intelligence.
Likewise, ghastly for a country that claims to stand up for the rights of its own citizens, the United States has remained silent as Israel targets Americans. In addition to Palestinian-Americans killed or stranded in Palestine, such as Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, the American Embassy in Beirut announced on September 27 that it was not evacuating U.S. Nationals and that they should seek their own way out. U.S. citizens are stranded in Beirut amid airstrikes unless they can afford inflated ticket prices.
The United States putting its imperial interests and those of Israel above the welfare of its own citizens is nothing new. In 2022, an IDF sniper killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al-Jazeera Reporter in Jenin, in the West Bank; and in 2003, Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza. In both cases, no one was held liable. We can go back as far as 1967, when, during the Six-Day War, Israel shelled the USS Liberty, killing 34 U.S. service members; in the aftermath, the event was covered up by Israel and the United States.
The United States’s commitment to Israel’s wars is likewise a climate disaster that facilitates intensified storms like Hurricane Helene. Israel’s bombing campaign will be one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in 2024. Nearly half of its emissions come from arms supply flights from the United States. Similarly, the U.S. military emits more carbon than many industrialized nations. Beyond the catastrophic damage to civilian infrastructure and farmland in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere victim to America’s “War on Terror,” U.S. militarism and Israel’s wars will have severe impacts on the planet’s climate, especially as it appears that they show no signs of slowing; if anything, they will only intensify.
Also at issue is the United States’s commitment to war over the welfare of its residents. Beyond the lack of universal healthcare, education, paid parental leave, and the like, the country’s infrastructure has been in a dire state for decades, which only exacerbates how climate change rocks communities in Southern Appalachia and beyond. According to the 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, the country’s infrastructure was rated as a D+. The same agency estimated, seven years ago, that we must increase annual infrastructure investment by 2.5% to 3.5% of U.S. GDP by 2025. While the estimated $1.2 trillion tied to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a step in the right direction, it falls far short and is rather unimpressive when we consider that the Pentagon’s budget is $849.8 billion for the 2025 fiscal year alone. Such exorbitant spending on the military, which hasn’t passed an audit in six years, compared to what we invest in the country’s physical plant is as breathtaking as it is reckless.
We are also seeing militarization and the U.S.’s relationship with Israel turn inward. Since the late 1970s, police budgets in the U.S. have increased by a staggering 189%. Relatedly, the IDF trains U.S. police officers; and the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems has plans to use Artificial Intelligence along the U.S.-Mexican border. The rollout of Cop Cities across the United States also speaks to a commitment to increased domestic policing. And these Cop Cities are also ecological disasters; the Cop City near Atlanta requires the destruction of 171 acres of forestland in Georgia, trees that pump oxygen into the air and absorb rainwater. Like in Appalachia, Atlanta saw widespread flooding from Helene. Deforestation will only make matters worse.
As the climate warms, human populations will continue to see their environments deteriorate, which fuels migration and will drive further crackdowns from armed forces and militarized police agencies at home and along borders. Climate change likewise exacerbates income and wealth inequality. Beyond migration, the border crisis, and the militarization of police, the U.S. military is one of the single largest beneficiaries of inequality. Because there is no draft, the United States relies on voluntary enlistment. While military recruitment is currently at all-time lows due to minimal confidence in the military’s aims and objectives, nearly half of all servicemembers come from poor areas of the rural South. And rural schools partner with the military to recruit poor students. One truly wonders what voluntary enlistment means in such a context. As an educator in Western North Carolina, I teach a lot of veterans, who are often some of the hardest working and most dedicated students; but the refrain is often the same: the military was an escape from poverty or how to pay for college. Sadly, this does not always work out, as veterans experience lower college graduation rates, and higher homelessness and suicide rates than the general population. As the U.S. feels compelled to send more troops to the Middle East, this cycle will only continue.
The United States is committed to policing the world and supporting Israel while those who live within its borders grapple with rampant inequality. This speaks to an imperial arrogance that lives on futurity. It promises us democracy, prosperity, and security for all in a distant golden age that will come one day. Eventually, America will save the world, one one-ton bomb at a time.
But such an empire has no future. With the planet warming at record rates, Israel’s U.S.-backed bellicosity destabilizing the Middle East, and the lack of a collective will to fix the problems that we face, the dream of American empire is at a dead end. For the moment, we are running toward catastrophe and those with the ability to stop it seem hellbent on accelerating it. Our only hope is that we realize soon that our only future is the one we build together.
Robert Clines (he/him) is Associate Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Global Black Studies and International Studies at Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, NC. He has published widely on antisemitism, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia in the premodern Mediterranean.
On Thursday, September 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall along the Florida Gulf Coast. Before making landfall, rain had already begun in Southern Appalachia, a tortuous and mountainous region full of streams, rivers, and dammed reservoirs. Flooding began that evening. By late Friday, over a foot of rain fell across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rivers overflowed, inundating low-lying areas. The Swannanoa River, which flows past my home in Asheville, NC, crested at 26.10 feet, 6 feet above the all-time record and 16 feet above flood stage. The town of Chimney Rock, NC, was almost completely wiped out. Electricity, cell phone service, and access to clean drinking water and food are only now returning to pre-storm levels. Interstates 26 and 40 were damaged and stretches of them still remain closed. While the flood waters have receded, cleanup has begun, and aid is arriving, it will take months to pick up the pieces.
There was no way to predict this level of devastation in Southern Appalachia. Helene has been called a 1-in-1000-year event. At over 2,100 feet above sea level and nearly 300 miles inland, Asheville, NC, is not exactly what one would call hurricane country. While the region is used to remnants of storms and the rain and flooding that come with them, this is abnormal. Asheville has even been called a climate change haven. But that is becoming increasingly less true.
While residents in Appalachia are suffering the worst aspects of our climate future, on the other side of the world, the United States continues to provide military and financial aid to Israel as it wages bombing campaigns on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.
In August, the United States agreed to send Israel $3.5 billion to spend on weapons; in September, this aid package was upped to $8.7 billion. This is on top of the billions of dollars in aid Israel receives annually from the United States, to say nothing of the intelligence and military aid it receives from other allies. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, and now thousands of Lebanese killed. Nearly 2 million Gazans and over 1 million Lebanese citizens, nearly 1/5 of the country’s population, have been displaced. While Israel and the United States submit that their targets are Hamas and Hezbollah and they are carrying out strategic strikes, such claims given the civilian causality toll and physical destruction of whole city blocks are an insult to basic human intelligence.
Likewise, ghastly for a country that claims to stand up for the rights of its own citizens, the United States has remained silent as Israel targets Americans. In addition to Palestinian-Americans killed or stranded in Palestine, such as Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, the American Embassy in Beirut announced on September 27 that it was not evacuating U.S. Nationals and that they should seek their own way out. U.S. citizens are stranded in Beirut amid airstrikes unless they can afford inflated ticket prices.
The United States putting its imperial interests and those of Israel above the welfare of its own citizens is nothing new. In 2022, an IDF sniper killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al-Jazeera Reporter in Jenin, in the West Bank; and in 2003, Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza. In both cases, no one was held liable. We can go back as far as 1967, when, during the Six-Day War, Israel shelled the USS Liberty, killing 34 U.S. service members; in the aftermath, the event was covered up by Israel and the United States.
The United States’s commitment to Israel’s wars is likewise a climate disaster that facilitates intensified storms like Hurricane Helene. Israel’s bombing campaign will be one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in 2024. Nearly half of its emissions come from arms supply flights from the United States. Similarly, the U.S. military emits more carbon than many industrialized nations. Beyond the catastrophic damage to civilian infrastructure and farmland in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere victim to America’s “War on Terror,” U.S. militarism and Israel’s wars will have severe impacts on the planet’s climate, especially as it appears that they show no signs of slowing; if anything, they will only intensify.
Also at issue is the United States’s commitment to war over the welfare of its residents. Beyond the lack of universal healthcare, education, paid parental leave, and the like, the country’s infrastructure has been in a dire state for decades, which only exacerbates how climate change rocks communities in Southern Appalachia and beyond. According to the 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, the country’s infrastructure was rated as a D+. The same agency estimated, seven years ago, that we must increase annual infrastructure investment by 2.5% to 3.5% of U.S. GDP by 2025. While the estimated $1.2 trillion tied to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a step in the right direction, it falls far short and is rather unimpressive when we consider that the Pentagon’s budget is $849.8 billion for the 2025 fiscal year alone. Such exorbitant spending on the military, which hasn’t passed an audit in six years, compared to what we invest in the country’s physical plant is as breathtaking as it is reckless.
We are also seeing militarization and the U.S.’s relationship with Israel turn inward. Since the late 1970s, police budgets in the U.S. have increased by a staggering 189%. Relatedly, the IDF trains U.S. police officers; and the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems has plans to use Artificial Intelligence along the U.S.-Mexican border. The rollout of Cop Cities across the United States also speaks to a commitment to increased domestic policing. And these Cop Cities are also ecological disasters; the Cop City near Atlanta requires the destruction of 171 acres of forestland in Georgia, trees that pump oxygen into the air and absorb rainwater. Like in Appalachia, Atlanta saw widespread flooding from Helene. Deforestation will only make matters worse.
As the climate warms, human populations will continue to see their environments deteriorate, which fuels migration and will drive further crackdowns from armed forces and militarized police agencies at home and along borders. Climate change likewise exacerbates income and wealth inequality. Beyond migration, the border crisis, and the militarization of police, the U.S. military is one of the single largest beneficiaries of inequality. Because there is no draft, the United States relies on voluntary enlistment. While military recruitment is currently at all-time lows due to minimal confidence in the military’s aims and objectives, nearly half of all servicemembers come from poor areas of the rural South. And rural schools partner with the military to recruit poor students. One truly wonders what voluntary enlistment means in such a context. As an educator in Western North Carolina, I teach a lot of veterans, who are often some of the hardest working and most dedicated students; but the refrain is often the same: the military was an escape from poverty or how to pay for college. Sadly, this does not always work out, as veterans experience lower college graduation rates, and higher homelessness and suicide rates than the general population. As the U.S. feels compelled to send more troops to the Middle East, this cycle will only continue.
The United States is committed to policing the world and supporting Israel while those who live within its borders grapple with rampant inequality. This speaks to an imperial arrogance that lives on futurity. It promises us democracy, prosperity, and security for all in a distant golden age that will come one day. Eventually, America will save the world, one one-ton bomb at a time.
But such an empire has no future. With the planet warming at record rates, Israel’s U.S.-backed bellicosity destabilizing the Middle East, and the lack of a collective will to fix the problems that we face, the dream of American empire is at a dead end. For the moment, we are running toward catastrophe and those with the ability to stop it seem hellbent on accelerating it. Our only hope is that we realize soon that our only future is the one we build together.
Robert Clines (he/him) is Associate Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Global Black Studies and International Studies at Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, NC. He has published widely on antisemitism, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia in the premodern Mediterranean.
No comments:
Post a Comment