‘Pissing in the wind’: Grappling with the spillovers of ‘malevolent weathering’

Abstract

This commentary engages with Mikko Joronen's provocative and timely notion of ‘malevolent weathering' developed to grapple with the formative roles of pollution within the Zionist settler-colonial project unfolding across contemporary Palestine. It argues that while Joronen's efforts to centre this weathering process as the main event is welcome and productive, the article less well attuned to grappling with this weathering's contradictory spillovers. I argue that addressing such spillovers requires more than simply weighing the costs of malevolent weathering against its material benefits to the Zionist project. And to do so, I suggest two things. The first, is to connect this weathering with Zionism's defining ‘addiction to violence’. The second is that because of its remarkable success in securing access to a nearly endless supply of Western arms and largesse, the Zionist project has never been forced to actually bear the full costs of its addiction to violence vis-à-vis its long-term viability. I suggest that this twin focus help us to explore how the spillovers of malevolent weathering might come to a head or be resolved in Palestine and beyond.

Immediately following Donald Trump's announcement of a supposed ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel on 8 October 2025, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) began an arson spree targeting civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including the Sheikh Ajlin Sewage Treatment Station in Gaza City. In Drop Site News’ reporting on this assault, Monther Shoblaq, Director General of Gaza's Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, noted the attack threatened to push Gaza City's wastewater system ‘to point zero’. Shoblaq further emphasized: ‘I mean, they signed a ceasefire’ so ‘Why set it on fire?’ (Tirawi and Cogan, 2025).

The reason is all too obvious. Destruction of civilian infrastructure has been a central pillar of the recent genocide, which has attempted to render Gaza as an uninhabitable wasteland. Yet even within this context, the article noted that the ‘scope of the arson perpetrated in Gaza City on the night of October 9th and early morning of October 10 […] was broader than at any other time Drop Site has tracked during the assault on the strip’ (Tirawi and Cogan, 2025). Such forms of ‘malevolent weathering’ are at the centre of Mikko Joronen's timely and incisive efforts to contend with the formative roles of pollution within the Zionist settler-colonial project unfolding across Palestine. This dovetails with parallel discussions of Zionist efforts to colonize Palestine as self-proclaimed ‘masters of the wasteland’ (Getzoff, 2025).

Weathering's contradictions

I begin my response to this arson because it so grotesquely exemplifies this ‘weathering process’ (see also Nieuwenhuis and Joronen, 2025). Joronen productively centres this process as the main event, rather than some tangential process or externality of something broader, whether empire, race-making or capitalism. In doing so he enables us to provide a structural and theoretically sophisticated answer to Shoblaq's question: the tactic of arson as a form of pollution is not merely some by-product of ‘colonialism's destructive drives’ but represents ‘a mechanism that enables them – a means of appropriating spaces through their contamination’ (Joronen, 2025: 4). While Joronen does not oversell the seamlessness of this weathering (5), he does not fully grapple with its contradictory spillovers.

The attempted destruction of the Station illuminates both the significance of malevolent weathering as a critical frame and what it overlooks. On one hand, malevolent weathering makes this arson legible as a Zionist strategy to appropriate Gaza. Yet, on the other hand, this weathering produces some quite contradictory downstream reverberations as well, not least of all the fact that the very raw sewage the Station would have processed will be dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Israelis become confronted with the very raw sewage that their weathering strategies force Palestinians to live with. This dynamic was already well in place before 7 October 2023, stemming primarily from Israel's starving of Gaza from adequate electricity supplies, making it impossible to run the Strip's sanitation systems at full capacity. Yet, the infrastructural destruction of the genocide stands to dramatically worsen this leakage.

Indeed, in a discussion of the Drop Site article, Drop Site co-founder Ryan Grim noted that burning the Station ‘is going to have very obvious effects for is Israeli beaches too’. ‘After all of the different layers of evil’ at work in the genocide, he asked of Israelis ‘what are you doing? […] why are you […] doing this to yourself? […] why are you pissing in the wind?’ (977 - The Next Day, 2025). We might reasonably conclude that this cost is simply justified by the Zionist project in the service of its greater mission of colonizing Palestine like other related costs incurred before it, like relying on Jewish labour (Shafir, 1989).

From Israeli reporting on this dating back well before the recent genocide (Lior, 2011; Rinat, 2013), this appears to be the case. It shows that rather than seriously reckoning with the destructive spillovers of malevolent weathering into 1948 Palestine, Israel has instead opted to manage and mitigate these consequences through limited ‘solutions’, including plans to provide electricity to Gaza's sewage treatment plants to ensure they remain operational even whilst denying electricity to the broader population of the Strip. Yet, over the past two years, Israeli leaders have shown that their commitments to even such partial mitigation efforts have been eclipsed by their broader genocidal objectives, revealing that for Israelis, having beaches continuously contaminated is a tolerable, if undesirable reality. But I wonder if is this sufficiently explains the Zionist project's enduring reliance on malevolent weathering?

I argue that addressing this dynamic requires more than simply weighing the costs of malevolent weathering against its material benefits to the Zionist project. And to do so, I suggest two things. The first, is that Israel's steadfast propensity to continue ‘pissing in the wind’ stems in no small part from what Sayegh (1965: 30) called Zionism's defining ‘addiction to violence’. This addiction he stressed was never ‘totally confined, in its manifestations, to Zionist relations with the Arabs’. As Sayegh argued, such ‘manifestations’ were apparent in Zionist violence directed at the British and the international community (30). This underscores how the Zionist project's addiction to violence spilled over in contradictory ways, not least of all the propensity to bite the Western imperial hands that have enabled its foundation and existence. While this tendency has at times infuriated Zionism's Western backers, some key Zionist architects saw hand-biting as an asset. As Shlaim (2004: 666) notes, Moshe Dayan believed that ‘Israel had a nuisance value’ that could be capitalized on ‘to induce the Western powers to give Israel arms in the hope that it would stay out of mischief’. Put differently, Dayan ‘considered military activism a factor that was more likely to help than to hinder the quest for [Western] arms’ (667). According to Shlaim, while Israel's belligerence proved counterproductive to gaining over backing from the United States (US) during the 1950s (669), in the longer term it proved formative in compelling the US to anoint Israel as its ‘strategic asset’ in the region after 1967.

Zionist dependency

My second, closely related, claim is that precisely because of its remarkable success in securing access to a nearly endless supply of Western arms and largesse (particularly after 1967), the Zionist project has never been forced to actually bear the full costs of its addiction to violence vis-à-vis its long-term viability. ‘In a departure from the settler-colonial endeavours of the past, which were constrained by the technological and geopolitical limitations of their respective periods’ Dana (2024: 168) notes that ‘Israeli settler colonialism has prospered with substantial support from Western powers’, which have served as the guarantors of Zionist aggression. In a related vein, Wolfe (2012: 152) argues that the success of Zionism was predicated on access to what he calls ‘preaccumulation’, namely the transnational capital from the Jewish diaspora that was ‘not conditional on the return of a financial profit’. In other words, what has sustained the Zionist project's addiction to violence materially is not its standalone capacity to internally absorb the costs this addiction incurs. Instead, the foundation of the Zionist project's power is on the Western arms and political backing that enable it to continue waging unmitigated mass cruelty (Machold, 2025). But as Dana (2024: 167) usefully points out, rather than reflecting general features of settler formations writ large, these features instead exemplify the ‘peculiarity of the Zionist entity’ in the sense of ‘being a settler-colonial formation that incubates a mode of consciousness promoting imperialist values and secures US hegemonic domination in the region’.

For me, attention to these twin dynamics, i.e., the Zionist project's addiction to violence and the way in which this is underwritten by Western backing, raises questions about how we can make sense of Israel's propensity continue pissing in the wind. The material benefits accrued from ‘malevolent weathering’ help to explain ‘Israel's’ propensity to do so. But the concept does not yet provide much insight into how (or to what extent) the Zionist project's is able to absorb the consequences of this strategy of settler colonial accumulation. For this reason, I think that the concept can be enriched by pairing it with a greater acknowledgement Israel's dependency on its various external benefactors, which enable it to ‘weather the storms’ stemming from this addiction, whether environmental, geopolitical or otherwise. While Joronen cites scholarship in this regard such as El-Shewy et al. (2025: 88), which foregrounds the dependency of the genocide on ‘a global network of supply, demand and complicity’, his theorization of malevolent weathering is less attuned to how this dependency ‘mops up’ the spillovers of this same weathering.

It is worth noting here, that it was German and other international funding beginning in 2012 that built the Plant that was attacked by the IOF between October 8–9 (Tirawi and Cogan, 2025). In the summer of 2022, there were reports that at long last Gaza's beaches were finally cleaner than at any point in recent memory (Al-Mughrabi, 2022). Yet, mirroring violence directed by early Zionists against the British prior to the Nakba, their addiction to eliminationist violence has meant that they could not see Palestinians' enjoyment of clean beaches as also serving their self-interest.

While certain elements of this are peculiarities of the Zionist project, the deliberate wasting of natures as a settler colonial strategy per se is hardly exceptional to Palestine. Estes’ (2019: 12) work on settler colonialism in North America ruminates on how ‘our [Indigenous] lands, and lives, were targeted not because they held precious resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the opposite was true: our lands and lives were targeted and held value because they could be wasted – submerged, destroyed’. This too, rather than some historical constant, represented a shift from other moments in the conquest of the Americas. As Estes notes, this wasting of lands through planned flooding was ‘unlike during the previous century, when Indigenous land was coveted [by settlers] for its endless bounty’ (134). This alerts us to ever-shifting but also sometimes contradictory nature of the settler colonial genocidal calculus with respect to natures.

Pressure valves and the colonial limits

It also raises pertinent questions about how (or to what extent) these impulses might come to a head or be resolved. In the context of the Americas Williams (2021 [1944]) ruminated on the economics of slave-based modes of agricultural production and their relation to natures. He noted that ‘From the standpoint of the [slaver] grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil’ (4). This problem of exhaustion was addressed through expansion, with Williams citing Thomas Jefferson boasting that ‘we can by an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one’, leading to the nomenclature of the slaver planter as in the US South as a ‘land killer’ (cited in Williams 4). As Jefferson's words allude to, the settler ‘solution’ to these tensions was the westward frontier – both as the guiding myth of the settler colonial project of American empire but the use of ‘bountiful land as a safety valve’ to alleviate the contradictions of this same project to keep American wages high in Grandin's (2019: 48) telling. We might say that the parallel ‘safety valve’ that sustains the Zionist project's reliance on malevolent weathering is its reliable dependency on Western largesse. Yet in keeping with Grandin's central concern with how such myths and their underlying infrastructures of dispossession might end, I wish to prompt similar considerations in relation to malevolent weathering alongside broader reflections on the collapse of Zionism (Pappé, 2024).