Weathering Palestine: Frontiering pollution

Abstract

In this response, I further elaborate the notions of ‘colonial pollution’ and ‘malevolent weathering’ in relation to three aspects: ontology, frontiering, and ungovernability. First, I elaborate the ontological role of pollution in spatial processes of world(un)making, looking particularly at the enmeshing of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ pollution. By showing how self-harm remains an intrinsic part of the settler colonial appropriation of space through 'contaminating-cleansing', I expand the discussion to frontiering, arguing that colonial pollution operates through a distributed weathering of frontiers. Finally, I suggest settler colonial pollution remain entangled with unsettling conditions and ungovernabilities of frontier-weathering, including material frictions, escapes, and generosity. Altogether, the response maps a broader vocabulary for thinking space-making at the frontiers of colonial pollution.

In early December 2025, a member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) from the far-right party Religious Zionism, Tzvi Succot, called for an air force strike against West Bank Palestinians who disposed waste by burning (Rinat, 2025). Succot's party member, Yitzhak Kroizer, also a Member of Knesset participating in the committee hearing on the matter, responded by further explicating how such extreme measures were just and needed, as the ‘air pollution’ of waste burning was a form of ‘terrorism no different than stone-throwing’. ‘The simplest thing’, he added, ‘is to send an F-16 to put out the fire’. The West Bank, short of waste collection and treatment facilities due to restrictions, fragmentation, economic strangulation, and annexations posed by the occupying state, but also Israeli garbage dump and waste-treatment site under less strict environmental (military) laws, was to be blamed for what signified a material manifestation of colonial polluting.

The event kept resonating with me while reading the four commentaries to my original article (Joronen, 2025), particularly the note provided by Rhys Machold (2025) on ‘self-harm’ – that colonial pollution might also boomerang back and harm colonisers themselves (Ghantous et al., 2026). As colonial history shows, and as Machold reiterates, such harm has rarely prevented the pushing further of colonial frontiers. Such is especially the case when serving ministers claim Israel to be at the ‘historical moment’ of taking the next steps in colonising Palestine (Sharon, 2025).

And yet, the question here is not merely that of the scale and intensity of harm. The self-harm, exemplified by Machold (2025) through the possibility that the bombing of the sewage treatment station in Gaza City could also pollute Israeli beaches, should be rather seen as a fundamental part of how colonial polluting operates by appropriating space through what I called ‘contaminating-cleansing’ (Joronen, 2025). As the example above on West Bank waste burning also reminds, when the polluting of colonised spaces hits back, the pointing finger rarely turns inwards. Instead, colonial pollution becomes weaponised to further speed up the eradication and ‘cleaning’ of colonised spaces and people. The framing of waste-burning fumes blends effortlessly into a long legacy of vilifying the Palestinians as ‘arsonists’, ‘saboteurs’, and ‘terrorists’ to justify further violence against them (Niewenhuis and Joronen, 2025). The material appropriation of space through ‘hard pollution’ is, in other words, entangled with ‘soft pollution’ (Serres, 2011) – with the Othering of ‘dirty others’ in ‘dirty spaces’ (Dekeyser, 2023; Ghantous et al., 2026) – but also with the establishment of the material needs for their transformative clean(s)ing. While the ‘Zionist addiction to violence’, as Machold suggests, might play a role in explaining the indifference to self-harm (indeed, the suggestion to use an F-16 as a cleaning device might just prove that), I propose we need to think further how settler colonialism remains not only a (bodily) addiction or a deadly desire/ideology, but a transformative process of ontological violence – a world(un)making process of polluting.

The self-harm, in this regard, is crucial to what I argue to be at the core of the material and atmospheric ‘weathering’ process of settler colonial world(un)making: the entanglement of ‘appropriation through contamination’ with the transformative purification of spaces, both tied, in varying historical and site-specific ways (Sidaway, 2025), to a facilitation of settler inhabitation. Such inhabitation is fuelled by the sense of superiority of settler colonisers arriving as the entitled cleaners working at the transformative frontiers of improvement, thus creating their own narrative, position, and need by polluting the Indigenous lands, population(s), and ways of living. Self-harm is neither caused by ignorance nor a sign of blind (ideological) attachment to violence; self-harm is an operational part of the transformative appropriation of settler colonisation and its world(un)making ontological violence of contaminating-cleansing.

In his commentary, Machold (2025) raises further a related point, also hinted at other commentaries (Clark and Henig 2025; Fregonese, 2025; Sidaway, 2025), concerning the need to see the success in colonising Palestine – and erasing Gaza – as fundamentally dependent on Western support. The connection of settler colonialism to imperialism and global frontiers of capital accumulation, especially in the context of more than a hundred years of colonising Palestine, might be beyond this commentary (see Collins, 2010; Ghantous, 2026; Tarvainen and Challand, 2024); yet it does raise an important question concerning how to approach the connection between frontier weathering and its globally distributed making. In this regard, I wish to make two remarks.

First, and related to the ‘ordinary weathering’ Sara Fregonese (2025) highlights in her response, the colonial world is, as Fanon (2001) has so vividly described, a Manichean space of violent re-worlding. It cuts and amputates colonised bodies from their everyday environments by weathering them with what I described as the pollution of settler colonial re-worlding. Here, pollution has an ontologically constitutive role in forcing an ‘everyday’ world – a new ordinary – that remains ‘disorienting’ (Ahmed, 2006) by default for the colonised, offering them less ways for being-in than being-cut from the world. This raises further questions about the ‘ordinariness’ of malevolent weathering. At times, ordinary weathers hide the violence they are built upon, the most extraordinary (and violent) being normalised as the mundane, unspectacular, and ordinary (Amira, 2021; Joronen, 2021). In other instances, however, we might need to question the assumptions on relatedness at the core of thinking the ‘ordinary’ ability to ‘be-in’ and orientate towards the world polluted by the colonial dirt (see Dekeyser, 2023; Palmer, 2020). Weatherings might bring change, but they also disrupt, cut, end, and erase.

And yet, the Manichean split is not the only condition for producing these colonial cuts; the settler colonial weathering in Palestine is also entangled with imperialism, racial capitalism, and the global proliferation far-right/fascist politics. What the reading of weathering adds is a spatial understanding of how these world(un)makings operate as atmospheric and material processes of manufacturing frontier landscapes. Settler colonial weathering, despite its distributed constitution, is a frontier process of appropriation, tied to those colonial volumes, materialities, ecologies, and atmospheres of violence that the colonised are forced to embody and inhabit. The notion of weathering, in short, allows a more turbulent and grounded view of a global frontiering.

Second, and relatedly, I suggest thinking the distributed production of weathering beyond the somewhat narrow notions of ‘dependency’ and ‘supply chain’ Machold points out. Instead, I suggest comprehending pollution as a process of ‘frontiering’, tied less to chains, networks and conventional core-periphery dynamics, and more to the coming together of weathered milieus with frictions, joint intensifications, and pressures in motion (see Ghantous, 2026; Joronen and Ghantous, 2024; Tarvainen and Challand, 2024). Weathering is not a node in a network, but entangled with turbulent materialities, pressured fronts, distinct vibrations, lingering political climates, geopolitical frictions, and complex multiscalar spatialities that materialise in landscapes, ecologies and atmospheres of frontier expansion. As frontiering, weathering diffuses the core–periphery flows (and their ‘dependencies’ and ‘chained’ directions), bringing into view ‘bastard alliances’ accompanied with what Ghantous (2026) calls ‘homological correspondence’ – alliances that move through the sites of unexpected connection/cut and complex paces and frictional resonances of frontiering.

It is through these two remarks that I want to come back to a more the ‘hopeful’ notes Fregonese (2025) and Sidaway (2025) ended their commentaries with. One of the examples Fregonese (2025) uses to exemplify the ordinariness of ‘malevolent weathering’ is the practice of West Bank settlers pouring sewage water down to Palestinian villages from hilltop settlements. As we have shown elsewhere (Joronen and Griffiths, 2022: 7), Palestinian villagers, living under Israel-induced water scarcity, also divert the settlement wastewater with hidden canals to feed different ends, using the clearer flow to wet plants that can tolerate it. These sites of malevolent polluting are thus equally spaces of negotiation, undoing, and excess, or what we tried to capture with the notion of ungovernability. This underlines how colonial pollution can become incapacitated through ordinary means, and hence the nonlinear, ambivalent, and frictional nature of frontier-making. The same also applies to the self-harming boomeranging discussed above: as shown by various scholars (Césaire, 2000; Ghantous et al., 2026), the violence of colonialism, can also start to curve back in, at times with catastrophic resonances eroding/polluting colonial foundations and the global political orders supporting them.

It is to these realities that Clark and Henig (2025) point when asking what happens when climate change collides with various realities of political violence, particularly the armed conflicts deployed with modern weapons. The way those affected navigate landscapes contaminated by war – shrapnel, debris, chemical and radioactive remnants, scorched earth, poisoned water, dust clouds, unexploded ordnance, and so on (Rubaii and Griffiths, 2025; Weizman, 2017) – but also the climate shocks and extreme weather conditions (Clark and Henig, 2025), indeed raises questions of endurance and (un)inhabitability. And even though it needs to be reminded that what is deemed ‘uninhabitable’ is often ‘inhabited’ by subaltern populations, it is also the case that not all wars are wars to colonise land for settlement and inhabitation. What remains crucial for settler colonial wars is precisely the aim to welcome settler inhabitation through entanglements of contamination and cleaning. Polluting appropriates space, but also creates the needs to purify, sterilise, sanitise, deodorise, and clean(s)e them, and even if this might take time, it offers material means for implementing the dispossessive settler colonial transformation. When landscapes become close to ‘unnavigable wastelands’, it is not only the ‘sensory experience’ (Clark and Henig, 2025) that is fundamentally disrupted in places like Gaza; it is also the whole temporality of everyday dwelling (Dader, 2025) that so lies in ruins – ruins that are to be inhabited and claimed as own(ed) by those who created them in the first place.

And yet, elements and moving materialities too contain ungovernable excess, agency, and generosity. Water, like fire, can offer means to resist as much as contain elemental irreducibilities that haunt and escape the colonial replacement of worlds and landscapes. The latter is well exemplified by the recent wildfires in Palestine/Israel and the ruins of destroyed Palestinian homes they revealed beneath the scorched ground (Razek, 2024), but also by the fact that forest fires consumed the matchbox ecologies produced by decades-long massive colonial landscape alterations that have replaced more fire-resistant native ecologies with flammable monocultures, thus turning the landscapes into fuel for the record-high climate change-induced heat waves in the region (Nieuwenhuis and Joronen, 2025). As with the waste-burning, these forest fires have been blamed on ‘vilified’ Palestinian arsonists rather than on the colonial landscape alterations that generated these matchbox ecologies in the first place. The earth might be ‘quaking’, as Clark and Henig (2025) write, because the earth is ‘being transformed by our doing’. Yet there's no ‘us’ behind the Anthropocene, as Kathryn Yusoff (2018) has reminded – at least not without the manifold ‘shakings’ and ‘ends of worlds’ already happening along the colonial, racialised, and otherwise geographically differentiated frontiers and weatherings of world(un)making violence.