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The scapegoating of Jews after disasters strike has been a consistent characteristic of Western societies over the ages.
This grim historical pattern shows no signs of abating, even in modern times, as responses to the devastating Los Angeles wildfires this past week unfortunately demonstrated.
Even as firefighters were still heroically battling the blazes, baseless claims and ludicrous conspiracy theories quickly began proliferating on social media, featuring a toxic mix of anti-Zionist and classical antisemitic tropes seeking to attribute responsibility to the Jewish people and state.
Discourse blaming Jews and the Jewish state for the wildfires broadly falls into four categories, described below alongside examples monitored by the Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) by CAM:
— Accusations that Israel monopolizes U.S. funds, depriving American firefighters of the necessary resources to battle the fires. Such assertions invoke the stereotype that Jews are greedy and seek to accumulate wealth at others’ expense.
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- The far-left organization Code Pink claimed in a video shared on X that U.S. money funding “genocide” in Gaza harmed the ability to fight the wildfires in California.
How are the California wildfires connected to the genocide in Gaza?@oliviadinucci & the CODEPINK DC team are in Congress today drawing the parallels. pic.twitter.com/IvdxRPZ5LV
— CODEPINK (@codepink) January 8, 2025
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- The group also wrote in a post on Instagram, “When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home.”
View this post on Instagram
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- Responding to a post on X about recent Los Angeles Fire Department budget cuts, progressive British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan published a screenshot of a headline that said, “US spends a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since last Oct. 7.”
https://t.co/M7s2G933hP pic.twitter.com/Gtz5XBI2OD
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 9, 2025
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- The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) published a graphic on Instagram emblazoned with the words, “ISRAEL BOMBS” and “LOS ANGELES PAYS” overlaying a picture of the fires. The group wrote in an accompanying caption that because Los Angeles had “exported over $238 million in federal taxpayer dollars … to Israel,” the “imperial boomerang of ecocide has now scorched Los Angeles like we’ve only ever seen in the black mirror of our screens.”
View this post on Instagram
— Assertions that the cause of the fires is climate degradation inflicted by Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza, attributing a magical, supernatural ability to affect specific natural phenomena to the Jewish state.
- Fatima Mohammed, a leader of the anti-Israel organization Within Our Lifetime, wrote, “Dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs on Gaza, turning it into a blazing inferno, has consequences,” and “There are climate consequences that will find us all.”
View this post on Instagram
- Replying to a post on X that called the “fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles” the “same disease,” UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese — notorious for her long track record of antisemitic rhetoric — opined, “On our small planet, all injustices are connected.”
On our small planet, all injustices are connected. https://t.co/EhIYiX5WUI
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) January 12, 2025
— Religious proclamations that deem the fires divine vengeance for Israel’s actions.
- California Imam Marc Manley declared in a sermon, “Allah has shown some of the Zionists who celebrated the destruction in Gaza that he will exact revenge upon them for their evil.”
California Imam Marc Manley on Los Angeles Fires: Allah Has Shown Some of the Zionists Who Celebrated the Destruction in Gaza that He Will Exact Revenge Upon Them for Their Evil; This Is Foreshadowing What Is Waiting for Them on the Day of Judgement pic.twitter.com/kbXuYoLzDD
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 15, 2025
— Pointing to certain American Jews’ alleged monopolization of water ownership in California as the proximate cause for water shortages. Allegations that Jews connivingly aspire toward outsize control frequently color antisemitic propaganda, most prominently The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th-century Russian forgery that purported to document secret Jewish plans for achieving global domination.
- The “Megatron” X account, which has almost half-a-million followers, wrote, “One Jewish billionaire couple owns almost all the water in California,” a reference to Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of The Wonderful Company, an agriculture conglomerate.
One Jewish billionaire couple owns almost all the water in California.
In 1994, the Resnicks secretly seized control of California’s public water supply.
pic.twitter.com/AuQbv01e9u— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) January 10, 2025
Broadly, the content highlighted above puts a modern twist on age-old antisemitic slanders blaming Jews for societal catastrophes. A prominent historical example is the accusation that Jews caused the Black Death, a disease that killed tens of millions of people in Europe during the 14th century, with a widespread narrative that the Devil recruited Jews to eliminate Christianity. Jews, according to this outlandish theory, “enthusiastically agreed, poisoning water wells to infect Christians with the disease.”
Even in the recent past, we see examples of such bigotry, as neo-Nazis and other antisemites blamed Jews for the Covid-19 pandemic. Flyers distributed by the anti-Jewish hate group Goyim Defense League (GDL) across the U.S., for example, proclaimed that “every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish,” alleging a Jewish conspiracy to foment societal upheaval during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, much of the antisemitic discourse that focuses on the Los Angeles wildfires posits that powerful American institutions work hand-in-glove with Israel to destroy the environment. In its aforementioned Instagram post, USCPR further asserted, “The US transfers weapons for Israeli occupation forces to test on Palestinians, accelerating climate collapse.”
There is clear historical continuity in antisemitic rhetoric: much like Jews were said to have willingly participated in a plot to eliminate Christianity via disease, the Jewish state today supposedly collaborates with American arms manufacturers to destroy the environment. The circumstances are different, but the overarching framework is the same. Such narratives of Jewish evil are not rooted in evidence or factual reality, but in conspiracy theories and lies that serve only to distract from true causes of problems.
Each of the above examples garnered substantial traction on either X or Instagram (save the sermon in California, which occurred in-person), highlighting the propensity of extremists to leverage social media to reach wide audiences. None of the X posts listed above accumulated fewer than 318,000 views each, vastly exceeding the average number of views per post on the platform of 1,121. Given the frequency with which X accounts such as Code Pink’s and Hasan’s comment on Israel-related issues, the virality of their posts suggests that a large contingent of social media users seek anti-Israel content as part of their news consumption, including material that echoes or perpetuates antisemitic tropes.
Several of the accounts noted above regularly disseminate antisemitic content or anti-Israel content that invokes antisemitic tropes, rendering their blaming Jews or the Jewish state for the Los Angeles fires unsurprising. Albanese has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, thus trivializing the gravity of the attempted wholesale genocide of the Jewish people in the Holocaust and equating its perpetrators with the descendants of its victims. In 2014, Albanese trafficked in the antisemitic trope of Jewish power and control by positing that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”
Code Pink, for its part, called Hamas’ October 7th attack in Israel an “act of resistance,” thus justifying the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism includes “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion” as a contemporary example of Jew-hatred (emphasis added).
On October 7, 2024, the USCPR marked one year since the deadliest single-day massacre of Jewish people by releasing a statement that described the anniversary as “one year since Israel began its current ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, unleashing the most horrific forms of violence to eliminate Palestinian life.” The group, therefore, denies the crimes committed against Israel while inventing nonexistent connections between the Jewish state and wildfires in California.
As Los Angeles reels from the wildfires, narratives falsely blaming Jews and the Jewish state undermine the social cohesion necessary to persevere, recover, and rebuild from the ashes. Vigilance is now needed to prevent this crisis from becoming a lasting breeding ground for new variations of antisemitism, and all those scapegoating Jews to stoke hatred must be called out, refuted, and ostracized.
