Written in November 2023

2025 note: I wrote this a month after the 7th of October. I was following the news – of what was then the beginning of a genocide – on Al Jazeera’s Live Youtube channel. In between the news updates from Gaza, there were short weather updates. And this got me wondering, what is it like to be a weatherman when there is a genocide?

I know most people check the weather
I check to see how many people look like me

– Nemahsis, “i’m not gonna kill you”

Every time I watch Al Jazeera lately, I wonder about their weatherman.

What is it like to do the weather forecast when there’s an ongoing genocide?

To stand at the corner of the studio, green screen behind you, the teleprompter ready, waiting for your cue.

To practice your lines as you wait for your turn on the camera, a peppy “Hello! We are expecting a wetter weather!” while you watch your Palestinian colleague hold his dead child in Gaza.

وفعلا انتقموا في الاولاد

“They’re actually taking revenge on our children.”

What is it like to do the weather forecast when there’s an ongoing genocide?

To want to tell the people in Ho Chi Minh City to bring their umbrellas, when in another part of the world, Israel’s bombs continue to rain all over a strip with over 2 million people trapped in it. Cut off from food, water, and fuel. Cut off from the rest of the Western world’s mercy.

To accept that there are places where people see the weather differently. That in Gaza, they think about the winds that carry the screams of their children trapped under the rubble. That in Gaza, they wonder if there would ever be rain at this time*, when more blood has been spilled than there ever will be water.

What is it like to do the weather forecast when there’s an ongoing genocide?

To share the good news about blue skies over the region that was once called Rhodesia, or to say that it’s the perfect beach weather over the Tel Aviv coast and vista – when just 60 kilometers from suntanning European settlers, Palestinians’ horizon is covered in smoke, from Israeli airstrikes, from dusts of a decimated hospital, from phosphorus bombs that burn through bones.

What is it like to do the weather forecast when there’s an ongoing genocide?

To talk about rains over Luzon in the Philippines, when you know that the country’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression” is selective as to whose freedom should be protected.

The Nobel Laureate, the West’s anointed Holy Saint of Peace and Democracy – you wanted to tell her to bring a jacket to seven-degree-Celsius Paris, as she prepares for yet another one of her countless international speaking engagements. She will talk about her book or how to collaborate for peace. But she will not talk about how her own news outlet continues to echo the war drums of Western media.

She will cling to her sainthood, preaching the Western war mongers’ language of “peace”: a language that doesn’t include “ceasefire,” a language that washes the blood off of “genocide.” She will cling to the sainthood the West has bestowed upon her, while dismissing the actual saints of journalism who continue to be targeted and martyred, along with their families, in Gaza.

What is it like to do the weather forecast when there’s an ongoing genocide?

To inform the seats of superpower that in Washington, DC, in London, in Brussels, it’s eight, six, four degree-cold respectively; when you know that in every corner of the world, temperatures are rising, the ground shifting, the atmosphere will never be the same. Never again.

You know that for every phosphorous cloud hovering over sleeping Gazans, 100,000 people across the globe are waking up to a reality they didn’t even know existed.

For every US-supplied rocket falling on a refugee camp, 100,000 more people are seeing Western governments’ hands on every suffering, every dispossession, every human violation throughout history.

And for every single one of the Palestinians pushed away from their homeland, 1 million more people are finding their place in a growing global solidarity that rejects and seeks to dismantle Western systems that extract blood and capital from the rest of the world; systems that select who should eat and who should starve, who should live or who should die.

The ground is shifting, the earth is shaking, and there will be fissure after fissure on empires until they become rubble and wither.

©️Catincrisis.Me