Arab MKs Blast Gov’t For Nakba-Day Heat Wave

“This government continually boasts how the country made the desert bloom. Anyone with such power over nature is automatically suspect in inclement weather.”

Jerusalem, May 15 – Members of the Arab Joint List delegation to Knesset denounced the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu today, saying that the timing of an oppressive heat wave to coincide with commemorations of Palestinian displacement in 1948 could not have been a coincidence.

As Arab and Palestinian leaders gathered in various places throughout the country to mark Nakba Day – when they lament the creation of Israel – they also cast suspicious eyes at the outside temperature, which began rising sharply yesterday and will remain oppressively high at least through Monday. Multiple public figures pointed an accusing finger at the right-leaning, Likud-led government.

“Any country capable of stealing an activist’s shoe and making it disappear without a trace is capable of engineering the hottest days on record in living memory,” suggested MK Ahmad Tibi of the Raam-Taal Party, referring to the enduringly mysterious, suspicious, and alleged theft of London-based Muslim activist Asghar Bukhari’s footwear last year. “This government continually boasts how the country made the desert bloom. Anyone with such power over nature is automatically suspect in inclement weather that affects political opponents.”

Palestinian leaders amplified Tibi’s accusations. “We would not put anything past the Zionists,” pronounced Fatah official Saeb Erekat. “The Zionists were already manipulating the weather back in the days of our direct ancestors on this land, the… the… whoever was before the Natufians. The Pre-Clovis people, maybe? Is that far back enough?” Erekat’s Bedouin ancestors moved to the area in the nineteenth century.

Erekat cited examples taken from Jewish lore such as the prophet Elijah declaring a multi-year drought, as described in the Biblical book of Kings, and a Talmudic take of Honi the Circle-Maker and others engineering sudden rainfall. “We must also view with malice any visions of future ‘acts of God’ in Jewish sources, such as the earthquake predicted by Zachariah,” warned Erekat. “Zionist schemes must not go uncriticized.”

Joint List chairman Ayman Odeh pointed to the suspect nature of the heat wave, which brought temperatures in normally-cool Jerusalem into the upper thirties Celsius – expected to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. “Such high temperatures are not typical of most parts of the country even at the height of summer,” he charged. “If there was already going to be an unseasonably hot spell in the middle of May, it should raise more than a few eyebrows that the temperatures spiked immediately after the Jewish Independence Day, right in time for Nakba Day.”

Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg called for an investigation into the discriminatory, politically-motivated weather.