This is the third episode of the Environment in Context podcast. In it, Environment Page co-editor Malihe Rezazan interviews Wael Tarabieh and Muna Dajani on the Israeli wind farms in the occupied Golan Heights.
Renewable, clean sources such as solar and wind energy have become an important part combatting the climate crisis and its impacts, but can we divorce the environmentally friendly technologies from the conditions under which these are developed and implemented? And what happens when renewable energy development becomes synonymous with colonial expansion and political repression?
Israel’s feverish plans to build the largest onshore wind farm in the occupied Golan Heights are a good example of why the conversation about a decarbonized economy may not be abstracted from considering prevailing power structures and systems of oppression including colonialism.
Wael Tarabieh
Wael Tarabieh, the co-founder of al-Marsad, The Arab Centre for Human Rights in the Golan Heights is an independent, not-for-profit international human rights organisation located in Majdal Shams, in the Occupied Syrian Golan. The centre was founded in October 2003 by a group of lawyers and professionals in the fields of law, health, education, journalism, and engineering, along with human rights defenders and other interested community members.
Muna Dajani
Muna Dajani’s research aims to identify the link between identity, resilience, and farming under belligerent occupation, where farming acquires political subjectivity as a form of cultural resistance. Her research interests are environmental politics, community-led resource management, and social impacts of climate change.
Malihe Razazan
Malihe Razazan is producer and cohost of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa on KPFA Radio in Berkeley. She is also a producer and guest host of Your Call, a daily public affairs program on KALW, local public radio station in San Francisco and a member of The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA). Malihe is the co-editor of Jadaliyya’s media page and host of the weekly program “Media on the Margins.”
Bassam Haddad interviews Omar Dahi and Rabie Nasser about the recently released report: “Conflict Economies in Syria: Roots, Dynamics, and Pathways for Change.” Omar Dahi, the lead author of the paper which was prepared for the Syrian Center for Policy Research (SCPR), summarizes its contents and findings. Rabie Nasser, Co-Founder of SCPR, address the context within which the report emerged, both analytically and institutionally. The interview was conducted on 9 July 2020.
The paper is part of a series on Development Policy Dialogue initiative and can be downloaded in full on SCPR’s website here, both in English and Arabic.
Omar S. Dahi is a co-editor of Jadaliyya and an associate professor of economics at Hampshire College and co-director of the Peacebuilding and State building program and research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests are in the political economy of development in the Middle East, South-South relations, comparative regionalism, peace and conflict studies, and critical security studies. He has published in academic outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics, Applied Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Political Geography, Middle East Report,Forced Migration Review, andCritical Studies on Security. His last book South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence (co-authored with Firat Demir) explores the ambiguous developmental impact of the new economic linkages among countries of the global South. He has served on the editorial collective of Middle East Report and is a co-founder and co-director of the Beirut School for Critical Security Studies working group at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). Dahi is also the founder and director of theSecurity in Contextinitiative.
Rabie Nasser is a co-founder of the Syrian Center for Policy Research (SCPR), working as researcher in macroeconomic policies, inclusive growth, poverty, and conflict dynamics. He obtained a B.A. in Economics from Damascus University in 1999. He has a MSc in Economics from Leicester University, UK. Before joining SCPR, Nasser worked for the State Planning Commission as Chief Economist and Director General of Macroeconomic Management Directorate. Afterwards, he worked as an Economic Researcher at the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait. He then moved on to work as a senior researcher for the Syrian Development Research Center that conducts studies, evaluations, and applied research.
This video is part of the Commonsense on Syria series providing the opportunity for a broad audience to engage with incisive analysis and important perspectives about Syria and U.S. “regime-change” wars. This session, featuring Jadaliyya co-editor Omar Dahi and Tima Kurdi, author of The Boy on the Beach: My Family’s Escape from Syria and Our Hope for a New Home, discusses internally and externally displaced Syrians.
[This article was originally published by Jadaliyya on 10 July, 2020.]
يعاني السوريون من تدهور شديد في أوضاعهم المعيشية بسبب السنوات التسع المتواصلة من النزاع. وفي الأشهر القليلة الماضية تفاقمت خسائر البلاد بسبب عوامل عديدة داخلية وخارجية من ضمنها مؤسسات مركزة على الصراع، معارك عسكرية، الأزمة الاقتصادية اللبنانية، وباء كوفيد ١٩ وقانون قيصر. ومؤخراً شهد الاقتصاد تدهوراً غير مسبوق في سعر صرف الليرة السورية، وارتفاعاً في الأسعار ومعدلات الفقر وموجة ضخمة من فقدان الوظائف. وصار الانهيار الاقتصادي أولوية محورية للنزاع السوري. يناقش المحرر المشارك في صفحة سوريا في جدلية ربيع ناصر والباحث عارف دليلة تأثير عوامل بنيوية غذت الصراع ودور اقتصاد الصراع في التطورات الأخيرة بالإضافة إلى سيناريوهات وخيارات على المدى القصير.
ربيع ناصر باحث اقتصادي وأحد مؤسسي المركز السوري لأبحاث السياسة، ويعمل كباحث في سياسات الاقتصاد الكلي، النمو الشامل وديناميات الصراع. حصل على الإجازة الجامعية في الاقتصاد من جامعة دمشق في ١٩٩٩. كما حصل على شهادة الماجستير في الاقتصاد من جامعة لايشستر في المملكة المتحدة.
In a webinar dated 12 May 2020, Villanova University Scholar and Jadaliyya Syria Page Co-Editor Samer Abboud examined the emergent “illiberal peace” in Syria. The absence of an internationally mandated or internally negotiated peace process, he argued, has allowed the Syrian regime to craft an illiberal peace as an outcome to the nearly decade-long conflict. This illiberal peace is shaped through a politics of exclusion in which Syrian society is bifurcated into the loyal and disloyal through processes of reconciliation, settlement, and new legal regimes of citizenship. Click below to watch the recording of the talk.
From Gaza: 24 March 2020
For audio only, find the podcast on SoundCloud.
This podcast takes you to several cities/countries affected by Covid-19 to discuss social, economic, and political challenges facing their societies, with emphasis on the most vulnerable groups and on what this pandemic reveals about the human condition (wow, big phrase). Based on personal and incisive conversations with various interlocutors on location, we hope both to learn from others and to provide some solace as we address how we are collectively experiencing and dealing with similar challenges.
We will be speaking with our guests, one or several at a time, via Skype, and will try to have brief, informative, and non-draining calls within 20-30 minutes.
Look out for upcoming episodes in the coming week(s) from Dublin, Cairo, Iran, San Francisco, Vancouver, and more.
As of March 23, only 200 testing kits are available.
Only about 99 people tested so far.
Only 3 ventilators per 100,000 in Gaza.
○ By contrast, in the US and Israel there are 52 and 40 ventilators per 100,000 people, respectively, which has been deemed vastly insufficient.
Around 30 hospitals and major clinics, providing an average of only 1.3 beds per 1,000 people.
While other countries have emphasized the need to wash hands frequently, Gazans are worried about having enough water to drink.
○ 90% of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption.
Almost impossible to quarantine people in Gaza due to population density.
○ 113,990 refugees are living in Jabalia camp which covers an area of only 0.54 square miles, making it impossible for people to maintain physical distance from each other, let alone effectively carry out a quarantine.
○ In Beach Camp, 85,628 refugees reside in an area of 0.2 square miles.
■ Beach Camp has only one medical center and one food distribution center servicing the entire population.
Schools have been converted quarantine quarters, with 8 people per classroom and about 200 sharing a bathroom.
Issam A. Adwan, the project manager for We Are Not Numbers, is a trained translator/interpreter, journalist and English teacher. In 2019, he was chosen by The Carter Center to be the first Palestinian independent observer for the Tunisian elections.
Salam Khashan is a family doctor in the Palestinian primary health care. She holds a bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery from Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice where she teaches topics such as human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009.