The above-featured image is one of the author’s selections and is “Flames and smoke rise from the site of twin bombings at al-Khodhary Street in Karm al-Loz neighborhood, Homs, Syria, April 2014.EPA/stringer”
The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes. At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.
Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage. Meanwhile, according to the health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, more than 6,500 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes and more than 17,400 injured.
There is a modern term for what’s happening in Gaza. Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home. It comes from the Latin word domus which means home and cide, which is deliberate killing.
But, home here doesn’t only mean the physical, tangible built environment of people’s homes and properties, it also refers to people’s sense of belonging and identity. We are seeing in many conflicts and wars across the world that alongside the destruction of architecture, people’s sense of dignity and belonging is also being targeted.
There is a link between genocide and domicide: genocide refers to the killing of people and domicide to the erasure of their presence and their material culture. In 2022, a UN expert on housing argued that domicide should be recognised as an international crime.
When people are continuously displaced from their homes, sometimes for decades, or even a lifetime, there’s a sense of grief and sorrow that their history is being erased.
The destruction of Homs
My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.
Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed. Across the country, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of these, 6.8 million people are displaced inside the country, and 5.4 million people live as refugees in neighbouring countries and beyond.
Domicidal campaigns like this also work to erase evidence that a community actually existed in a particular place and that it had a history and culture there. This is an attempt to write people out of history through destroying their homes and heritage in a way that’s systematic and deliberate. In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground. In other cities, such as Damascus and Hama, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out through new land and property laws which designate these neighbourhoods as “informal”.
There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle. But I’ve been following the news continuously since the Hamas attack on Israel, and I can’t stop looking at the updates about the heavy Israeli bombing. The scale of destruction, the level of mass displacement is just so heartbreaking. Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.
Israel says it has the right to defend itself, and is targeting Hamas positions, but the scale to which ordinary people’s homes, hospitals and “safe areas” have been hit means what’s happening in Gaza is absolutely domicidal. People living in the north of the Gaza Strip were told by Israeli authorities to move to the south of the territory to the supposed “safe areas”, but the southern areas continue to be bombed too. The bombardment is killing civilians, killing their everyday lives and causing the mass destruction of neighbourhoods. As we have seen in videos, entire buildings have been levelled.
Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford, who was born in Baghdad, and is considered one of Israel’s critical “new historians”, called Israel’s actions “state-sponsored terrorism”. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.
Catastrophe for Palestinians
It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before. This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.
When one million people are ordered to leave their homes it’s important to understand that these people have attachment to their places, to their neighbourhoods, to their streets. The impact of displacement and loss of home can live with people for their lifetime.
In my interviews with people from the city of Homs, I’ve heard many people say that even if they are still living in Homs, they feel like strangers in their own city, or they feel exiled inside their own city. For people such as the Palestinian diaspora or the Iraqi diaspora or the Syrian diaspora who are unable to return to their home countries, that suffering and pain and trauma of displacement continues.
I imagine people have different mechanisms to cope with these traumatic events, but that’s why it’s so important to have memory projects where people at least can reflect on what happened to heal and grieve, even when, sadly, many are unable to return and some spend their lifetime in exile.
After researching conflicts, wars, dictatorships and occupations for several years, I always say that the pain of people start as a headline in the news media, and turns into a footnote in history. Let us resist that, let us remember the life of every human being and keep the struggle for a free and just world for everyone.
On the eighth day of the current intensification of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, I saw a tweet that said that there would be more uproar in the west if “2.2 million golden retrievers [were] being bombed to extinction in an inescapable cage” instead of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
This tweet took me back to interviews I conducted with 96 young Palestinians and their teachers in the West Bank in the aftermath of the 2014 invasion of Gaza and published in a journal recently. We talked about issues that affected their daily lives, not least their awareness of human rights as well as how the rest of the world perceives the Palestinians’ struggle.
I wanted to find out about the different ways Palestinian youth in grades nine and ten (aged 13-15) across a range of public, private and United Nations schools understood, talked about and used human rights – especially when the ideals they learned about at school contrasted with their struggles for rights in their daily life. In my conversations with these young people, they opened up to me about a range of issues that they confront in their daily life.
1. Dehumanisation of Palestinians
The young people I spoke with, who were from a range of different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds, often described how they felt dehumanised in discourse on Israel-Palestine relations. This failure to see them as fellow humans with the same wants, needs and – importantly – human rights as every one else, they felt, has come to be accepted globally.
But they also often used similar language to describe how they live under occupation. Hiba, a girl in grade nine studying at a private school joked that: “It’s funny how animals have more rights than the humans in Palestine”. Then, more seriously, she added: “We’re not equal, we are different from other children in the world.”
The idea that the value of a Palestinian life is ranked lower than the lives of others was another talking point. Anwar, a grade nine female refugee student at a school run by the UN said that: “In western countries if someone dies they make a massive issue of it. But if we Palestinians were killed whether it was 100 to 1,000, then it’s normal and OK. Palestinians are numbers.”
The rhetoric displayed by Israeli officials over the past fortnight shows this dehumanisation at work. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant in announcing the complete siege of Gaza asserted that: “We are fighting human animals.” His words were echoed by Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian who said to Palestinians in Gaza that “human animals must be treated as such”.
Many of the young people I spoke to were critical of how their elders – especially the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) – appeared to have come to accept the occupation. Talking about the 2014 war in Gaza, Camilla, who was studying at a private school, told me: “Our government acts like they don’t care whether we are occupied or not … Israelis are killing kids and the government is not letting [sic] Israel pay for it.”
This week, Palestinians across the West Bank have joined protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. But they have also been highly critical of the PA. In response PA security forces have cracked down on and fired live ammunition at demonstrators, killing young people like Razan Nasrallah, a 12-year-old girl from Jenin who was shot and killed in the West Bank city on October 17 while protesting at the attack on a Gaza hospital which killed hundreds of Palestinians.
Although some young people were also cynical about the prospect of seeing an end to the occupation in their lifetime, most were optimistic. Anwar, a grade nine pupil at a UN school told me that while “adults feel that it is over … as young people, we still have hope because we have a future”.
3. Israelis: even occupiers deserve human rights
Many of the young people I interviewed in 2015 were keen to make a distinction between most Jewish people living in Israel and those whose vision of a Zionist Jewish homeland involves the displacement of native Palestinians. As Jiries, a grade nine pupil at a private school told me:
Some people say that Jews are the one who are Zionist … but they’re wrong because there are a lot of Jews that support us … I just want to make sure that everyone who reads about “Jews” or “Zionists” can separate between the two.
The students were also keen to stress that not all of the Jewish community supports the state of Israel’s policy towards Palestine – and during the current conflict there are many Jewish groups around the world standing in solidarity with them:
The young people I interviewed lived in areas of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which are officially off limits for Israelis. So, most of the young people’s encounters with Israelis would have been with settlers or soldiers either at checkpoints or during military raids. Young people held different views on their perceptions of the Israelis they’d encountered. Lina, a girl in grade nine at a UN school for refugee children stressed the difference between soldiers and citizens, meanwhile her classmate Nadiya, said:
In the Gaza war they didn’t differentiate between civilians and soldiers, Israelis target civilians and most of those who were killed were children, women and old people.
But when I asked this group of refugee girls if they thought an Israeli young person their age should enjoy the same human rights as them, they unanimously agreed.
4. Hope for the future
The occupied Palestinian territories have a young population: the median age in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is 19.6 years and in Gaza more than 40% of people are 14 or younger. Since October 7 2023, a Palestinian child has been killed about every 15 minutes.
For those who survive, military attacks can leave children with life-changing disabilities, without parental care, and can have long-term adverse impacts on their mental health. Other children may yet die because they can’t access food, water, or life-saving medical treatment because of the siege.
Despite being disproportionately affected by the violence, the views of young people are rarely consulted and their voices are largely missing in commentaries and decision-making processes that will affect their lives. Young people in society do not necessarily reproduce the views of adults around them. And often adults don’t listen when the young speak.
As Marwan, one of the young people I spoke to put it: “[adults] don’t understand that we are mature enough to understand our world”. Young people in Gaza and those in exile have addressed the international community calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The question is, who will listen and act upon these young people’s calls? They are the future of Palestine and their voices must be heard.
1 post of Global Voices of September 2023 on the presence of a mosaic of MENA languages enlightened us after that of August 2023 on a similar topic that watered our mouths. Here it is.
The above-featured image is for illustration and is credit to Pinterest
.The Middle East and North Africa region boasts a rich tapestry of languages and cultures. However, despite this richness and diversity, the region has not received adequate attention when it comes to language rights. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a lack of research on the various language communities in the region, leaving these communities at risk of being left behind in the global discourse on language rights.
Recognizing the importance of filling the gap in research and advocacy for non-Arabic language communities in the region, with the support of the IFEX network, Rising Voices has launched a new project dedicated to shedding light on six such communities.
These communities include:
Kurdish
Assyrian
Armenian
Nubian
Soqotri
Amazigh
The project aims to support their rights to free expression and access to information in online and offline civic spaces. It seeks to identify the opportunities, challenges, and threats they face in the digital realm, in order to better understand their unique needs and set priorities for advocacy strategies to address them.
Linguistic rights refer to the right of people and communities to use, maintain, and develop their native languages without discrimination. This right allows people to use their own language in public, receive education, and access information in their own language. It also includes the right to use their own language in legal proceedings.
On the other hand, freedom of expression is a fundamental human right enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It states that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
This right is protected under international law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Linguistic rights are significant for human dignity because they allow individuals and communities to exercise other human rights, such as political and social participation, cultural and religious expression, access to information, education, and the justice system. When these rights are denied or restricted, it can lead to discrimination, marginalization, and oppression.
Upholding linguistic rights and freedom of expression, on the other hand, enables individuals and communities to fully participate in society, express their unique identities and perspectives, and contribute to the cultural diversity and richness of our wondrous world.
This is how Smart Cities World‘s Cultural space covered the city of Madinah, the second holy city in Saudi Arabia. Madinah, as a smart city, was found to cohabit for its future.
Abdulmajeed Albalawi, smart city programme director at Madinah Regional Authority, explains how the Saudi Arabian city is harnessing innovation to not only solve urban challenges, but promote Madinah’s cultural and historical heritage to citizens and visitors alike.
Madinah’s status as a holy city means a lot of the activity in the city is centred around the Holy Mosque
Madinah is primarily known as a holy city – where do your smart city ambitions intersect with that identity?
Abdulmajeed Albalawi: We’re mainly focused on solving city challenges and improving quality of life for our citizens. In that way, there’s no contradiction between Madinah as a holy city and Madinah as a smart city. We see our smart city strategy as an enabler to meet the needs of the city and its people, and to create positive experiences for those people.
Our aim is to become more holistic and to introduce more tools that will serve our citizens. That extends to the holy elements of the city and people’s lives and will make the city more suitable for those needs.
Our objectives are to improve city life for all citizens and create new jobs and economic opportunities – for example, around start-ups and technology. These are the driving forces behind the projects that Madinah has taken on so far, and as we see it, one influences and helps to solve the other – improving quality of life leads to better opportunities and a better urban economy.
As part of this work, we’ve designed an engine to capture the challenges the city faces so we can more easily connect together the issues and needs with solutions, with a view to meeting our main objectives.
When are some of the primary challenges that Madinah is facing?
AA: We have challenges split into two sections – business and operational. In terms of business challenges, we’re aiming to reduce the unemployment rate in the city through the projects we launch, and improve the digital skills of the workforce as part of that.
On the operational side, we’re looking at how we break down siloes between departments and promote a more open mindset. It’s a clear challenge for a lot of cities that needs to be solved, and for Madinah we want to overcome it to ensure that everyone can work towards our smart city objectives in the right way.
We see our smart city strategy as an enabler to meet the needs of the city and its people, and to create positive experiences for those people
There are other challenges out in the city that we’re facing, too. Madinah’s status as a holy city means a lot of the activity in the city is centred around the Holy Mosque, both for residents and visitors from around the world. As a result, there is a constant flow of people in and around the mosque which we need to manage to cope with crowding in the centre of the city. To deal with this challenge, we have launched an incubator in partnership with universities, experts and start-ups from around the world.
The incubator will be dedicated to solving further urban challenges in Madinah, too, identifying and defining the issues being faced and then engaging in a continuous problem-solving process with experts to overcome them. It’s a unique proposition for the city to work in this way and to have potential solutions being recommended on a continual basis from international experts.
What kind of technology-based solutions is Madinah looking to deploy to solve these challenges to become a smarter city?
AA: Our technology partners are crucial in achieving our goals as a smart city. We’re currently working with FIWARE and using their technology to create our own smart city platform. Madinah is the first middle eastern city to make use of FIWARE’s platform. We chose FIWARE’s open platform because our objectives call for us to view Madinah from a ‘city as a system’ perspective, and to solve problems based on what the system is telling us.
The smart city strategy seeks to improve city life for all citizens and create new jobs and economic opportunities
There’s no contradiction between Madinah as a holy city and Madinah as a smart city, said Abdulmajeed Albalawi
We’re now creating our city as a system via the FIWARE platform, meaning we’re connecting the dots between Madinah’s services, operations and departments, and beginning to break down siloes to identify the right solutions to issues at the right time. We’re collecting data from all over the city and connecting it together to enable data analytics, which will be really important in how we work out the kinds of solutions we require.
The main benefit of breaking down these operational siloes is being able to better define issues and challenges, as we have much more context on the city and its operations as a whole. It’s crucial for Madinah to be able to work in this way, and the challenge with crowds at the holy mosque illustrate why; we need to understand where the problem originates so we can solve it at the source.
Another benefit is that Madinah’s city departments have been able to collaborate more often and more easily. In turn, that has meant we have been able to push towards our primary objectives more collectively.
Outside establishing the smart city platform through FIWARE’s technology, we’re now looking into smart lighting. We see connected streetlighting as the beginning of a nervous system for the city, able to gather data about the city and monitor pedestrian and traffic flow, as well as air quality. We’re also exploring how we can use the same infrastructure to promote messages and information to citizens through digital signage. The streetlights and all associated monitoring will feed back into the smart city platform to give us a more holistic view of the city and how it is operating.
We have recently signed an agreement to build a full-scale digital twin of Madinah using satellite imagery, becoming the first city in the Middle East to do so
Coming back to the crowd challenges around the holy mosque and the central area of the city, we’re also developing a simulator to model those crowds. We’re currently designing the model and later will deploy sensors in the city to gather data to be able to monitor crowds and simulate scenarios. This won’t necessarily be a full digital twin of the mosque, but will be a mirror for the movement within and around it, including parts of the city infrastructure and operations that have an impact on movement and crowding.
We have recently signed an agreement to build a full-scale digital twin of Madinah using satellite imagery, becoming the first city in the Middle East to do so. We’ll use the 3D model digital twin for urban planning, traffic management, crowd management and urban analytics across the entire city, not just the centre and the holy mosque. We anticipate that we’ll have a digital twin of the city in the next three months.
How can innovation help to protect and promote Madinah’s history and culture?
AA: Through all of this smart city work, it’s important that we also look to promote the city’s culture and history, so we’re assessing how we can use technology to bring that history back to life. Here, Madinah is looking to use a combination of augmented reality and digital twin technology to illustrate our history in a more dynamic and modern way, both for the benefit of citizens and visitors.
I think innovation is all about how to open doors to experiences and the city’s unknowns. Technology is a great enabler for Madinah’s heritage and culture and can help to show everyone in the city how its identity has developed to become what it is now. We’re not designing the city around technology, we’re designing it around experiences, and how those experiences can create stories to be shared among people. Madinah’s culture flows through that process and innovation just helps us to draw it out.
MENA countries should cooperate to overcome water crisis, expert says in a Jerusalem Post published 23 March 2022, article.
The Middle East and North Africa region is one of the most water-stressed in the world. According to statements issued by local authorities at the MENA Desalination Projects Forum 2022, held last week in Abu Dhabi ahead of World Water Day on Tuesday, 14 of the 20 countries in the world with the highest amount of water scarcity, are located in the MENA region.
Aiman Eid Al-Rawajfeh, a professor of Chemical Engineering and Desalination at Tafila Technical University in Jordan, and a Jordan Engineering Association-certified consultant on seawater desalination and environment told The Media Line that the current demand of water in the region is greater than the drinkable water available. “There is great shortage between supply and need in the MENA region, and Jordan is one of the poorest countries in water resources and supply,” he said.
Al-Rawajfeh explained that this is due to the lack of natural potable water sources and – mostly – due to the rapid population growth in the area, which includes, in Jordan’s case, many refugees migrating to the country, exponentially increasing the water demand.
Jordan Valley field effected by drought (credit: REUTERS)
He said that – together with wastewater treatment, reuse and water harvesting – desalination of seawater is a favorable choice as an alternative non-traditional water source, which can partially help solve the problem. However, the high cost of desalination may not be affordable for some countries in the region, he added.
For that reason, Al-Rawajfeh suggests that there should be a greater cooperation among the MENA countries to help one other to improve their desalinization plants, in order to make them more efficient and able to become a more significant solution.
Jordan, for instance, has only one desalinization plant, located in Aqaba, which Al- Rawajfeh describes as “very small.”
He says that almost none of the water used in Jordan comes from the desalinization plant. Most of the water comes from ground water pumped from the Disi aquifer, or from Jordan’s share of the water from the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers. In addition, some water is treated and used.
This has become an insufficient source for the country due to a population that continues to grow, according to Al-Rawajfeh. That is why he suggests that the Gulf countries, which have greater financial resources, and experience in desalinization, should invest in such projects in other MENA countries including Jordan in a show of regional cooperation. “Suitable funding should be supplied to the researchers, and innovations for more R&D and commercialization of some great ideas to solve the problem” he said. In addition to the high cost of desalinization of water, Al-Rawajfeh explained that, if the process is not done properly, it could also cause environmental damage. “The residue left after the process, meaning the high concentration of brine, is an issue,” he said. “But suitable treatment should be practiced to protect the environment,” he added. Israel is one of the leading countries in the region in finding alternative solutions to similar water scarcity problems. One of the most innovative solutions is provided by the Israeli company Watergen, a global leader in Atmospheric Water Generation (AWG) technology. Watergen’s technology provides a completely new and seemingly unlimited water resource – the air. Michael Rutman, Watergen co-CEO, and Jenny Goldman, marketing manager of Emerging Markets for Watergen, told The Media Line that the Watergen technology represents a significant effort to find a solution to what Goldman called “probably the most pressing crisis of the 21st century – the water crisis.”
“Watergen’s technology extracts water from the air by enabling the air to move fast into the patented Genius system in a significantly short time, ensuring greater efficiency and thus using less energy,” Goldman explained.
The machine includes an “energy-efficient heat exchange module, using condensation as a means of producing fresh water. One liter of water costs 7-15 cents, which depends on local electricity costs,” she said.
Watergen offers a variety of water supply solutions, with machines that can generate from 12 liters to 6,000 liters per day. “The technology can be implemented at home or office; in commercial and industrial scales; and can even be generated on-the-go, totally off-grid. Currently, Watergen provides an essential water supply to corporate offices, restaurants, hotels, hospitals and distilleries,” she said.
Goldman explained that Watergen operates on five different continents, providing water to companies and governments in multiple countries around the globe. Watergen has five production lines worldwide, and is setting up more, to meet the demand.
The vision of Dr. Mikhael Mirilashvili, the president of Watergen, is to provide clean and safe drinking water to every corner of the globe, according to Goldman. With its pathbreaking technology, Goldman said, “Watergen is working with governments, NGOs, and multinational corporations around the world in order to realize its mission: to solve the severe drinking water crisis that plagues almost every country.”
The top featured image is for illustration; credit to Reuters.
A three-day forum in Morocco emphasized the importance of environmentally friendly, socially resilient, and technologically innovative approaches to urban development. Key discussions included the role of smart cities in achieving sustainable development and the significance of digitalization and AI in transforming societies. Participants highlighted the need for smarter planning strategies and collaboration across African cities.
run Africa from top to bottom, just that… April 8, 2024 Russ Cook, nicknamed the “ hardest Geezer » (the toughest of the giants) completed his remarkable expedition of traveling the entire length of Africa after about a year. The 27-year-old from the United Kingdom crossed deserts, mountains and rainforests on his journey from South Africa to […]
North Africa’s Renewables Revolution: Unlocking The Region’s Potential For Climate Resilience By Pooja Chandak In the face of climate change challenges, North Africa – encompassing Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan – emerges as a key player in the global energy transition. The region’s economies, heavily reliant on agriculture, fishery, and tourism, are […]
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