Rights and Accountability 12 September 2019
An Israeli company plans to build 52 wind turbines as tall as 64-story buildings in the occupied Golan Heights.
Chameleons EyeAn Israeli renewable energy company is suing a human rights group over its investigation of a wind farm the firm plans to build in the occupied Golan Heights with government backing.
Al-Marsad, the group which Energix is suing, has found that the Tel Aviv-based company’s wind turbine project violates the indigenous Syrian population’s right to self-determination. The scheme also serves to strengthen Israel’s control over the territory.
The group says Energix’s filing against it sets “an extraordinarily dangerous precedent.”
Along with 15 other organizations, the group is urgently requesting that United Nations experts “intervene immediately to protect human rights in the occupied Syrian Golan.”
The Energix lawsuit is the first to be brought forward by an Israeli firm under Israel’s anti-boycott law to suppress the activity of a human rights group.
That law, enacted in 2011, imposes sanctions on groups advocating boycotts of Israel or its settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights.
Energix also alleges that Al-Marsad has engaged in “slander” by describing how its energy project violates international law in a report published in January.
Entrenching occupation
The Golan Heights is Syrian territory captured by Israel during the 1967 war. Approximately 340 Syrian villages and farms in the Golan Heights were destroyed by Israel, which built Jewish settlements in their place.
Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights violate international law, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.
Some 26,000 Israeli settlers enjoy control over 95 percent of the Golan – a landmass of 1,860 square kilometers representing 1 percent of Syria’s total territory. Approximately the same number of Syrians have control over the rest of the Golan’s land.
After Israel claimed to annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the UN Security Council declared the move “null and void and without international legal effect.”
Energix seeks to build “an enormous energy project that would occupy almost a quarter of the agricultural land” that is still controlled by Syrians in the Golan, according to Al-Marsad.
The project would severely restrict the expansion of Syrian communities. Nearby Israeli settlements have rejected smaller wind farm projects.
“By executing the project on native Syrian lands but seeking approval and validity through Israel’s regulatory scheme, Energix is supporting the human rights violations embedded in Israel’s illegal and discriminatory occupation of the Golan,” Al-Marsad states.
The group’s investigation “uncovered that the Syrians of the Golan are being lied to, manipulated and purposefully divided over the project by both the company advancing it and the Israeli government.”
One-fifth of the Syrian population in the Golan Heights has signed a petition opposing the Energix project.
The turbines, which emit low-frequency sound waves and flickering, pose a health risk to nearby Syrian communities, particularly to people with epilepsy.
But “most concerning … is the risk Energix’s project poses to Syrians’ cultural life in the Golan,” according to a paper by Al-Marsad and Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group.
“Indigenous Syrians are deeply attached to their ancestral land,” the groups add. “This attachment is strong despite Israel’s repeated attempts to dispossess Syrians of their small plots.”
Decades of occupation and discriminatory Israeli practices have “destroyed native Syrians’ economic prosperity, especially in the agriculture sector,” according to Al-Marsad’s report from January.
Economic suffocation has made “the proposition of earning quick cash far more tempting” to Syrians in the Golan than in nearby Israeli settlements that have rejected similar schemes.
The project will involve building and widening roads, clearing land, installing “52 structures [with] the equivalent height of 64-story buildings,” and a new underground electric line stretching 30 kilometers.
“All this will permanently disfigure the Golan and reshape its entire existence,” Al-Marsad states.
Exploitation
Israel has prevented occupied villages in the Golan from creating an independent energy utility system, forcing them to be permanently dependent on Israel for energy.
A local plan to develop a wind farm was stalled by the Israeli military in 2014, “around the same time Energix began aggressively progressing” its project, according to Al-Marsad.
The Energix project, meanwhile, has been fast-tracked by Israeli regulatory bodies.
“Israel has prioritized developing natural resource-based industries” in the territories it occupies “because such industries are physically embedded in the land,” Al-Marsad states.
Israel has accelerated gas and oil exploration in the Golan since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Israel prohibits Syrians from utilizing these same resources.
The energy produced by the Energix wind farm in the Golan Heights will be sold directly to the Israeli Electric Corporation and bring in an estimated yearly revenue of $38-44 million.
Energix “will only pay out about 1 percent of its profits to Syrian landowners,” according to Al-Marsad’s investigation.
“Similar plans in Israel or Israeli settlements are said to have proposed to pay out as much as five times more,” the group adds.
Energix’s project in occupied Syrian villages exploits “economic and legal instability that stems from occupation-based policies that discriminate against their ethnic background and national origin.”
Israel will soon be exporting electricity to Europe through the EuroAsia Interconnector project, due to be launched over the next decade. The project will directly connect Europe to Israel’s illegal settlements built on occupied land, implicating it in war crimes.
“This energy infrastructure integration further entrenches Israel’s occupation and colonization,” according to the paper by Al-Marsad and Al-Haq.
Comments
Energy
Permalink Frank Dallas replied on
Once again here is the odd conjunction of a progressive measure and reactionary injustice. Many young Brits went to work on a Kibbutz in the '60s and '70s, convinced that they were progressive because co-operative in character. It should never be forgotten that some of the most vile, entrenched, racist acts of oppression against the Palestinians were initiated or supported by the Israeli Labour movement. This is something of a conundrum for those on the left who assume economic justice means justice per se. The example of Israel reveals the fallacy.
Here we have an energy generation scheme apparently in step with the ecological movement, seemingly responsible in the face of the climate catastrophe, in fact despicably oppressive and unjust.
The essence is this: justice brooks no exceptions. To build a co-operative economy in isolation doesn't rule out injustice beyond it. There have to be common standards and impersonal values and they must apply universally. The Israeli Labour movement was and is capable of standing for justice within Israel while claiming genetic entitlement to Palestine. This fundamental Zionist claim is ipso facto racist. As Weizmann argued, there is a "qualitative" difference between a Jew and an Arab. The State of Israel is founded on that belief. The left is internationalist in character but it hasn't been clear enough in arguing that democratic equality has to be a universal value and that has permitted ostensibly left of centre governments to pursue policies which have undermined the commitment to common standards and impersonal values. Consider the British Labour government of 1945 and what happened in Palestine between December 1947 and late 1948. Effectively, a government which argued for equality and established the NHS to prove it, permitted ethnic cleansing to go ahead while it had some 100,000 troops on hand. Labour should have stopped the ethnic cleansing. It should do so now.
green washing
Permalink Peter Purich replied on
The Liberal Party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Canada will, no doubt, rush to celebrate another indigenous land grab, given their history. But no word from Jody Wilson-Raybould nor the Green Party of Canada.
While I support renewal energy - including wind power- but the thought of orange and white, 64-story monstrosities would be both a monstrosity and illegal.