“Green Clusters of Wrath”: The people of the Syrian Golan resist the “turbines” of displacement

Editorial Board

While the mouthpieces and activists of the “Syrian Thermidor” inside Syria are busy marketing the illusions of “neoliberal investment” and selling off the public sector to war investors and warlords, our people in the occupied Syrian Golan are facing an imperialist colonial tool used by the Zionist enemy to expand settlement and demographic displacement, which has come to be known as “Green Colonialism.” The “turbine” project imposed by the Israeli company Enerjix is not a project for alternative energy, but a weapon of mass destruction aimed at liquidating the Syrian material and economic presence. We see in the battle of “Maqam al-Ya’furi” and the protests in Majdal Shams, Buq’atha, and Ein Qiniyye, the core of our class and liberation struggle.

What happened in the Golan?

The Israeli occupation authorities released, on Sunday, three activists from the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan after arresting them last Thursday for their participation in the protests against the “fans” project, or what is locally called “displacement wind turbines.” The released individuals are Emil Hussein Masoud, Mayad al-Batheesh, and Fahd al-Wali. They were arrested for “threatening people associated with the project and damaging property during the protests last April,” according to the Israeli authorities. The court held a session in Tiberias to consider the police’s request to extend the detention for five days, but the judge decided to detain them for only two days until Sunday. This comes at a time when confrontations continue because of the project, which threatens large areas of agricultural land for apple and cherry crops in three Golan villages. Since the announcement of the project years ago, the residents have been living in a state of tension and fear due to the economic, political, and environmental danger the project poses to the region.

What is the wind turbine project?

The project aims to build 220-meter-high turbines on an area of 3,800 dunams of agricultural land in the villages of Majdal Shams, Buq’atha, and Mas’ada. 21 to 32 turbines will be built in the first phase to generate electricity from wind energy. The project is being implemented by the Israeli alternative energy company Enerjix, which operates in the United States, Poland, Lithuania, and Israel. Planning for the project began in 2008, and after legal objections and discussions that lasted for years, the Israeli National Planning and Infrastructure Committee approved it in 2019. In January 2020, the Ministerial Committee for Planning Issues approved the project, and the decision became governmental in the same month. In 2023, the company began laying the foundations to implement the project, which caused a wave of wide protests in the Druze villages. June witnessed resistance by the residents to the attempts to implement the project, which developed into violent confrontations between the residents and the police, and extended to other areas in the Galilee, which prompted the company to announce the freezing of the project. In November of last year, protests renewed after the company announced the resumption of work at some sites targeted by the project east of “Birket Ram,” which led to the residents coming out from the Maqam (Abi Dharr al-Ghifari) in demonstrations on horses and in cars, and they confronted the workers and forced them to withdraw. The Israeli occupation police refused at that time to provide protection for the company and the workers.

The myth of “green energy” and capitalist plunder:

Residents and activists speak about a set of damages resulting from the project, the first of which is the loss of large areas of agricultural land, in addition to the health impact, as wind turbines emit constant noise and vibrations that affect the physical and psychological health of the residents, especially with their proximity to residential areas and the effect of moving shadows. The project also has wide environmental impacts, mainly on migratory birds, bees, and livestock. In 2020, a group of organizations issued a press release explaining the damages of the project and considered it an existential threat to the Syrian residents in the Golan. The statement pointed to the dangerous and destructive effects that the project could cause, from destroying an important part of the traditional agricultural economy represented by fruit tree cultivation, and the risks it causes to the residents from noise, infrasound waves, and flickering, and restricting the urban expansion of the villages targeted in the project, which increases the housing crisis suffered by the people of the Golan, in addition to distorting the natural landscape in the region. Our report reveals that the occupation seeks to build 25 giant turbines 220 meters high (equivalent to skyscrapers) on an area of 3,800 dunams of farmers’ land. It is “disaster capitalism” that exploits Israeli laws (such as Decision 4450) to confiscate Syrian lands under the name of “national projects.” They are stealing the wind to sell us electricity, and destroying the cherry and apple orchards—the pillow of material safety for the Golan farmer—to turn our indigenous residents into “day laborers” or displaced persons in a suffocating housing crisis.

Striking economic independence (dismantling dependency):

The Syrian farmer in the Golan has succeeded, through their agricultural cooperatives and refrigerators, in building a unique model of “subsistence and resistance economy,” breaking their dependency on the Israeli market. Therefore, the fan project comes as an act of “class punishment” aimed at destroying this independence and forcibly attaching the Syrian farmer to the Israeli capitalist production system.

Judicial terrorism and arrests:

The arrest of the comrades (Emil Masoud, Mayad al-Batheesh, Fahd al-Wali) is an attempt to intimidate the masses and break the collective popular will. But the response of the masses was decisive: “The decision is popular, not individual.” This is revolutionary popular organization; where individual leadership dissolves into the will of the group, and confrontation becomes an obligation for every laborer.