The blue and white painted ceramic jars stretch up to the ceiling. Marked with the traditional symbol of five crosses, each jar held a medicine ranging from honey to myrrh to the famous Jerusalem balsan. The jars came from the first pharmacy in Jerusalem founded by a Franciscan month in the 17th century. “When the […]
Paris art exhibit tackles Islamic taboos in a show aimed at broadening Western views of Mid East culture. Oooh la la…The Body Uncovered, at Paris’ Arab World Institute (AWI), presents two hundred controversial paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos that tackle variations of a provocative theme: the naked body. A mix of art forms created by […]
Cases of the swine flu have died down, now avian flu scare resurges in Israel and the West Bank. Image via todds-gallery Animal cases of avian flu in Bala village in the Tul Karem area of the West Bank, Palestinian Authority northeast of Tel Aviv, have been confirmed, and some 250,000 chickens culled, according to […]
Young Israeli and Palestinian Architects Are Invited to Join World Renowned Architects for a Week of Green Building Lectures, Site Visits, and Workshops. With cooperation from Friends of the Earth Middle East, Hebron Polytechnic, and the Porter School for Environmental Studies (among many others), the International Non-Profit Organization ECOWEEK has announced that from July 25th […]
The Jordan River’s source is a sewage pipe, and it ends in a whimper. Predicted to run dry by 2011, Karin goes on a media tour with FoEME to see firsthand the damage done. Here a Russian tourist dips into Kaser El Yehud, believed to be Jesus’ baptismal site on the Jordan. The bus full […]
Jordanian teens work to learn more about Jordan River conservation efforts and practices. Friends of the Earth Middle East (known as foy-me for its acronym FoEME) have accomplished to develop an unprecedented study of the quality of water in the Jordan River, which they hope will lead to its rehabilitation. Highly polluted from a variety […]
Tractors carving up the face of a hill in preparation for the new town. (Photo credit: Green Prophet) About a half hour’s drive north of Ramallah, construction has begun on the first planned Palestinian city. Surrounded by sleepy hilltop villages and terraced olive orchards, Rawabi, which means “hills” Arabic, is being marketed as a green and […]
A young, ‘green’ peacemaker Ilana Meallem, who first wanted to serve her country in the army, now devotes herself to coexistence and environmental good works. You’ll find her wherever the peacemakers and ecologists roam, at venues like the annual United Religions Initiative Middle East North Africa (MENA) region conference. Today Ilana Muallem is one of […]
Karin meets Prince Hassan of Jordan at a water security conference in Switzerland last week. It was a meeting of minds, water minds. Water consultants, ambassadors who’ve built water treaties, and government specialists and negotiators from around the Middle East and Europe gathered in Montreux, Switzerland for a two-day workshop on Water Security in the […]
For the past two weekends I attended a Quran study seminar hosted by the Al-Maghrib Institute in Bradford, UK. Throughout the course the staff and speakers directed our attention to the environmental schemes that they ran. As a representative of Green Prophet I seized the opportunity to look into the ways British citizens were contributing […]
Plastic bottles (in Hebrew and Arabic) wash up on the shore of the Red Sea in Sinai, Egypt. In this region water and pollution knows no boundaries. How can Israel be part of the change? Is Israel a water hog, unjustly siphoning aquifers from its neighbours? Does it take more than its share? Or does […]
Wael looks into the horizon (on Mount Nebo, Jordan) and sees a new “green” economy that could radically improve life for Palestinians. The Marda Permaculture Farm is a working farm and a demonstration site for permaculture principles, techniques and strategies in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority. Based in the community of Marda, the project promotes […]
After around two months of international phone calls, this Sunday and Monday Green Prophet hosted a whirlwind two-day (20-hour) seminar on environmental blogging in Madaba, Jordan. Thanks to the good efforts of Volunteers for Peace and the Masar Center, nearly 20 Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli writers and activists met for the first time and learned […]
Hiba Hamzeh from Volunteering for Peace living in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority, blogs about her desire to initiate a "green" change among people and youths in the PA:
Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanians host cross-border workshop on environment blogging in Jordan to spur Middle East change. The UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen is putting a lot of pressure on oil-producing nations in the Middle East; but the reality is that most countries in the region are failing miserably in all areas of environmental […]