A Jewish woman named Rachel kept a number of Hamas terrorists calm by preparing them cookies on the Oct 7 terror attack on Israeli communities outside the Gaza Strip. Jewish women do have their wiles, most apparent when it comes to cooking. Jewish women from North African countries such as Morocco, Tunisia and Libya are known for the tastiest food. Jewish traditions found in Israeli cooking incorporate flavors from the Diaspora. When Mia Schem (her Instagram is here), the Israeli-French national kidnapped by Hamas terrorists wanted to keep herself alive, she did what she knew best: she cooked Jewish food like her mother taught her and like her life depended on it.

Although she had only one functional arm, she instructed a group of Hamas terrorists what they needed to buy at the market, she said on the half hour video she released in Israel. She was going to cook for them a Libyan dish known as tbeha. Libyan food or Tripoli food, as it’s sometimes known in Israel, is rich with long-simmering sauces that include paprika (hot and sweet), cumin and maybe some baharat. They are North African stews best enjoyed with a chunk of fresh bread or a bowl of fluffy couscous.

Do you want to learn to cook to save your life? Try the life-saving meal, tbeha cooked by Mia Schem. This is a Green Prophet version of the tasty dish that can be cooked with chicken, beef or for protein you can add tofu or chick peas. Feel free to load up on the olive oil. It’s only good for you. Once you have the sauce down pat you can pretty much make plenty of variations adding potato, zucchini, chickpeas, English peas, and haricot vert. My favorite is with green peas and potatoes, plain and simple without the meat. The key is to cook and simmer for a long time, hours if you have the time.

In Jewish households it is customary to have pots of hot food simmering on a blech overnight well into the next day as religious or observant Jews do all their cooking before the Sabbath starts. This way, a real rest for all can be had, with bullies full and satisfied.

Ingredients for tebha:

Tebha can save your life. This Libyan dish was prepared by Mia Schem as a way to keep the Hamas terrorists keeping her in Gaza both calm and happy. Image via The MD Chef 

• 2 pounds chicken, cut into pieces
• 3 large potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 2 large onions, finely chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• small can of tomato paste
• 1 cup chickpeas cooked (canned or frozen is okay)
• 1/4 cup olive oil or more. You can lighten buy adding any tasteless vegetable oil.
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 to 2 tablespoons of sweet paprika
• 1 tablespoon or more hot paprika (to taste)
• 1 tablespoon baharat (you can make baharat from this recipe here)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Fresh coriander or parsley for garnishing later
• optional variations: 1 pound green peas, green beans, green or brown lentils. Tomato chunks.

Instructions:

1. Sauté Vegetables:
   • In a large wide pan, heat olive oil over medium heat.
   • Add chopped onions and minced garlic, sauté until softened.
   • Incorporate tomato paste, spices, salt, and pepper. Stir well.
2. Cook Chicken:
   • In a separate pot, brown the chicken or beef pieces on all sides with a bit of oil.
   • Once browned, add meet to sauce
3. Combine and Simmer:
   • Mix the ingredients well, ensuring the chicken is coated with the spices.
   • Pour in enough water to cover the ingredients and bring the mixture to a simmer.
   • Add potatoes, and also add vegetables such as peas, green beans, lentils.
   • Let it cook over low heat until the chicken or beef is tender, and the flavors meld. You can make a variation with tofu or any other kind of vegan protein such as adding more chickpeas.
4. Adjust Seasoning:
   • Taste and adjust the seasoning as needed. Add more salt, pepper, or spices to suit your preferences. We sometimes add a teaspoon of vegan soup mix for extra flavor. A dash of white wine or red never hurt anyone.
5. Serve:
   • Once the tbeha is cooked and the flavors have melded, it’s ready to be served.
   • Garnish with fresh coriander or parsley before serving on a fluffy bed of couscous.

Libyan cuisine is a reflection of the country’s rich history from North African, Jewish, Berber and Arab and Ottoman influences along with Italian cultures. In Libya, tbeha is a staple dish enjoyed during family gatherings and celebrations. It showcases the country’s agricultural abundance, with ingredients like chickpeas, lentils, and tomatoes being widely produced.

Want to know more about Libya’s sustainability initiatives and the environment there? Dive in here. Looking for more food? Here is an Iftar-inspired vegetarian couscous dish. Couscous common in North Africa is the national dish of Libya.

The post Mia Schem’s tbeha dish saved her life in Gaza appeared first on Green Prophet.

While Lebanon is going through an historic financial crisis, fishermen are trying to survive by fishing with dynamite. A special Green Prophet report on a social and environmental disaster:

Sitting in the courtyard of his home in a port district of Tripoli, Sayed*, a fisherman in his sixties, enjoys a coffee prepared by his wife. The crutches that have helped him since a violent car accident are lying on the ground. In his damaged mouth, where only two teeth remain, is a cigarette, which he soon lights. With it, he demonstrates the effect of fire on ammonium nitrate. From a black bag, he extracts a handful of green powder which he placed on a plate. His family witnesses the sinister scene.

“This is what I make my dynamite with,” he says with a serious face. The old man pours the nitrate into a piece of plastic which he rolls up mechanically. His wife brings him some thread to tighten it. All he needs now is the detonator to finish the homemade preparation. Sayed is a former dynamite fisherman, an illegal practice. Even if he has not forgotten anything about its manufacturing, he claims he has withdrawn from the market.

Land of the cedar but also of the sea, Lebanon hosts 44 ports and a mostly artisanal fishing industry. Dynamite fishing has evolved throughout the tumults of history. During the civil war (1974 to 1990), sticks of dynamite were common currency. Today, it’s in Palestinian camps, such as in Nhar-al-Bared, 12 miles north of Tripoli, that you can find ready-to-use sticks. Other fishermen, like Sayed, prefer to make their own.

Also the recipes differ, they all use ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer sold in any agricultural store and the cause of the explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020. “Homemade” dynamite also requires a detonator, banned from public sale but easily available on the black market. For the rest, everyone has their own tips. Some add sugar, others charcoal. With the crises of recent years, the techniques have been further refined.

Artificial reefs made from car wrecks are created to make nurseries for fish. Others, for saving fuel, swim to sea pushing a floating tire loaded with dynamite and bombard the fishes. A 50 kg bag exploding at a depth of 60 meters has a radius of 50 meters and can harvest up to four tonnes of fish. After the explosion, the fishermen just need to wait until the dead fishes go back up to the surface.

“Fish are killed by the shock wave which causes hemorrhagic lesions of the gills,” analyzes Rami Khodr, technical director at the RBML Food Labs laboratory in Beirut. Particularly effective, dynamite fishing is well established in the poor regions of North Lebanon.

Surviving poverty

Sitting under a sheet metal shelter with fishing companions, Amir*, 34, is waiting. Due to unstable weather, he was unable to go out to sea. The man lives in Aabdeh, in the Akkar region. The Syrian border is only 10 miles away. The surroundings are poor and abandoned, the smell of fish and diesel escapes from this small fishing port. “The fish are getting smaller and smaller and there are fewer and fewer of them, he says sadly. We sometimes have to go further to find it, but it costs a lot of diesel.”

So, for him, it is not surprising that some are turning to illegal fishing.

A two-hour drive north of Beirut, Tripoli is no longer the flourishing Phoenician city of the old days. The town was already poor before the economic crisis, but since 2019, Tripolitans have joined Syrian and Palestinian refugees in poverty. As day breaks over this desperate city, the port is bustling with activity. The fishing boats have returned from their night of hunting. On the market stalls, dozens of marine species lie in trays of ice. It’s hard to guess which ones were captured with the explosives. “Dynamite? None of that here!”, claims one of the sellers, clearly shocked by the question.

Lebanon’s shipwreck

If the pandemic followed by the explosion at the port of Beirut had already weakened the country, the economic crisis that occurred in 2019 and is still ongoing has destroyed much of the hope of the Lebanese population. The country is experiencing inflation which accelerated at the start of the year to reach 270% year-on-year in April, 2023. This crisis has plunged more than 80% of the Lebanese population into precarious living conditions, with half of them living in extreme poverty. To try to get by, people work night and day.

Thus, fishermen no longer belong only to the sea. They are also taxi drivers, café owners, bus drivers. Many had to sell their boats. “It is sad because fishing is a family tradition, a heritage,” adds Amir. Bassem is another fisherman from the port of Aabdeh. Sitting on a plastic chair in the hot sun, he relates his father’s accident in which he lost seven fingers while handling dynamite: “He was at sea. It was raining and windy. He lit a cigarette and the dynamite exploded. Since then he stopped using it.”

According to the Safadi Foundation, a structure that develops sustainable projects in Lebanon, 5% of fishermen use dynamite fishing. “In Tripoli, this technique was in decline for several years before increasing again in 2019, points out Samer Fatfat, consultant at the Safadi foundation. On the beaches of Akkar, it has remained constant.”

A failing state

On 25 miles of coastline between Tripoli and Syria, the army was quickly overwhelmed. In Tripoli’s Al Mina port alone, more than 1,800 fishermen are registered. These wooden motorboats, less than seven meters long, enter and leave the port by means of a simple visual check by the army from the dyke. While the authorities clearly lack resources, not even having enough fuel to arrest illegal fishermen, they may also be in cahoots with the outlaws. In the port of Al Mina, illegal fishermen are known to everyone but the omerta, a southern Italian code of silence, hangs over anyone who dares to denounce them.

As for the president of the fishing union, crisscrossing the Corniche and the fish souks aboard his gleaming black Mercedes, he brushes the question aside: “It’s not our mission to arrest the fishermen and if they are arrested it is only for a few days in prison.”

Corruption, however, is costly to illegal fishermen. According to one of them, 40% of the revenue is intended for corruption and 60% is shared between him and his crew. However, a law governing the rules of fishing in Lebanon exists since 1929. Dynamite is strictly forbidden. But like a country that does not have a president since a year, the state is falling apart and the laws are not applied.

Some fishermen even bomb the Palm Islands Nature Reserve, in front of Tripoli, where all human activity is theoretically prohibited. Explosions not only damage the seabed but also contribute to the reduction of fish stocks without distinction between small and large fish. A toxicological analysis carried out by the RBML Food Labs laboratory, which tested three samples of fish from a market in Tripoli, demonstrated a significant quantity of ammonium inside the fish. But due to the massive use of this fertilizer in agriculture, it is difficult to know whether this pollution comes from dynamites or land runoff.

Every day, hundreds of bombs are dropped in Lebanese waters by fishermen, descendants of Phoenicians, renowned for their navigation skills. In these ravaged lands, the sea is a constant witness to tragedies. Each time a conflict has caused the closure of maritime space, fishermen have found a sea rich in fish. But the natural cycle is constantly overtaken by the death spiral. The president of the Al Mina union even dares a comparison: “It’s like Israel and Palestine, the sea is the enemy against whom the fishermen throw bombs to survive.”

*names changed

The post Dynamite fishing is at war with the sea appeared first on Green Prophet.

So many countries in the Middle East and North Africa rely way too much on concrete for their building needs, but Libya Design bucks the trend with Doshma – a new creative hub built in part with a used shipping container.

Opened in June, 2013, this striking new arts center is the talk of Tripoli.

Inspired by the 2011 Libyan Revolution, which culminated in longstanding despot Muammar al-Gaddafi’s ouster, Doshma provides an exciting new model for urban architecture in the Mediterranean city.

Granted, the domed glass shell is probably not the wisest material choice since it’s bound to trap heat and ratchet up energy costs, but given its minor footprint of just 140 square meters, the center won’t require much to stay cool in the first place.

But we love the shipping container, and not only because it’s recycled.

In addition to reusing a material that would otherwise languish at port, Libya Design, Allabina and HudHud have infused their cultural icon with an idealism rarely seen in contemporary North African architecture.

During the revolution, this particular shipping container was used to deliver aid to revolutionaries who fought hard to wrest control of their country out of Gaddafi’s greedy hands.

“Doshma is an architectural response to a country’s struggle,” says Libya Design’s Chairman and Co-Founder Walid El-Turki.

Other materials used for defense are deployed as well, further emphasizing the revolution’s symbolic role in the project’s design. The vaulted interior is used not only to exhibit work produced by local artists but also to carve out a sacred space to share ideas and socialize.

Unlike the cold hard ambience of concrete architecture, the exposed aluminum infrastructure lends an intriguing industrial essence to the center. Far and away the most exciting project to hit the city in some time, Doshma has the potential to spur more of the same.

:: World Architecture News

The post Tripoli’s Doshma Creative Hub Has a Recycled Shipping Container Core appeared first on Green Prophet.

Like in many Middle Eastern cities, walking the streets of Tripoli in Northern Lebanon is an assault on the lungs. Battered, old taxis dart and crawl along the cramped roads, oozing billows of pungent fumes, while furiously honking their horns. But this all changed on 14 November.

A coalition of youth NGOs from the north of Lebanon, known as the Tripoli Youth Network, came up with an idea that was to become the Middle East’s first ‘car-free’ day.

Calling itself a ‘Mega Green Event’, aside from the thousands of Lebanese citizens who attended the event, the initiative attracted high-profile attention, being officially inaugurated by the Lebanese President, Michel Sleiman.

MP Robert Fadel tells us why we should go car-free
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9aD_hd2bYI[/youtube]

Although cars were technically only banned from two major thoroughfares of Tripoli and Mina, a stretch of about 10km of road, the other streets in the city were considerably less congested than normal, with the people of Tripoli opting to walk or use buses rather than drive their cars.

A programme of sporting, cultural and other entertainment activities was organised for the closed roads, aiming to spread a greater understanding of the environment and, whilst avoiding politics, to highlight the environmental challenges that Lebanon faces today.

President Sleiman planted an olive tree on the Mina corniche and kicked off a solar car race along the car-free stretch of road. Children from local schools had been taught how to make electric cars that were used for the race.

A bank handed out apples to passers-by, a drawing competition was held for young children under the title ‘What the environment means to me’ and from two main stages Western and Eastern music played long into the night.

Although the event was scheduled to finish at 6pm, people crowded the streets to such an extent that the roads remained car-free until after 9pm. Encouragingly the MP Maurice Fadel received calls for the event to be repeated in the near future.

The event attracted considerable support from across the country, especially among young people, with many cycling from Beirut, and over 150 taking advantage of the free buses for volunteers to take part in the event.

‘This is the first time I have seen the roads of my city free of cars since my childhood. It brings back memories of Tripoli in the early thirties’, Abdul Sattar Halawani, an 86 year old resident of Tripoli said.

::Car Free Day on Facebook; Photos via the organization’s Facebook page.

Read more on going car-free:
Tripoli Goes Car Free, If Only for a Day
Is It Possible to Go Free in the Suburbs?
Vauban, The German Suburb Without Cars

Editor’s note:
Dubai had a car-free day earlier this year so Lebanon isn’t the first, but among the first!

The post Twirling for Tripoli’s Car Free Day appeared first on Green Prophet.

Be prepared for some carbon monoxide withdrawal in Tripoli: Air pollution is Lebanon is getting bad. Local youths have appealed to the Environment Ministry to close the city to cars this coming Sunday. While it is documented that car-less cities and suburbs like Vauban in Germany may bring other problems for the elderly who need to lug around groceries, over all the sound of a car-less Middle East is music to my ears.

Cars are polluting and noisy. If you live in a healthy city, you don’t need one – just your legs to walk you to the market, or your bike to get you across town.

The Tripoli Carfree City event next Sunday will also be an expose of sorts, the Daily Star is reporting. Environmentally-friendly modes of transport will be showcased, like solar power cars.

The country’s Environment Minister Nazim Khoury blamed transportation for 70 percent of Lebanon’s air pollution problems. A bigger problem is the single commuter: “When you stand in Beirut or Tripoli, it’s clear that thousands of cars pass by with only one person inside,” Khoury said.

Tripoli Carfree City will happen November 12-13th in Tripoli and Mina. Send us photos, dear readers, if you can.

::Tripoli Carfree City
Image via sadsnaps

The post Tripoli Goes Car Free, If Only for a Day or Two appeared first on Green Prophet.

Unlike the former presidents of Egypt and Tunisia, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi has no intention of relinquishing control of his country.

Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) responded to his defiance over the weekend with a fractured Operation Odyssey Dawn, which resulted in an attack on Libya’s military control center. In addition to the obvious detriment ongoing military activity is having on that country’s cultural, environmental, historical, and social fabric, oil prices are rising.

Not long after the establishment of a no-fly zone and ceasefire, reports of continued fighting in the rebel stronghold Benghazi came streaming through the airwaves.

Today Globes reported Tomahawk missile strikes on Libya’s capital, Tripoli, and damage to a building in Gaddafi’s compound, the site of the military command center. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that under the terms of the UN Security Council, Gaddafi was not a target of NATO strikes.

While Nato members decide whether to launched a coordinated campaign, with France, Germany, and Turkey reluctant to do so, oil prices edged up 2% to $103 per barrel.

According to Globes, Libya’s 16 million barrel per day production rate has shrunk to less than 400,000 barrels. Gaddafi relishes the difficulty this causes “the Christians.”

“We will not leave our oil for the US, France, Britain, or any Christian country. We will fight for every centimeter,” he said.

:: Globes

image via DonkeyHotey

More on Libya, Oil, and the Middle East:

Libya Touts Great Man-Made River As 8th Wonder of the World

All Eyes On Libya As Oil Prices Rise

Libyan Revolution Will End Gaddafi’s Green Visions

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