MEDI1TV Afrique : Les éoliennes du Golan - 26/06/2023
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NewsTranscription
00:00 [Music]
00:11 They are here, they exist and they are exasperated.
00:14 These are the Druze who live on the Golan Plateau in Israel.
00:18 They are protesting against a project to install dozens of wind turbines on their land.
00:24 A project supported by an Israeli company of renewable energy, Energix, which wants to install a wind farm north of the Golan Plateau.
00:33 Clashes have recently broken out between protesters and the Israeli police.
00:37 The Druze community has also announced that it will continue to protest if this project is not suspended.
00:43 Some 150,000 Druze live in Israel, of which 125,000 have Israeli nationality.
00:49 25,000 of them reside on the heights of the Golan Plateau.
00:52 The majority refuse to take Israeli nationality, but if they wanted, they could take it.
00:58 These people are accusing Israel of being legitimate on this territory occupied the day after the 1967 war and annexed to Syria in 1981.
01:07 In 2019, we remember that the United States, of President Donald Trump, had recognized this region as being, I quote, "an Israeli territory".
01:15 Only 10% of the Druze on the Golan Plateau have asked for Israeli citizenship.
01:20 Most of them live off agriculture and tourism.
01:23 They claim that this wind project will harm their way of life.
01:27 The natural landscape of the Golan, attracting many Israeli and foreign tourists, will be littered with wind turbines.
01:35 The construction of these turbines will require heavy machinery, so large roads to build to transport them.
01:42 This will certainly put some people on the lookout for health risks, as there is constant turbulence of wind turbines and reflective light.
01:53 The Israeli energy company, Energix, rejects all these points and claims that its project will provide residents of the Golan Plateau with clean energy
02:00 and that the inhabitants will finally be safe from electrical breakdowns, which are quite recurrent.
02:06 This will create, says the company, hundreds of jobs.
02:10 In fact, these protests against wind turbines are a sign of a Druze population
02:15 who fear that little by little they will be expropriated from their lands.
02:19 According to the Druze of the Golan, the Israeli government is multiplying the obstacles to the development of the region.
02:25 This is not a development thought and orchestrated by the people themselves.
02:29 They feel a bit like second-tier citizens.
02:33 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met the spiritual leader of the Druze community,
02:38 dear Mawafak Tariq, to try to ease tensions, as much as possible.
02:43 They talked, let's wait and see.
02:45 But what is certain is that for the Druze community, the solution is simple.
02:50 The Israeli government must completely cancel this project and give up building wind turbines on the Golan Plateau.
02:59 (Music)