Zifzafa

Zifzafa is a digital tool that advocates for the sonic self-determination of the people of the occupied Syrian Golan heights (the Jawlanis). It is a video game simulation that seeks to safeguard the auditory life of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights (al Jawlan) against further acts of occupation and dispossession.

In 1967, Israel seized and occupied 70 percent of Jawlan. Approximately 131,000 people living across 344 villages were forcibly displaced from their homes. Those who remained on their land have since endured military occupation.

During the summer of 2023, the residents of the occupied villages of the Jawlan protested against their occupiers on a scale not seen for forty years. These demonstrations were catalysed by the initiation of an Israeli government project to build 31 wind turbines— the largest in the world at 256 meter high—on the last remaining open space for the occupied Syrians of the Jawlan. These turbines will produce just 0.6 percent of Israel’s energy needs, yet most of them will be built within tens of metres of Jawlani homes and farms.

Depending on the wind speed, each turbine generates between 70dB-90dB of noise — the intensity of sound equivalent to a busy highway. The acoustic footprint of this wind turbine project will be 16 square kilometres, covering (in noise) a quarter of the area allocated to the Jawlanis living in the Jawlan.

This noise pollution will effectively annex this plot of land, rendering it uninhabitable and impede any future expansion of Jawlani villages, towns, and farms. For once constructed, who would build a house next to a turbine, educate their children in a school that would be established under the blades of a 250m droning tower, or worship in a Khalwa that would be bathed in turbulent cacophony?

To support the Jawlani community fight this wind turbine project, Earshot collaborated closely with Al Marsad, a humanitarian organization in the Golan Heights, to develop a digital tool — Zifzafa — with two key objectives: to contest and to preserve. By using our video game simulation, users can go into the homes and farms most affected by the noise pollution and experience for themselves the force of this sonic annexation.

In order to accurately model the propagation of this noise, we made recordings and measurements in Gaildorf, Germany, as this was the only accessible site in Europe with similar 256 meter high turbines. The intensity of the noise was measured across the frequency spectrum at multiple distances from the source of the sound: the wind turbines’ propellers. The measurements were taken on a day with a wind speed of approximately 5 knots— the average wind speed in the Jawlan. Our measurements show that the wind turbine is the loudest source of noise in the area between 0 and 400 metres surrounding it and that the noise is still clearly audible at a distance of up to 1 kilometre. In Gaildorf, people residing 5 kilometres away from the wind farm can still hear the turbine noise, albeit faintly. In the Jawlan, the nearest residents will be just 35 metres away.

The turbines are not the only thing that can be heard in Zifzafa. Jawlani musician and sound artist, Busher Kanj Abu Saleh, made over 40 field recordings which we have geolocated and embedded in the digital terrain. In this way, the video game simulation serves as an archive of the vibrant sonic life of the Jawlani community. From songs and instruments to wildlife and weddings, we’ve created a site where the sonic memories of the Jawlani community may be preserved before they’re rendered inaudible.

While the wind turbines create sonic borders that confine the future of the Jawlanis, sonic weapons intentionally built by the Israeli state in order to separate people from their land, certain Jawlani songs and music have survived more than a hundred years of successive practices of division and dispossession. These songs, which remind us that sound is also a potent act of resistance, have been recorded and included in Zifzafa.

Zifzafa serves to document the harm being enacted on the Jawlani community in the name of green and clean energy. As in many places around the world, green policies disproportionately affect communities already facing structural oppression. For instance, wind farms have also become a point of contention for Indigenous communities in Norway and Mexico. Zifzafa, which is available to download from Earshot’s website is the only publicly accessible and highly accurate simulation of wind turbine noise to date. As such, while it is primarily employed to support the Jawlanis, it can also be used in many other contexts where wind farms threaten a communities right to sonic self-determination.