Zifzafa: a video-game fighting green colonialism in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights
The concept of struggling for economic and territorial self-determination is not new, but in its latest project, Earshot has advocated for the right to sonic self-determination.
Earshot is a not-for-profit organisation producing audio investigations for human rights and environmental advocacy.
Its latest investigation seeks to underscore the fundamental role of sound in the formation of a community and to argue that it is the people who possess the power to determine what is and what is not noise.
Zifzafa is a digital tool that acts to advocate for the sonic self-determination of the Jawlanis — the people of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. It is a video game that seeks to safeguard the auditory life of Al Jawlan against “further acts of occupation and dispossession”.
In 1967, Israel seized and occupied 70 per cent 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 to be the largest in the world — 256 metres tall — on the last remaining open space for the occupied Syrians of Jawlan.
These turbines will produce just 0.6pc of Israel’s energy needs, and 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 — an 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 impeding any future expansion of Jawlani villages, towns, and farms,” Earshot writes.

“For once constructed, who will 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’s fight against this wind turbine project, Earshot collaborated closely with Al Marsad, to develop a digital tool — Zifzafa — with two key objectives: to contest and to preserve.
Through the simulation, users can go into the homes and farms most affected by the noise pollution and experience for themselves what Earshot calls “the force of this sonic annexation”.
In order to accurately model the propagation of this noise, the developers made recordings and measurements in Gaildorf, Germany, the only accessible site in Europe with similar 256m tall 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.
The measurements showed that the wind turbine is the loudest source of noise up 400 metres in the surrounding area and that the noise is still clearly audible at a distance of up to 1 kilometre.
In Gaildorf, people residing 5km 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.
 alt="Screenshot from Zifzafa: performance by Jawlani musician, Amr Mdah. — Copyright Earshot 2025
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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 have been geolocated and embedded in the digital terrain.
As a result, the game serves as an archive of what Earshot calls “the vibrant sonic life of the Jawlani community”. The developers have created a site where the “sonic memories” of the Jawlani community — including songs and instruments to wildlife and weddings — may be preserved before they’re rendered inaudible.
“While the wind turbines create sonic borders that confine the future of the Jawlanis, and the Israeli state builds these sonic weapons 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,” Earshot wrote.

“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. Earshot notes that in many places around the world, green policies disproportionately affect communities already facing structural oppression.
Wind farms have become a point of contention for indigenous communities in Norway and Mexico.
Zifzafa, which is available to download from this website, is the only publicly accessible and highly accurate simulation of wind turbine noise to date.
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.
To download Earshot’s game and see the full investigation, go here.
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