- Completely revamped web application
- Better navigation
- Ability to easily view, share, add and explore bands
- New player
- Ability to create your own personal collection of favorite tracks
- Ability to receive suggestions for other bands based on your favorite tracks
- An iPhone application that syncs with your collection
… And more!

We think the site speaks for itself – so please head over there and check it out! http://mideastunes.com

Our mission is to bridge barriers of faith and geography to unite young people committed to fostering constructive discourse in the Middle East through music. The core of the project manifested from our desire to promote bands and musicians that would otherwise never be given a second glance in the international scene. We feel that is because most people would never think to look to regions like the Middle East and North Africa for highly thought provoking music. The need to change this is our driving force. We believe music can change the world and that the musicians of the Middle East and North Africa will lead the way.

Founded in 2010, the site has expanded to serve as a primary resource for discovering up and coming Middle Eastern talents. We’re proud of our quick progress and awaiting to unveil amazing new parternships ahead!

In the meantime, enjoy the tunes and discover the very best of the underground music scene brimming from our region: http://mideastunes.com

Are you an organic food addict? Or do you insist on eating food that grown locally, but pesticide-ridden, to spare food miles (or to serve an ideology?)

As food production is a major source of greenhouse gas pollution (Read: Global Warming), eating locally, and consuming less meat is one way we can do our part.

Following a worldwide trend, where people are opening up their fridge to show people what’s in their fridge (and on their palette) today I will expose myself and show you what’s in mine. It feels a bit like opening my underwear drawer to strangers, but here goes:

CONTENTS (Door on right): Bio eggs, butter, organic strawberry jam, milk, mustard, sundried tomatoes, pomegranate concentrate, goat’s milk yogurt, V8, tehina, capers, guava juice, orange juice, batteries (not for eating!), coconut juice, goat’s yogurt, and the old Canadian maple syrup (thanks Mom!).

SOURCE: There are a number of imported items here like the V8 from North America and the juice from Egypt. The jam is from the United States. Phoeey on me, but it looked so good. And the pomegranate concentrate, I think is from Turkey, while syrup is from Canada. All the milk products are produced locally and bought at Eden Teva market or local non-organic shops. Milk costs about $1.50 a liter in Israel (non-organic), the organic yogurt about $3 a bottle.

CONTENTS: (from top to bottom, left to right) organic lentil sprouts, organic goat’s cheese, chessick fruit, soft regular white cheese 5%, organic red cabbage part of a weekly CSA veggie box delivery (choose from a list of CSAs here if you live in Israel); more cheese including a Rockfort goat’s cheese, Syrian dates, spicy lettuces, cabbage, parsley, green onions, carrots, leaks, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, and spinach.

SOURCE: Vegetables come from an organic farm, which delivers a box of whatever’s in season, once a week. Some of the cheese is from Eden Teva market, a health food store in Bnei Brak; some cheese is from Arab supermarket on the corner nearby my house. Reducing food miles is important to me from an environmental perspective. I try to eat locally produced food, and things which are in season.

CONTENTS: It being Passover in Israel means that a lot of the bread products you might see here other times of the year have been cleaned out, eaten or burned, as per Jewish custom. Moving on, there is some sort of white fish, hamburger organic and regular, rice (stored in freezer to keep the bugs out), and a strange kind of sheep tail fat (bottom right) for making a Bukharian food known as Osh Pollo. It is wrapped like that because someone (on their request) was supposed to “smuggle” it to the US where no such sheep tail fat can be found. It stays frozen in the meantime. (As a once a week meat-eater, Osh Pollo is very yummy and highly recommended.)

SOURCE: The frozen products come from Eden Teva Market, a health food store, a regular grocery store, and the sheep tail fat, a local market. Normally you won’t find so much meat in the freezer, as I tend to buy it when I want it. I have no idea how much meat costs per kilo, because I buy it so rarely. The organic hamburger, enough to feed 4, cost about $25 for the box, times 2 what you see above.

Want to know more about fridge voyeurism? Read this post in its original form with more details at Canada’s Israel. Or a past Green Prophet post on a fridge in Jerusalem.

We’d be happy to feature your Middle East fridge or diet here on Green Prophet, if you dare. Send us some pics and describe contents and food source, so we can know a little more about you, and what you eat. Send to contact@greenprophet.com.

::Canada’s Israel

Karin Kloosterman is the editor of Green Prophet, the only news site covering the environment from a Middle East perspective. To read more see www.greenprophet.com.

Fair Trade and preserving local craftsmanship and culture, is an important aspect of the green movement –– at least for those environmentalists who value humankind and the health of its societies. Following that notion, we think it’s appropriate to feature the women from Lakia: as their agrarian society shifts to a western one, Bedouin are getting lost in the Negev dust. Literally. But an NGO founded by Bedouin women for Bedouin women, is giving new purpose to an old way of life. Here is their story.

As the Israeli Bedouin culture, which was once partially nomadic, adapts to the fast-paced ways of modern living, its women are being left behind. Undervalued at home, and with few skills that can lead to gainful employment (most are not allowed to leave the home for outside work), not only do Israeli Bedouin women suffer from high rates of poverty and abuse, they can pass on a sense of hopelessness to their children — a cycle that never ends.

As the once nomadic people transition into the modern way of life, the women are becoming more marginalized. In the past, they had responsibilities in the house — collecting water and wood, taking care of the livestock and setting up the family tent. These are skills no longer valued in their society. But that’s changing.

Determined to find a way to empower themselves, a group of four Bedouin women from the Bedouin town of Lakia, founded the Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status in 1992. Since creating their NGO, the women have been able to build a number of meaningful projects in their society that generate income and a sense of self-worth.

Drawing water from a new kind of well

“The women in Lakia no longer go to the well to collect water, but I tell them that the well is inside us,” says Naama Elsana, a co-founder of the association, who teaches women and their daughters the ancient Bedouin craft of embroidery, a skill that not only creates beautiful clothing and decorative items for the home, but which also transmits stories of the Bedouin way of life, inside the intricately detailed patterns.

In a bold move, the women of the Lakia association have veered from tradition and have created their own style of embroidery. In previous embroidery patterns developed by the tribe’s grandmothers, the men were at the center. (See also One World Many Beads)

“Today, we have our own pattern,” Elsana tells ISRAEL21c, as she shows her creations to a group of American executives visiting her tent as part of a tour by the non-profit foundation, Project Interchange: “In this one as you see here, the four women who have founded this organization are at the center, while the four sheiks of our community, are stitched on the outer corners.”

The well in Lakia (pictured above) used to be the source of community for the Bedouin women of Lakia. Now it is locked.

This past November, Naama and Hessin Elsana, a cofounder of the association, addressed a group of high-powered construction executives from the United States, in Israel at their village. The executives are CEOs and VPs who manage multi-million and billion companies in both America’s East and West Coasts, and had come to Israel for one week, on Project Interchange — seminars which help influential leaders see and experience Israel beyond the conflict, beyond the violence they see on CNN.

In Lakia, beside the greeting tent where guests can eat a traditionally cooked Bedouin lunch, and then hear a lecture with Elsana or one of her partners, there is also a gift shop where visitors can purchase unique jewellery, clothes, wall hangings, purses and handicrafts fashioned by the local Bedouin women.

A library on wheels

The association gives fulltime work to 70 Bedouin women. Teaching the traditional art of embroidery, and then selling the products is the association’s central activity, but there are other community activities that have branched out to further strengthen their society from within.

One is an adult literacy program the women have created, a special kindergarten for their children, and a mobile library, which passes through different neighbourhoods to spread literacy, and human rights education among the town’s children.

Today, Elsana reports that Bedouin women are undergoing a transformation — while only a handful of women went to university 10 years ago, this year there are about 350.

The Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status has an “open-tent” policy, which allows visitors from Israel and the outside world to experience the joys and hardships of being a Bedouin woman. They invite outsiders to come and meet them.

This article is reprinted courtesy of ISRAEL21c.

For more feature stories on Bedouin in Israel, see:
Bustan and Bedouin Paint the Desert Green
A Film About A Bedouin Man and His Landscape
Sharing Water Resources With the Bedouin
Buying Fair Trade from Israeli Craftswomen
A Journey Through Bedouin Jewelry

::Desert Embroidery website