AP – Over the past three months, on banners and T-shirts and balloons and social media posts, one piece of imagery has emerged around the world in protests against the Israel-Hamas war: the watermelon.

The colours of sliced watermelon – with red pulp, green-white rind and black seeds – are the same as those on the Palestinian flag.

From New York and Tel Aviv to Dubai and Belgrade, the fruit has become a symbol of solidarity, drawing together activists who don’t speak the same language or belong to the same culture but share a common cause.

To avoid repressive censorship, Chinese dissidents once pioneered “algospeak”, or creative shorthands that bypass content moderation. People around the world began using algospeak to subvert algorithmic biases on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms.

The internet is now teeming with pictorial signs – pixelated images, emoji and other typographical codes – that signal political dissent. The watermelon emoji is the latest example.

Here’s how the watermelon went from being a symbol of protest in the West Bank and Gaza to a global sign of solidarity with Palestinians online.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

After the 1967 Mideast war, the Israeli government cracked down on displays of the Palestinian flag in Gaza and the West Bank. In Ramallah in 1980, the military shut down a gallery run by three artists because they showed political art and works in the colors of the Palestinian flag – red, green, black and white.

The trio was later summoned by an Israeli officer. According to artist and exhibit organiser Sliman Mansour, an Israeli officer told him, “It is forbidden to organise an exhibition without permission from the military, and secondly, it is forbidden to paint in the colours of the Palestinian flag.”

The officer mentioned a watermelon as one example of art that would violate the army’s rules, Mansour told The Associated Press last week. In protest, people began to wave the fruit in public.

“There are stories of young men who defiantly walked the streets with slices of the fruit, risking arrest from Israeli soldiers,” Jerusalem-born author Mahdi Sabbagh wrote. “When I see a watermelon, I think of the unbreakable spirit of our people.”

From the mid-90s, when Israelis and Palestinians reached interim peace deals, until the current nationalist Israeli government took office a year ago, raising the Palestinian flag receded as a major issue. Three decades later, “it became a national symbol” again, Mansour said.

A year ago, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir banned Palestinian flags in public places. This effort was met with fervent opposition. In response, Zazim, an activist group of Arab and Jewish Israelis, plastered taxis in Tel Aviv with large watermelon stickers that read: “This is not a Palestinian flag.”

“Our message to the government is clear,” the organisation said in a written statement.

“We’ll always find a way to bypass any absurd ban and we won’t stop struggling for freedom of expression and democracy – whether this involves the Pride flag or the Palestinian flag.”

For some, embracing the colors of the flag is about striving for freedom and equality rather than necessarily statehood.

“I’ve never cared for flags or nationalism,” said an expert in Middle Eastern studies at King’s College London Mayssoun Sukarieh. “But when it comes to Palestine, it’s a flag of a colonised people who never saw independence. And because it has been banned, it becomes more of a symbol of resistance than it is of nationalism.”

WATERMELON EMOJI

Watermelons have long been a staple of food in the region, with some dishes, like a popular salad in southern Gaza, originating with Bedouin Arab tribes.

Increasingly, young activists have adopted the watermelon emoji in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Emoji may confuse algorithms that advocates say tech companies deploy to suppress posts with keywords like “Gaza” and even just “Palestinian”.

“With the watermelon (emoji), I think this is actually really the first time where I’ve seen it widely used as a stand-in. And that to me marks a notable uptick in censorship of Palestinian content,” said the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Jillian York.

The Berlin-based York has analysed Meta’s policies. While “shadow banning,” or the limited visibility of certain posts, can be difficult to discern, advocacy and nonprofit organisations studying digital rights in the Middle East say they have tracked stark biases, especially on the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. Meta hasn’t said much directly about this but cites a statement it released in October.

“Censorship is somewhat obvious” on Instagram, York said. In mid-October, people began to notice that if one’s Instagram bio said “Palestinian” in English alongside the Palestinian flag emoji and “Praise be to God” in Arabic, the app translated the text to “Terrorist”. Meta released a public apology.

Watermelons are not the only symbol to catch on with activists. Other signs of global Palestinian solidarity include keys, spoons, olives, doves, poppies and the keffiyeh scarf. In November, to connect with the peaceful message of Armistice Day, when many Brits traditionally wear red poppy pins, protesters this year passed out white poppy pins, to commemorate victims of all wars. On the holiday, scores of protesters wearing poppy pins marched across London calling for an end to the war in Gaza.

In the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace amplified watermelon imagery in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza last month.

The group held signs in New York in the colors of the Palestinian flag and with triangular watermelons, leveraging the triangle symbol of ACT UP, the historic AIDS activist group.

A member of both organisations, said Jason Rosenberg, “Our reinvented image shows that our fight for liberation and fight to end the epidemic is intrinsically connected to the Palestinian struggle.”

SEED IMAGERY

Another reason the watermelon might resonate: It has seeds. There is a saying, often attributed to the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, that is popular among activists: “They wanted to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

“You might be able to smash a watermelon. You might be able to destroy a fruit, but the seed is a little harder to crush,” said artist Shawn Escarciga, who created the coalition’s design. “It’s really powerful that life can come out of something so small and something so resilient – and that it can be spread so, so easily.”

The image of a watermelon punctuated by bold, triangular seeds was held up at the groups’ protest at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, and has since proliferated online.

That often happens – art emerges from protest movements and then enters the mainstream.

“Artists have always been at the forefront of revolution, resistance, politics, in varying degrees,” Escarciga said. “We’re doing this, using this iconic imagery, because AIDS isn’t over – and war is obviously not over.”

Israel’s air, ground and sea assault in Gaza has killed more than 24,000 people, some 70 per cent of them women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.

The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Throughout, activists around the world have continued to call for peace and a permanent cease-fire. Israel said ending the war now, before Hamas is crushed, would give a victory to the militants.

“We’re seeing Palestinian flags being banned, even the emoji online being flagged – and, you know, the word ‘Palestine’ being censored online,” Escarciga said.

“But having this image that transcends language, that transcends culture, that transcends algorithms – can really reach people.”

BRASÍLIA (AFP) – In an exhibition laden with symbolism, Brazil recently marked the anniversary of the far-right riots that rocked the capital a year ago by displaying artworks, antique furniture and other objects vandalised in the attacks.

Here is a look at the exhibit and the work undertaken to fix – or not – the scars left when thousands of supporters of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court that day.

The works are on display in the “Green Room” of the lower house of Congress, one of the three buildings by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer that rioters trashed on January 8, 2023.

Thirty photographs of the day’s destruction are also on display.

The lower house said in a statement some damaged objects would not be repaired but “will intentionally be left with the marks of history”.

“Artworks live in time and go through various things, which we record and sometimes decide to leave. January 8 is a part of history. These works bear witness to that day,” Aline Rabello, head of restoration work for the lower house, told newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

The pieces include the fragments of a gold and porcelain vase given to Brazil by China in 2012, and another vase gifted by Hungary in 2011.

Both were shattered during the riots. Some of the pieces were never found.

An engraved ostrich egg given by Sudan in 2012 to then lower house speaker Marco Maia is also on display – with missing pieces, as well.

At a ceremony to mark the anniversary recently, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who narrowly beat Bolsonaro in Brazil’s bitterly divisive 2022 elections, will present a restored tapestry by iconic Brazilian artist and landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx.

Rioters ripped it from a wall in the Senate, tore it and urinated on it.

Some of the worst destruction took place at the Supreme Court, a frequent target of outrage from the far-right over its investigations into alleged crimes by Bolsonaro.

Authorities registered 951 items stolen, broken or destroyed in the high court.

The cost of restoring its main chamber reached USD2.4 million, the court said.

The lower house reportedly restored 54 of the 64 objects vandalised there, including a giant mosaic by Brazilian master Athos Bulcao, at a cost of more than USD280,000.

At the Senate, where some 20 works were damaged, a spokesperson told AFP that restoring one iconic painting alone – a sprawling depiction of the signing of the Brazilian republic’s first constitution, by 19th-Century artist Gustavo Hastoy – will cost around USD163,000.

PARIS (AFP) – The amount of snow that stays on the ground is rapidly dwindling due to human-caused climate change, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people, researchers warned recently.

Global warming – which hits high mountain areas especially hard – has already reduced snowpack affecting up to 80 per cent of the northern hemisphere’s population, a trend that is set to continue, scientists reported in the journal Nature.

Accumulated snow is a naturally stored resource that becomes a vital reserve of fresh water as it melts in spring.

But the impact of a warming world on snowpack is deceptively hard to measure due to natural year-to-year variability, and the complex interplay of temperature and precipitation.

That is why even as temperatures rise, some regions are seeing more snow while others are seeing less.

But the researchers warn some populations reliant on melting snowpack for water supply should prepare for a future without snow.

In the new study, researchers at Dartmouth University sifted through four decades of precipitation and snowpack data across the northern hemisphere in March, when spring thaw begins to turn snow into water.

Building on the observational data, the team used climate models to measure the impact of changes in snowpack, with and without human influence.

Some 80 per cent of snowpack, they found, is in regions cold enough to be resilient to rising temperatures, which has seen Earth’s surface warm on average 1.2 degrees Celsius (ºC) since the 19th Century.

But the other 20 per cent occurs in regions reaching a temperature threshold scientists called the “snow-loss cliff”, where each additional degree of warming above minus 8ºC depletes a larger percentage of winter snow.

The southwestern and northeastern United States, along with central and eastern Europe have seen snowpack declines between 10 per cent and 20 per cent per decade since the 1980s.

Four out of five people in the northern hemisphere live in these regions of “tremendous snow vulnerability,” Justin Mankin, associate professor of geography at Dartmouth University and study author, told AFP.

River basins, for example, along the upper Mississippi in the United States (US) and the Danube in Europe – home to 84 and 92 million people respectively – have seen a 30 and 40 per cent decline in spring water due to snowpack loss.

“By the end of the 21st Century, we expect these places to be close to snow-free by the end of March,” lead study author Alexander Gottlieb, a doctoral student in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society programme at Dartmouth, told AFP.

A warmer climate makes for wetter, more humid winters, resulting in more rain than snow. “The human and ecosystem consequences of snow loss can extend far beyond the winter,” Mankin said.

“This regime shift from snow to rain means water managers have had to release water in the middle of the winter” to reduce flood risk, he added. “That means releasing this really crucial water supply, and effectively losing it to the ocean.”

Apart from water security concerns, the repercussions of snow loss extend to winter-dependent economies, impacting sectors such as tourism and skiing.

Beyond the ecological impacts, Mankin suggested that a transition from snow to rain could also harm ecosystem health, encourage the spread of pests, and render forests more susceptible to drought-induced wildfires.

VISEGRAD (AP) – With predictable seasonality, tonnes of garbage floats down a river at least twice a year and ends up near the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad behind a barrier installed by a local hydroelectric plant.

An environmental activist watched as workers removed trash from the river.

“New year, new problems or rather old problems with new garbage floating our way,” Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad said on Wednesday.

Garbage from unauthorised waste dumps dotting the Western Balkans is carried year round by the Drina River and its tributaries in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro toward Visegrad, and further on to the Danube River, into which the Drina eventually flows.

But during the wet weather of winter and early spring the waterways in the region swell and sweep up such a huge amount of trash from dozens of illegal landfills along their banks that it can’t escape the hold of the river fencing installed by the Bosnian hydroelectric plant a few kilometres upstream from its dam near Visegrad.

As the result, at least twice a year and for a few weeks, the fencing turns into the outer edge of a floating accumulation of plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tires, household appliances, driftwood, dead animals and other waste, putting into plain sight the failure of regional authorities to adopt and enforce adequate environmental quality standards.

“Once again (since late December), between five and six thousand cubic metres of mixed waste amassed here and the hydroelectric plant workers have been clearing it away,” Furtula said. “Last year, the clearing activities lasted for 11 months, which is to say that the waste keeps coming throughout the year”.

The Drina River runs 346 km from the mountains of northwestern Montenegro through Serbia and Bosnia. The Drina and some of its tributaries are known for their emerald colour and breathtaking scenery, and a section along the border between Bosnia and Serbia in particular is popular with river rafters.

However, the regular, headline-grabbing reemergence of the floating waste near Visegrad makes marketing the town as an outdoor tourism destination a very difficult job.

“The ghastly sight that greets Visegrad visitors at the entrance to the town is a problem that we cannot solve,” said Olivera Todorovic from the Visegrad Tourism Board.

“Judging by what we hear from tourists, that ugly and sometimes unpleasantly smelling site discourages many visitors from coming to Visegrad,” she added.

Furtula agreed, but argued that problem was much deeper.

Each year, an estimated 10,000 cubic metres of waste is removed from the section of the Drina near Visegrad and taken to the city’s municipal landfill to be burned. The smoke and leachate from the “always burning” landfill are an obvious health hazard, Furtula said.

In March, Eko Centar Visegrad will start taking water samples from the Drina and testing them for pollutants at several locations, including in the vicinity of the city’s municipal landfill.

“Through air, soil and water, all the released toxins (from the landfill) return to the Drina River and I expect its pollution levels to be really, really high,” Furtula said.

Decades after the devastating 1990s wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection.

In addition to river pollution, many countries in the Western Balkans have other environmental woes.

One of the most pressing is the extremely high level of air pollution affecting a number of cities in the region.

Western Balkans countries have made little progress in building effective, environmentally sound trash disposal systems despite seeking membership in the European Union and adopting some of the 27-member bloc’s laws and regulations.

The environmental problem facing Visegrad is “long term and solving it will be neither easy nor cheap”, Todorovic said. “But we must work on solving it”.

Furtula agreed that there were no quick and simple solutions, but said some measures could be easily taken to alleviate the problem.

“All the municipalities upstream from Visegrad should install trash barriers like the one here and establish their own waste collection teams in order to expedite garbage removal, make it more efficient and also to prevent garbage from sinking to the bottom of the river,” he said.