Across the Middle East, from Cairo and Istanbul to Damascus and Tehran, abandoned churches, schools and social clubs, wrought in the neoclassical style that was in vogue during the 19th century, lie abandoned.

Few efforts are made to revive them by the surviving octogenarian patriarchies. Instead, fossilized boards of directors meet once or twice a year inside these crumbling buildings, for extended procrastination sessions. They are surrounded by thick walls, their plaster peeling off. The dim roar of 21st century traffic peters through as a reminder of besieging modernity.

For Benghazi, a dusty Mediterranean city just 200 kilometers south of the Greek island of Crete, its Greek community reached the point of extinction in the 1980s, as an international embargo was slapped on Gadhafi’s Libya for its alleged role in the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.

Flocks of Greek businessmen departed as opportunities dried up. After a century of commercial back and forth that mirrored millennia of trade in this corner of the Mediterranean, socialist policies and a crippling bar on trade with the outside world dwindled a once-thriving community to a few families. 2004 was the last year the Greek community school functioned. That year, six teachers taught the two remaining students.

”In the name of maintaining Greekness we led ourselves into seclusion, even though Greece is in the European Union and most Greeks no longer live in homogenous ethnic states,” said Kanakis Mandolios, who is the president of Benghazi’s Greek community. “So we decided to create here in Libya a multicultural community of the type the EU is striving to replicate.”

As part of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a division of government-owned investment firm Mubadala, Masdar is pushing an aggressive, billion-dollar plan to develop and commercialize clean energy technologies.

The Masdar Initiative’s headline project is Masdar City, a carbon-neutral community that aims to produce more energy than it consumes, using energy-efficient design and on-site renewable energy sources. The Emirate broke ground on Masdar City last February. It’s scheduled to open in 2016 and cost $22 billion.

The bulk of the city’s power will come from solar panel installations on the ground and on rooftops, storing energy in Abu Dhabi’s municipal grid by day and using it at night. Masdar-funded researchers will also explore less mature technologies like geothermal and waste-to-energy methods. Housing 50,000 residents and 40,000 commuters, Masdar hopes the project will be a high-tech real estate venture as well as showcasing research and development – a living case study on clean energy applications.

“Masdar is the playground or testing ground where all of these different applications will come together,” says Ziad Tassabehji, a former venture capitalist now heading the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, the Masdar Initiative’s $250 million investment, which is run in partnership with Credit Suisse.

That Abu Dhabi, home to the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves, is spending billions on clean energy has raised more than a few eyebrows, and helped attract visitors to Abu Dhabi’s World Future Energy Summit in January. The three-day expo was put on for companies looking to do business with Masdar and with each other. Masdar used the forum to drop major announcements, including a pledge that by 2020, renewable energy will account for at least 7 percent of Abu Dhabi’s power use. General Electric also announced that it will be Masdar City’s first major tenant, part of its broader business engagement with Mubadala.

Oil and gas majors like Shell, BP, and Chevron, the traditional enemies of clean energy proponents, also attended the event. “That the oil people are here for this conference is a very big deal,” says Eithne Treanor, an oil expert and media consultant. “Those who make their living off the carbon-fueled economy, it seems, have reconciled themselves that clean energy is an unavoidable part of the global energy mix.”

Smaller exhibitors like Torresol Energy of Spain, a renewable energy firm established as a joint venture between Masdar and Sener Group, showed off Masdar’s global reach. Sener offers decades of work in clean energy. In return it gets a boost from Masdar capital as well as a foothold in the lucrative MENA market.

Abu Dhabi-based Enviromena was also on display. As Masdar’s first major commission, Enviromena has instantly become the largest solar-energy contractor in the Middle East. “We consider this the first market in the MENA region … this project is really a launch pad,” says Sami Khoreibi, Enviromena’s CEO. Khoreibi sees “tremendous interest” from around the region in developing solar power systems. Unlike oil and gas resources, which are concentrated in a handful of states, countries from Saudi Arabia to Morocco share abundant sunlight and vast tracts of desert ideal for solar power generation.

“We’re seeing an awakening on all levels in the Middle East,” says Khoreibi. “Individuals through to the government see the value of going green.”

Procurement for Masdar City alone has ramped up capacity at firms like Enviromena and put pressure on not-so-green supply chains. To support Masdar’s zero-carbon calculus, the company demanded that producers churn out concrete made with recycled materials and steel made wholly from scrap metal.

Stimulating the market for clean energy could become Masdar’s greatest achievement. In the process, it may just rake in the greenbacks too.

As Israeli ground forces surged forward in Gaza during the second week of January, six-year-old Ido Erdal was one of hundreds of children at a West Jeru-salem elementary school who brought home a note from the principal asking parents to donate care packages for soldiers at the front.

”It will be a package for the soldiers of today from the soldiers of tomorrow,” the principal wrote. His mother, Ayana, was dismayed by the note. “Do they have to make them soldiers already?” she asked.

Half an hour’s drive away, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, nine-year-old Palestinian girl scouts wearing green kerchiefs, their foreheads marked with the word Gaza in red, were among those marching through the main al-Manara square to protest Israel’s devastating military operation. They held up pictures of bandaged toddlers while dozens of de-monstrators chanted, “With blood and spirit, we will redeem you oh Gaza.”

A Palestinian Authority (PA) employee, from the northern West Bank city of Nablus who was interviewed in the square said, “I want to educate my kids to hate Israel. If I can’t do something maybe my kids can. I will educate them to fight the Israelis.”

Indeed, increasing hatred towards Israel on the Arab side will be one of the residues of the war that will make resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict even harder. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has also been weakened by the bloodshed. On the other side, a military approach that’s indifferent to causing Palestinian civilian casualties persists in Israel. And each of these signs point to a bleak prognosis for finding peace amidst Gaza’s rubble.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told Israelis that their overwhelming use of military power had worked. After three weeks of military combat, during which 13 Israelis and 1,200 Palestinian died - half of which are believed to have been civilians - Israel, she said, had restored its “deterrence.”

I’ve been teaching here for at least eight years but I’ve been out here for tourism before that.

In the wake of the global meltdown, what factors do you think are going affect the region, and what will their impact be?

I think the region will be impacted – whether it’s impacted as adversely as, say, the UK or America is certainly yet to be seen. It’s certainly not immune from the global shocks that we’re seeing. If one thinks of stock markets, stock markets are all interrelated so the markets will be affected by the crashes that we’ve seen worldwide. In terms of employment, the region will obviously be protected by its oil revenues. What happens to the oil price will be impacted by the world economy generally, so a slowdown in the world economy will impact on the oil price and will therefore impact on the world economy. So, yet another interrelationship there.

Bond markets are now issuing local currency bonds, and there are calls to create a central currency for the Gulf. Are these sensible or protectionist measures?

First of all, you’ve mentioned protectionism. We’ve learned from the crash of the depression of 1929 that protectionism is bad for the world economy. So protectionism is not to be abdicated. And the local market is very much dependent on local trade. It doesn’t just survive by itself; it isn’t part of the global trade environment. So I don’t think protectionism will be good for the region. Whether it’s time to de-peg from the dollar; curiously it has been strengthening in recent months because of its safety so the dollar provides a measure of security and safety in times of turmoil. So, maybe now is not the time to be de-pegging from the dollar because of its consistency. In terms of finance, I think raising funds locally would make a lot of sense for a lot of companies. It’s a natural development for the economy. Dubai is developing, so that will be a natural extension anyway, perhaps accelerated by the recent turmoil.

Higher oil prices ensure revenues. What factors will Gulf states have to consider over the net 6-12 months?

Over the next six to 12 months there is very little they can do unless they can influence the price of oil itself by cutting production and controlling it, such as OPEC are discussing … but that just shows the problem of being dependent on just one source of revenue, and if that sort of revenue is affected by world markets then you are ultimately going to be affected. I think, to be fair to these economies … people have gotten used to that environment. So, although we’ve fallen back, we’re at the same place we were at last year. So those economies should still be strong, but not as strong as we’ve seen. They still run the risk of being dependent on oil.