Interview with Gidon Bromberg

Please tell me where you’re from and how you got involved in this work.

As far as the organization goes, I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship from the New Israel Fund, which sends three attorneys from Israel every year to the United States to do a Masters in Human Rights Law or Environment Law. I was sent for Environmental Law, because I was working in an environmental office here in Israel. That was in 1993, during the euphoria of the peace process, Oslo,1 which had just started. My thesis focused on the environmental implications of the peace process. The concern was that peace was actually going to help destroy the environment.

Why would peace “help destroy the environment”?

If you look at the economic summits the governments had organized in Casablanca, in Cairo, and later in Amman, you see that economic development, the new Middle East, was all about major economic plans.2 The governments were talking and devising these plans, the private sector was coming out with thousands of new investment proposals for the region, and yet the environment simply was not on the table. So the conclusion my thesis drew was that the environmental community of the region-Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt-needed to get together, get to know each other and start working together, otherwise sustainable development will not be one of the results of peace.

In Washington I had met some potential funders and threw the idea around a bit, but didn’t receive too much interest. Upon coming back to Israel, I had to work for an environmental organization for at least for one more year in return for the fellowship. I negotiated with the director of the organization to spend 10% of my time focusing on regional environmental issues, and the rest on national Israeli issues. I wrote a proposal, and suggested holding a meeting in Egypt, in Taba,3 that would bring together four of the leading environmentalists from each country-Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Egypt-to discuss what, if anything, we should do. I sent it to several people, and it’s never happened to me since, but I got a phone call one week later from one of the funders that said-again, because of the euphoria-“If you can organize it, we’ll pay for it.” In the last ten years, that’s never happened again! We’ve been funded many times, but a response in one week by phone has never happened since.

That meeting happened in Taba in December ’94.4 Various options were presented from meeting occasionally, to exchanging emails and somehow staying in contact, to creating more of a network where maybe we would meet periodically, to creating an organization, knowing that this would be the first regional organization ever created. There has never been an organization under one board that includes Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians.5

You mean just environmental, or period?

Period. In fact, until today, EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East, remains the only regional organization that exists, and it exists because it grasped that window of opportunity. I know it’s a term people don’t like to hear, but it’s true. There are times when there is a window of opportunity. If you don’t grab it, the train moves out of the station. We created ourselves at a time of euphoria, at a time when the need was realized and people were involved. I think it’s due to all of us being environmentalists, and therefore having a very strong common language, and a common vision for the region, over and above peace, that enabled us to jump the gun and really start something new.

Where did you find the other people for that first conference?

I received recommendations from various people that had attended conferences. Israeli and Arab environmentalists had met, even before the peace process, in various international conferences. So I got some names, but I also targeted major organizations: the umbrella organization of all Egyptian NGOs, and we got two representatives from that organization to come; the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature in Jordan, for instance; in Israel, it was also the umbrella organization of all Israeli environmental NGOs that attended.

When you yourself got involved, was it for peace or was it for the environment, how did you see your goal?

Both, always. The organization has always had two objectives, promoting sustainable development and promoting peace, so we call it sustainable peace.

How do you think environmental work and peace work intersect?

They’re very closely related, at various levels. From an economic perspective, particularly in the globalized world that we live in, businesspeople are always looking for cross-border business opportunities to benefit from, and they often result in major environmental impacts. I’m talking about industrial zones that are proposed at the border shared by Israel and Jordan, or the Gaza Industrial Zone6 between Israel and Palestine. There are major environmental concerns with tourism development. Peace brings opportunities for mass tourism to the region, and that has negative environmental impact.

From the people-to-people perspective, understanding one’s shared environment, understanding the fact that the environment knows no borders, that water flows according to its natural flow, and the border is actually irrelevant-that’s something people comprehend. There is a common interest; we are dependent on each other, and that is particularly true in a small region such as this one, where each of the countries is incredibly small, where all the water resources of all three countries-certainly Israel, Palestine and Jordan-cross borders; there is no water source that is purely Israeli or purely Palestinian or purely Jordanian. The environment is something that creates interdependence, and interdependence requires a common understanding if we’re to manage that environmental resource properly.

Are you resisting economic development?

In some cases. We also try to find common ground with economic development; we’re not against economic development. We try to promote sustainable development-economic activities that enhance the environment, that benefit not only people but also the environment. We don’t always find that. There have been several cases where we’ve come out strongly against the development being planned. But our general vision is to formulate alternative plans, so that we’re not saying “No“ to development, we’re saying development could take place if we try to balance it. Our work at the Dead Sea is a good example. In 1994 some fifty thousand hotel-rooms were being proposed for around the Dead Sea.7 That’s the equivalent of Eilat8 being expanded eight times, so it’s an enormous amount of development.

Was that cross-border development?

Yes, Israelis planning, Palestinians planning, Jordanians planning. We approached the issue by making a suggestion to the three parties, and we got funding to hire our own planners. Like with everything we do, we hired a Palestinian planner, an Israeli planner, and a Jordanian planner, to devise an alternative strategy together. In this case, we developed a World Heritage concept for the Dead Sea.

What do you mean by a "World Heritage concept for the Dead Sea"?

World Heritage is a UNESCO9 program, and it identifies areas of the world that have outstanding universal value.10 The Dead Sea is one of them. Unfortunately it is not registered, but it meets all the criteria. It’s not registered because of the conflict. The mismanagement of the Dead Sea is also due to the conflict. We presented an alternative to the development that was planned, and said, “okay, you can build hotels, but let’s identify concentrated areas, clusters, so that we don’t see hotels built all around the shores of the Dead Sea,“ which was what was being proposed by tourism developers and the governments. That’s how we’ve tried to deal with the economic sector, but it’s also a unique way of bringing the governments together. We come with concrete proposals that are attractive. Today, the World Heritage concept is attractive to business, because business also understands that registering the Dead Sea as a World Heritage site is tremendous for tourism. It requires that the governments cooperate. In fact, the very first time that the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, and the Jordanian government sat around the same table to talk about the Dead Sea, was at a conference we organized in 1998.11 Since then, they’ve been continuing to meet, and tremendous things have happened. The Dead Sea is still in bad condition.

Why is the Dead Sea in bad condition?

The Dead Sea has dried up; it’s lost about a third of its surface area, and it continues to drop one meter every year. It’s due to two reasons: the diversion of water upstream so that the Jordan River basically doesn’t flow anymore south of the Sea of Galilee, which accounts for about 70% of the water loss of the Dead Sea; the industry in the south extracts minerals-and in that process it also evaporates a lot of water-and that leads to about 30% of the water loss. The Dead Sea is literally dropping. It’s the lowest place on earth, and it’s getting lower by a meter every year. That is incredibly destructive to the surrounding eco-system, because although the Dead Sea itself doesn’t have any life in its waters-it does have two organisms, but I can’t describe it as life-around the Dead Sea is a paradise of various subtropical plant life, which is all dependent on the Dead Sea itself being stable. That’s a major activity that we deal with.

How is what you’re doing going to give people a shared resource that brings them together, compared with how joint economic development might?

At the moment, there is no cooperation when it comes to the resources at the Dead Sea. It’s competition, and it’s greed. It’s everyone grabbing absolutely as much as they can from the water resources or from the mineral resources at the Dead Sea. Our work is to put cooperation on the table in ways that make economic sense, particularly for tourism, because only if the three governments cooperate together can the site become a World Heritage site. One country can’t register for World Heritage status alone. If there are three countries that share a site, all three must agree and submit their request to UNESCO. So what we’re doing requires cooperation. What’s happening at the moment is a greedy competition, in which the strongest party wins, and it’s basically Israel and Jordan who win. Palestine loses out terribly at the moment.

Palestinians don’t have access to the Dead Sea right now, for the most part, even as a natural resource for local people to visit.

If there aren’t closures,12 then they have access to the northern part of the Dead Sea, in the area of Ein Feshka.13 Over the years we’ve brought many groups of Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian youth to that area of the Dead Sea where everyone has access. But if there are closures, then Palestinians don’t have access, of course.

Can you give me an overview of the Friends of the Earth Middle East programs?

First of all, the nature of the organization is such that everything we do is cross-border. We don’t do anything that deals just with the environment of Israel, or the environment of Palestine or the environment of Jordan. The mandate of the organization is cross-border. Ninety percent of our work today is focused on water issues. We’re an advocacy group and we’re aiming to change policies. We’re not a tree-hugging organization that is trying to protect nature for nature’s sake or a public awareness organization per se. It doesn’t mean that we don’t do those activities, but we always try to identify a policy that we’re trying to change. Much of our work is advocacy aimed at the governments. Much of the work at the Dead Sea for instance-bringing the governments together, bringing the private sector together-has been focused on what you might call the elite. Other activities however, are focused very much on communities.

We have a project that’s in its fourth year now, called “Good Water Makes Good Neighbors.“14 We focus on communities on either side of the Green Line15 or on either side of the border between Israel and Jordan, that share a water resource-a river, a stream, a wadi16 that runs through them. The communities utilize that common resource to try and better understand each other’s reality-their water or environmental reality-but also to improve the environment they share and in the process build good neighborly relations. That’s what peace is all about, being good neighbors.

How do you get communities working together on their shared water resource?

First we identified communities that were willing to work with the other side… a community group, a school, a mayor [willing to lead the community]. We have 11 communities involved in the program. We identified a person from each community that was willing to work on a part time basis for the project, sometimes it’s a school principal. It is very important for us to work with someone from the community who demonstrates knowledge and commands trust in that community. In each case we identified a school that is willing to work with the project. We created a group of what we call “Water Trustees“ that volunteer at least once a week to do something on water issues in their community.

For the first year everything was done separately. Basically, getting to know your own water reality: Where is your water coming from? How is it being allocated, what’s happening to your sewage and your solid wastes, how is water being priced? Testing: what quality is your water? For the first year, we really had each community get to know their own water reality, and in the second year we started asking the questions, “What’s the water reality of my neighbor? What did I imagine my neighbors’ water reality to be and what is it actually in reality?“

How did you go about that?

Exchanges, first and foremost by the staff, because we have a staff person in each community, so the staff would exchange the information. The staff members would present the Water Reality of the other side to the Water Trustees, who had been asked beforehand, for example, “What do you think the water reality is?“ They often got very different responses. For the most part Israeli kids were quite ignorant of the lack, of the extent of the water scarcity that exists in Palestine and in Jordan. In fact, it’s probably more severe in Jordan than in Palestine, which I think shocked everyone, even the Palestinian kids. There is a sense in Palestine that every Israeli has a swimming pool in his backyard and has so much water that they don’t know what to do with it. That was also sort of put back into proportion.

What were some of the kids’ reactions when they found out they were wrong about their assumptions about the water situation of the other side?

The reaction of the kids overall is curiosity. Youth of this generation don’t know each other at all, which is different from their parents’ generation, [Palestinians] who had worked in Israel, or Israelis who had traveled more in Palestine. This generation’s youth know next to nothing about each other. And it’s certainly the case in Jordan, so it’s a mystery for them actually, and yes, they imagined things from media reports, but still they believed the person who was telling them that the reality is actually different. And in many cases they got to see the reality first hand. We’ve organized summer camps where we took 50 kids-Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian-from these communities, to get to know each other, to spend three days together in the North of Israel looking at the water resources of the region, because the tributaries of the Jordan become shared water resources.

Towards the end of the first year and for most of the second year we were working on a common petition identifying an issue that both partner communities are concerned about, generally protecting the river or stream they share, or the water shortages the communities face. They put that into a common petition, and then got the kids out to get adults from their respective communities to sign on to the petition. It helped bring the sense of common interdependence to a much broader community. That was very successful. We collected some 13,000 signatures, and we held another event in Jerusalem, with officials from the three governments involved in a joint event. We got to present these petitions to the respective government officials.

We had a kid from Beit Shean17 stand up and say, “I’m from Beit Shean. My community is worried about the River Jordan, which is polluted by Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, and we want this change to happen.“ Then he hands the petition-we had collected 3,000 signatures-to the Israeli Water Commissioner’s office. The Palestinian kid from the neighboring community of Bardala18 stands up and says, “We’re worried about the future of our common water. We collected so many signatures,“ he hands it to the Palestinian Water Authority. The Jordanian kid from Sheikh Hussein19 (all three kids are neighbors), hands it to the representative from the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation. It was a very powerful event.

Are those three officials able to meet together to cooperate on policy?

They do meet; it was actually unusual to have the Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian [officials] meet together. The Israeli and Palestinian officials and the Israeli and Jordanian officials do meet, but they meet together in a secretive way. The public is not aware of when they meet, what they talk about, what they’re actually doing. Still, until today. It’s very secretive. It’s very much out of the public eye, partly because of the politics, because they’re concerned that people will try to stop them from meeting-people and groups who are against cooperation-but also partly because water somehow is seen as a national security issue.

Why is water a national security issue?

Well, access to water, provision of water, is essential to all life. Therefore, if you try to get information, any information out of the Water Commissioner’s office, the answer is no, this is top secret information. So that’s another hurdle we’ve always had to face. That’s another policy aspect of our work. We’re trying to bring water issues into the public eye, to try to make our decision-makers accountable for what they are or what they’re not doing.

Another very important thing that we did in each of these communities is that we converted a school building into a model water saving building. We held competitions, either between schools or within classes, asking the kids themselves to design ideas for how they can conserve water in their own school. They came up with some incredible things, like: collecting the water of air conditioning systems. Kids calculated exactly how much water, and it amounts to one and a half cubic meters of water collected just from air conditioners every day! That’s a lot of water. Collecting water from the roofs of the school, from the pavement of the school, from the drinking fountains. It’s amazing how much water is wasted from the drinking fountains that can be collected for reuse. In the Israeli schools, we invested some 6,000 Euros in each school, and we’re using that water to flush toilets, or for the garden.

We created ecological gardens in each of the schools as well. When I say “we,“ it’s the kids; they put all the pipes together. We didn’t bring in some sort of contractor to do the work. It’s very hands-on in the schools. In the Palestinian schools and in the Jordanian schools, the water from the roofs is used for drinking purposes. That helps solve water shortages. One of the things that shocked many of the young people was that one of our schools in Jordan was being provided enough water for three days/week. The other three days that kids come to school, there’s no water in the taps. This is in Sheikh Hussein in the Jordan Valley, where it’s 40 Degrees Celsius20 in the summer. That means the children have to bring their own drinking water to class. The toilets are locked because there’s nothing to flush toilets with, so the kids have to go out into the yard. It is very embarrassing when a regional organization is highlighting the fact that some 200 kids in this particular school don’t have water three days a week. Very quickly the municipality corrected that situation. Again, we were making the authorities responsible, accountable, for how they’re dealing with water issues.

Do you think there’s enough water in this region for everybody?

Oh yes, definitely. There’s definitely enough. The issue is not water shortage. Water scarcity is a relative thing. Most of the water that we have in this region goes to agriculture. It’s not being used for drinking purposes. In Jordan, in Palestine, 80% of the water goes to agriculture. In Israel, 60% of the water goes to agriculture. It’s not that there’s a shortage of water, the issue is how we’re allocating that water. From an environmental perspective, but also from an economic perspective, the current allocation does not make sense. Most of the region’s farmers are receiving water either for nothing or for next to nothing, and therefore a lot of it is being misused. We’re growing bananas! Israel and Jordan, in the Jordan Valley, we’re both growing bananas, a crop with the most ridiculously high water consumption. We could be importing bananas from Sudan, which is not far away, at half the price, if economic indicators were much more realistic, if farmers were paying the true cost of water. They’re not. That’s another policy issue that we deal with.

If you could generalize, across the different societies that you work in, do you find different attitudes about environmental work?

There are different attitudes that relate more to education and income. Yes, generally higher income, better-educated members of society see the environment as a priority and are willing to invest resources, and have resources to try and improve the quality of their environment. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a wealthy community in Israel, Palestine or Jordan. There are certainly wealthy sectors in all three, and there you see a high level of environmental awareness. On the other hand, I think people who come from the rural areas tend to have tremendous respect for the environment, irrespective or their economic situation, because they feel very much a part of the environment. It’s in the urban areas-where people have been really disconnected from the environment, even alienated from the environment-that there is real trouble. If you add in poor education and lack of resources in an urban setting, then the environment can be very abused.

These issues go way beyond water. Once you create these relationships through water, through the environment, then you’re creating trust-building that goes way beyond environmental issues. For instance, in one of our communities near Bethlehem21 and Jerusalem22 on both sides of the Green Line, the cooperation has gone way beyond water issues. Both communities are objecting together against the building of the wall23 through both communities, the building of a road that’s being planned in that same area, and the expansion of a settlement24 to the east of the Palestinian community. Palestinian and Israeli members of those communities-I can’t say the whole community, but certainly significant members of each community-are working together. Once that trust is built, the opportunities are remarkable, and the awareness, the knowledge that each community has of the other, and the understanding of interdependence is there. Both communities can really benefit from it.

Are they objecting to the road, the wall, and the settlement expansion on an environmental basis?

On an environmental basis, and also on an environmental justice basis.

What’s the difference?

Well, environmental justice includes issues of human rights, and fairness, and some sort of just notion of the division of natural resources. If one side grabs all the natural resources then the other side is going to lose out, not only on the natural resources themselves, but also on their economic potential. So there’s a realization that we’re not only dealing with the environment here, we’re also dealing with political issues too.

Do you think the desire to control water supplies and other resources fuels the conflict?

Definitely. If you look at Sharon’s25 plans for the West Bank, where he says that he is willing to give back 40% of the West Bank, that other 60% that he doesn’t want to give back has strategic value, and much of it deals with water.26 Certainly all the areas on the western side [of the West Bank] deal with controlling water resources. The settlements were built with control of water resources in mind. The desire not to give back any of the Jordan Valley to Palestine is partly to have a barrier between Palestine and Jordan, but another big reason for it is in order not to share the waters of the River Jordan with Palestine. So water is a crucial aspect of the peace process.

It’s one of the five working groups of the Oslo Accords.27 I should highlight that on water issues, it’s the only working group that never stopped meeting. The governments, the Israeli Water Commissioner and the Palestinian Water Authority, never stopped meeting throughout the whole intifada.28 The only agreements that were reached by the two governments in these last four and a half years both relate to water.29 One was an agreement at the very start of the intifada not to destroy each other’s water infrastructure, which they both signed. The second was a more recent one that we played a very significant role in advancing, which was to agree on common standards of sewage treatment, because the sewage also pollutes our common ground water. So on the political side, because of the basic interdependence that goes to the heart of water in our region, no side can afford not to cooperate, and that’s the beauty of it. That is the basis of the link between environment and peace.

What are your strategies for bringing this more into the public eye?

Well, the different activities, the Good Water Neighbors project, working at the community level, is one angle of bringing it to public attention. We’ve held public events for every one of the school buildings that was converted [to conserve water]. The last one was just 10 days ago in Baka El-Gharbiyeh,30 an Israeli Arab31 town. We had over a thousand people come to the event for the launch. We had representatives from the Ministries of Education and Environment, the mayor. For different projects, we hold conferences, publish reports.

We came out with a very controversial report called, “A Seeping Time Bomb.“ It looks at how 60 million cubic meters of untreated sewage, both Israeli and Palestinian, are polluting the Mountain Aquifer, the most important drinking water source for both peoples. The Mountain Aquifer is underground water in the West Bank and Israel, in areas such as Modi’in32 and Rosh Ha’Ayin.33 The springs in those areas come out of that aquifer.34 Despite it being the most important source of drinking water, there’s only been one sewage treatment plant built above the aquifer in the last ten years.

We did a study as to why there’s been no progress. We looked not only at the Israelis and Palestinians, but also at the donor community. The US government and the German government in particular had made promises to build sewage treatment plants, particularly for the Palestinian cities. We organized a very important conference at Tel Aviv University and brought the Israeli officials and the donor countries, the US and the Germans, and presented our findings before them. We were very critical of all, including the donors. We felt that there was a lack of coordination-that the issue was not sufficiently at the top of the agenda. We held a hearing before the Interior and Environment Committee of the Knesset.35

We brought the issue to the US Congress-the Committee of International Relations of the US House of Representatives held a hearing on water and the Middle East and we were invited to testify before the US House.36 We presented our concerns as to why the US Government hadn’t moved forward on building sewage treatment plants sufficiently. We held a remarkable event at the United Nations in April of this year, where we brought a representative from the Palestinian Water Authority, and from the Israeli Water Commissioner’s office, and speakers from the two donor states, Germany and the US. People said it was the first time they had ever seen an Israeli and a Palestinian government official speak together constructively at the United Nations. That’s a rarity. Again, it’s because of water; it’s because of that common interest that is the basis of life for both of our peoples.

Have you yourself been involved in other kinds of peace work besides the environmental work?

No.

I’m wondering if there’s any difference in the way people might relate differently over environmental issues versus meeting specifically for the purpose of coexistence activities or dialogue.

There is a difference. There is a significant difference because there is that interdependence that is very well understood and that is due to that shared environment. I think that’s one of the reasons our organization has been able not only to continue its work during the last four and a half years, but actually to flourish; we’ve never been larger, we have 27 staff today and we run out of three offices: Tel Aviv, Bethlehem and Amman. By all terms we’re a large organization. It’s because the issue is not dialogue for dialogue’s sake. There’s a lot of, “We’re sick of hearing about the other side. We don’t want to talk about peace when there’s no peace, when there’s no peace in the region.“ We’re saying, “We need to talk about water, because if we don’t have water, neither of us will have water to drink.“ So there’s a sense of urgency and a sense of necessity that is very different and is maybe to our advantage as far as motivating people, in the worst of situations, to continue dialogue.

Do you work with people in Gaza as well?

Yes, one of our communities is in Abasan,37 which is a Gazan community.

And who’s their counterpart?

A community called Eshel HaNassi.38 That’s the only community that’s not right next door to each other. All the other communities literally see each other. This community is a little bit further away. They share a common wadi. It’s floodwaters, but that’s the basis for cooperation.

What would you say are the biggest challenges right now to doing the work?

At the moment I think we have a little window of opportunity. Things are easier today since the passing away of Arafat39 and the forthcoming Palestinian elections, particularly with the statements made by Abu Mazen40 in recent weeks. We already see changes on the ground. Our organization sees letters coming from Palestinian ministers supporting cooperation. That was unthinkable four years ago. We had that support, but we weren’t able to get it in writing. It wasn’t possible before, certainly in the period of the intifada.

Things were incredibly difficult before. They remain incredibly difficult, but there is more of a sense of a political willingness, a political opening, which makes it so much easier to move forward. Nevertheless the types of issues we face are first of all sections of the public that simply object to cooperation, that see cooperation as collaboration,41 as contrary to the interests of their side. That’s reflected in threats, in people refusing to meet with us, to associate with us. We’ve known not only threats; we’ve had incidents of shootings at our organization, because of our organization.

When and where did the shooting occur at your organization?

Our Jordanian director was shot at in Amman outside our office at the very start of the intifada. That was incredibly scary. I was calling from Tel Aviv saying, “Well, let’s close the office for a few days until we find out from the police what’s happening,“ maybe they would arrest the individuals concerned, because the bullet missed two of our staff members by millimeters. But to the credit of the office as a whole, the staff said, “No, if we close the office, we’re giving in, and we’re not giving in.“ They didn’t close the office, not even for a day. They changed the way they came to work, they didn’t come at the same hours, they didn’t come together so that they wouldn’t be a large target. For a while we had a security person in front of our offices. Several of our Palestinian staff have been threatened by representatives of their own communities. This office has received not quite threats, but certainly ugly messages that we’re collaborators, that we’re despicable. I’ve had my tires slashed. But I have no doubt that our Palestinian and Jordanian staff face the greatest risks.

Some of the community work is so important because it brings the issue to the community. We’ve had events with adults in community groups and someone stands up and says, “This is a project that’s working with the enemy, and people should stop and get out.“ Those involved in the project or attending the meeting have had to deal with that. We had one school principal respond to an individual like this by saying, “Well, this project is benefiting my community. This project has actually improved the water situation for this school, and has brought drinking water to our sons and daughters. What are you doing for my school? What are you doing that allows you to tell others to get up and leave?“

We had a horrible case several months ago where a member of the Tanzim42 knocked on the door of one of our staff, after the last summer camp that we held, charging, “Why did you bring students from this community to that summer camp?“ And again, he responded, “Well, I’m working with my neighboring community to stop the wall, what are you doing to stop the wall? This community is partnering with me for the benefit of my community?“ And of course the member of the Tanzim wasn’t from their community, wasn’t from their village, he was from a city. Our staff person was left fine, though he didn’t leave his house for several days afterwards for fear of his life. Thankfully nothing has happened to him.

As horrible as it is, we’re able to empower people to respond. I think maybe that’s the difference between this and dialogue for dialogue’s sake, which I think is also incredibly important. Dialogue for dialogue’s sake is part of peace building. But if you’re also able to have dialogue that shows real on-the-ground, concrete change, then you’re more empowered to respond to the critics, because there are so many critics, and the critics are very powerful. And I think that’s one of the secrets of the success of our work.

Do you have dialogue built in to your summer camp or any of the other activities you do?

Always. Not necessarily first, but at some stage we have to also deal with the dialogue issues of just getting to know each other, the identity of the other, and to discuss the politics that each of us see. We don’t run away from politics, we have to deal with politics.

What do you hope to achieve in the big picture?

Peace, and sustainable development. That’s the mandate of the organization; we’re working at creating peace between peoples. We’re very much aware that if you only focus on the prime ministers or the presidents signing some sort of accord, it’s meaningless. Israel and Jordan have had a peace treaty for ten years. There’s no peace between Israelis and Jordanians; it doesn’t exist, it’s a fallacy. Most Jordanians are hostile toward Israel, and most Israelis are unaware of anything that’s really going on in Jordan. It’s not peace, and if it stays at that artificial, governmental level, with a change of government, it will all crumble, it will all disappear. The type of peace process that involves people, that involves communities and the shared environment, creates real foundations for peace, it builds understanding.

We learn about each other’s water reality, each other’s environmental reality, and through that we come to understand each other. When dealing with water issues we’re also dealing with administrative issues, with political issues, and therefore it creates a deeper understanding. That’s what’s required. And the call that we make, whether it’s to the United Nations or the US House of Representatives or the European Parliament, is, “Yes, invest in the peace process with our leaders, but you cannot ignore the need to focus on people.“ And one of our greatest concerns and critiques is that the peace process is focused on supporting government activities and building large projects, but a miniscule amount of money is being invested in supporting communities and bringing people together, and that is not sensible or realistic. And we’ll all pay the price if that’s where it’s left.

What do you personally gain from doing this work? What have you gotten out of it?

Tremendous, tremendous satisfaction. It’s an incredibly rewarding job, despite its also being incredibly frustrating and incredibly difficult.

What’s frustrating about the work?

Oh, dealing with threats, dealing with criticism left, right, and center, dealing with lack of financial resources. We could be working in a hundred communities-we have a hundred communities that want to work in the project today. We don’t have the financial resources to do it. We’re still in eleven communities, because there’s so much cynicism. We started at the start of the intifada. Even the funding for those eleven communities… I won’t mention the donors so as not to embarrass them, but the donors were saying, “No, it’s not possible to do this project, we’re taking back the money.“ Myself and our Palestinian director and our Jordanian director went to Europe to tell the donors, “Why are you telling us that we can’t do this? Who are you to tell us we can’t do this?“ So that’s incredibly frustrating. Also we have different cultures, we have different ways of behaving; that’s very frustrating at times, accepting cultural differences in order to move things forward.

What have you learned about working with cultural differences from the past few years of doing this?

Well, we’ve had to create a common work ethic, a common work environment. On the one hand-this is according to the personal traits of the individuals involved-trying to agree on deadlines, that there are deadlines that need to be met, first of all trying to identify realistic deadlines, and once they’ve been identified to make absolute effort to meet those deadlines. There are very different attitudes at play: attitudes in Israel of, “yihiye b’seder,“ “it’ll be okay,“ and attitudes in Jordan and Palestine of “Insha’allah.“43 You don’t get things done that way.

It actually sounds very similar, those two ideas.

Yes, it’s not necessarily an Israeli-Palestinian issue, it’s an issue of creating a common work culture within the cultural boundaries of the Middle East. We’re not Western Europe here, we’re not North America, and we don’t try to be. Nevertheless we’re dealing with deadlines and with public money, because every cent that we receive is donated, and we’re accountable to it. We feel responsible. We feel that we need to get the maximum mileage out of every cent that has been donated to us. It can’t be done if we don’t meet targets. So that is something that also has its own levels of frustration. I’m speaking as a manager here.

But the beauty of the work, of course, is that I feel privileged, I have the opportunity to meet wonderful, incredibly committed people, especially in these last four and a half years of really working against the current, working despite incredible gloom. We’ve had staff members whose siblings have cut off relations with them because they didn’t believe in what they were doing. It’s incredibly difficult if one of your siblings is saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore because you’re working in this organization.“ So this is the type of character, the type of people who are involved; they are incredibly committed, and have an incredible wealth of vision. That’s the greatest benefit that I see.

Do people invest in this work for water? Do they do it for peace?

I think they do it for both. We’re all environmentalists. There’s no one in the organization that doesn’t have some sort of environmental commitment, they don’t necessarily need an environmental background, but everyone in all the offices has a sense that the environment is important, and I would say that in all the communities, the people we are working with also have a sense that the environment is important, otherwise they wouldn’t be motivated. But peace is crucial, that plays a tremendous role. Certainly within the organization itself, and even stronger within the communities-peace is probably the strongest factor there. That’s not necessarily true, because there are some people that see an economic benefit… we have farmers’ groups working together because they see economic benefits from working together, we have tourism people working together because they see economic benefits. But again, you can only work together if you believe in peace, so peace is a common thread throughout everything.

Has the conflict affected your own life?

Completely. Although I was born in Israel, I came back to Israel after completing my studies in Australia, because I wanted to be part of solving the conflict. That’s something very deep in my own personality, my own value system; I came to live in Israel because I wanted to be involved in peacemaking. I didn’t have any idea as to how I was going to do it, but that was my major reason for coming back to live in Israel.

Can you talk a little bit about why we’re here with regard to what happened in past peace processes?

Why past peace processes failed?

I don’t like to state the word “failure“ as part of the question, because some people have pointed out that good things also came from previous peace processes.

Incredibly important things, but they haven’t run their course… but see I think that peace is a dynamic issue. Again, I’ll bring the example of the peace with Egypt or the peace with Jordan, the peace treaty.44 I think that it’s not very solid; although there is a political peace treaty, there is a piece of paper, and yes, the governments are supporting it, those treaties do not have the support of the majorities of the public, and therefore it’s in a very dangerous situation. The essence of creating peace is far more personal, it’s far more individual; it has to go back to the communities, to understanding, to reconciliation, to forgiveness.

I think we have to forgive each other for horrible things that we’ve done to each other, and that hasn’t happened. We need to go through that process. We also need our leaders to make those political statements to help create the environment for forgiveness, and to stop the suffering that we impose on each other, but peace is about reconciliation, forgiveness, understanding. We’ve got a long way to go. It’s going to take years; it’s going to take generations. It’s a marriage, and a marriage, a partnership, requires working at it every day at every level, and that’s what peacemaking is about, that’s what peace is about.

What does the word peace mean to you?

Accepting one another despite the differences, because of the differences, understanding the needs, the desires, the dreams of each other, and creating a relationship that is constructive to those needs. So it’s not only understanding, it’s not only forgiving, it’s something constructive, it’s taking that understanding and doing something positive for the betterment of both communities.

What role do you think international communities, either governments or individuals, could play here?

I think they have a very important role, but I’m very critical of the role of the international community. The international community is partly responsible for the conflict in the first place; during the last 10 years of the peace process I think the international community hasn’t done enough politically, but also economically. The way that money is given in this region is terrible; it’s counter to peace.

Why are you critical of the way money is given in this region [by donor countries]?

Well, I think that every dollar that has been allocated to this region-and we’re talking about billions of dollars a year-should identify a peace dividend, and they don’t. The whole concept of “how is a given activity going to help create peace“ is not sufficiently thought through. Israel receives one and a half billion dollars a year from the United States. It’s a check that is just deposited in the treasury. There’s no thinking about how this money is being leveraged for peace building. Palestine had been receiving close to a billion dollars a year from the United States alone, another billion dollars from the Europeans, to build buildings for the different Ministries, to build different infrastructure projects. I’m not saying that these are not needed. But how are we evaluating the peace dividend of these projects?

I’ll give you a concrete example: the building of a sewage treatment plant in Hebron,45 which the US Government is funding. The sewage currently comes out of Hebron and pollutes the environment of many Palestinian towns and villages along the way, and then pollutes many Israeli towns and villages, including some Bedouin46 Israeli communities. By building a sewage treatment plant, we’re improving the environment of both… both communities are going to have a direct benefit. There are about 50 million dollars being allocated to build the sewage treatment plant. Not a cent is being allocated to work with the two communities that are going to benefit. An investment of some 50 million dollars-it’s a lot of money! -is taking place, yet both communities have no sense that that investment is part of the peace process, that that investment is there to improve the lives of both.

I brought this up in the Congress when this meeting was held, and some interest was expressed, but actually it’s Congress that has mandated that money that goes for the Palestinians can only be spent on the Palestinians, it cannot be spent on working with both communities. This is generally the case with the way donor funds are spent. They’re spent on a bilateral basis between the country that’s giving and the country that’s receiving, and it’s generally one country. That’s inappropriate in a conflict area. Not only in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in any conflict. When you’re dealing with a conflict area, you need to have specific rules, specific guiding principals to identify ways of overcoming the conflict, ways the dollar that you’re going to spend is going to contribute to peace building. And that doesn’t exist in the way the international community deals with conflict areas.

As an NGO, in every proposal that we respond to we have to highlight how we are not discriminating against minority groups, against women. But peace building is not a question that is addressed. And I’m not critical that minority issues and women’s issues are dealt with. But where are the questions about peace building? Why aren’t they being asked? We’re missing out on the peace dividend of these billions of dollars that are being spent. The other issue is that there should be a balance between how much is being spent on governments and how much is being directly spent on peace building itself, on communities, on people-to-people activities. There isn’t any balance. We’re talking about a tiny percentage that’s going to people-to-people types of activities. That’s at the expense of peace building.

What do you think are some of the misconceptions about the region?

The international misconceptions. I think one of the problems of the international community is that there’s bias. I would generally say that there are two major players: the Americans and the Europeans. There’s generally a pro-Israel bias amongst American actions and there’s generally a pro-Palestinian bias amongst European. Neither is doing us a favor.

People from outside shouldn’t be coming here in order to tell one or the other of us off. They should be coming here in order to help both. Of course they can be critical, but if the attitude is not “We’re here to help both of you resolve this horrible conflict,“ then they’re not doing any good. They’re not helping anyone by being biased for the benefit of one or the other. We don’t need to hear that “Yes, we’re great and the others are terrible,“ whoever we are, either side. It’s not constructive. Again, it’s a conception of the role of peace building in a conflict area.

I think that that’s a really significant bias that exists in the international community, and it’s also due to lack of training. People come out here with great intentions to help the process, but they haven’t been trained to work in a conflict situation. And I’ve seen it first hand; they become haters. They hate the other side sometimes even more than the Israelis or the Palestinians, and therefore they become of no value. They become really damaging to the process, to any prospects of peace building. And that is terrible.

From an environmental perspective, I think also a lot of people also don’t understand the geography.

How small the area is. Absolutely, people have no understanding. People think that the region is the size of the European Union, or the size of the United States, because it’s in the news everyday: why are these leaders and why are these peoples being talked about every day? So there’s a complete misconception of the geography, the size of the region, the size of the population that we’re talking about, which are all incredibly small. Unfortunately there is no conception of the shared environment, of the interdependence of the environmental resources of the peoples.

End.