Free Flow

[

] 28

From the Dead Sea to an Israel/Palestine

Water Accord: 20 years of water diplomacy

in the Middle East

Gidon Bromberg, Nader Khateeb and Munqeth Mehyar, Co-Directors, EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East

coPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) is

a unique organization that in 1994 for the very first

time brought together Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli

environmentalists to work together under a single board. Over

the past 20 years the organization has grown from an all-

voluntary staff working out of rooms in the offices of other

organizations, to opening its own offices in Bethlehem, Amman

and Tel-Aviv where today 80 paid professional staff members

are employed and hundreds of volunteers involved. In this

timespan the organization has reinvented itself in the face of

significant shifts in political and social moods in the region.

At the same time, it has learned to combine multiple models of

action in order to pursue what has become its primary focus

since the early years of the millennium – a water diplomacy

designed to promote a just and sustainable cross-border coop-

eration over shared water resources.

At the launch of the first United Nations Water Talks, on 24

April 2012, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization Director-General Irina Bokova called for a renewed

commitment to water diplomacy: “We need new forms of water

diplomacy – to integrate multiple perspectives and resolve prob-

lems in ways that are informed by science and technology and that

favour intercultural dialogue”.

Over the past 20 years, FoEME has

continuously leveraged its experience for the creation of a water

diplomacy based on scientific expertise, top-down advocacy and

bottom-up community-led action. Its aim has been resolving shared

water problems in sustainable ways both between peoples and

between people and nature in the midst of a conflict-ridden region.

FoEME was founded at a time of optimism, when there was belief

in a process that people thought would shortly result in compre-

hensive peace. Since obtaining ‘peace’ was considered doable, the

organization focused on the quality of peace from an environmen-

tal perspective. Its literature from that time highlighted the phrase

‘sustainable peace’, reflecting its belief that the peace being forged

by our governments was ecologically unsustainable.

A classic environmental top-down advocacy organization at its

inception, FoEME was predominately involved during these first

years in leading efforts for developing sustainable livelihoods. The

work of the organization was focused on protecting the environ-

ment from the lack of cross-border cooperation related to conflict,

and from overdevelopment being proposed within the framework

of advancing the peace process.

During this period the organization advanced its

objective of leading ‘sustainable peace’ focused on tradi-

tional avenues of cross-border environmental advocacy.

It saw an urgent need to advocate processes of sustain-

able development, balancing the needs of people and

nature, but recognizing that only a regional effort could

result in the issue being placed on the political agenda

of the Arab/Israeli peace process. From the early days

of the organization, creating a common vision around a

shared ecosystem by bringing together experts from the

three countries involved was recognized as a necessary

first step for advocacy purposes.

The lack of such a vision for the Dead Sea was one

of FoEME’s first major concerns. As part of the efforts

to promote regional peace and prosperity, the Dead Sea

was marked by the region’s governments as a site for

rapid development holding great economic potential.

Among other proposals were the building of a conduit

to fill with seawater, 50,000 new hotel rooms around

it; an international eight-lane highway proposed along

the Jordan Valley; and increased water extraction for

the use of the potash industry.

Understanding that such developments might result

in considerable ecological damage to this unique

ecosystem, FoEME held two conferences during 1996

in Amman and Tel Aviv titled ‘The Dead Sea – Future

Challenges’. These conferences highlighted the lack of

coordination in planning processes between Israelis,

Palestinians and Jordanians, and the need for cross-

border cooperation in creating a unified vision for the

sustainable development of the Dead Sea. As FoEME’s

efforts at that time were mainly directed at develop-

ing sustainable livelihoods, the question guiding these

efforts within the context of the Dead Sea was how the

political, economic and development activities in place

can be altered so as to strike a more balanced approach

both between the peoples sharing the ecosystem and

between the needs of people and the needs of nature.

The period of pursuing sustainable peace, however,

came to an end by 1998, when the belief that peace was

indeed within reach had faded in the face of the Oslo

Accords’ failure to stand up to people’s expectations.

The peace process had by then became so sour that the

ater

iplomacy