Peace-Building Eco Tourism in the Middle East
Israeli environmental website Green Prophet recently brought our attention to the variety of eco tourism options in the Middle East – specifically in Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. But those eco tours are all confined within the borders of a single country.
If you think about it, eco tourism has the potential to be a tool for promoting peace. It promotes cultural exchange and understanding, economic opportunities, and a shared commitment to preserving communal resources. Which is why Friends of the Earth Middle East, a tri-national NGO with offices in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authorities, has launched the Neighbors’ Paths project.
The Neighbors’ Paths series of community-based eco tours focuses on water and peace-building between Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian communities with the hopes that communities who share the same water source can come together upon realization of their common future goals and needs. Highlights of the paths include sights related to the water history or current water reality of the area. According to Green Prophet writer and Friends of the Earth Middle East intern Rachel Bergstein, “in the Palestinian village of Auja, for instance, visitors stop at Ein Auja (Auja Spring), the community’s historical water source, where they can also learn about water struggles between Palestinian farmers and Israeli settlers.”
Rachel also describes the Neighbors’ Paths tour of Emeq Hefer in Israel, which includes the Yad Hannah Wastewater Treatment Plant, “a water treatment facility that is the result of cooperation between Emek Hefer’s City Council and the Mayor of Tulkarem, Emek Hefer’s Palestinian partner. The facility treats wastewater from both Palestinian and Israeli sources, and protects the Alexander River, which Israelis and Palestinians share.”
Hopefully cooperation regarding regional environmental matters will lead to a larger scale peace.
Read more about shared environmental concerns in the Middle East at Green Prophet::
Water Planning, Problems, and Propositions for Palestinians
Palestinian Agro-Industrial Park: A Sustainable Plan?
Lifesource: Working for Water Justice in Israel and Palestine
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A friend of mine works for Friends of the Earth Middle East–will have to forward this link on to her. Not to mention hit her up for one of the tours.
Yes, I feel the eco movement as a whole can promote peace. It’s hard to imagine people caring and feeling compasionate about the environment but not one another.
Part of the tour should be the pools and grassy lawns on the Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank when less than one mile away people don’t have clean drinking water.
I don’t think that this is unrealistic. In fact, it may well be argued that environmental cooperation could become the most realistic pathway to peace.
There are certain factors which converge in the Middle East which point to environmental protection as a solution to most of the problems there and elsewhere: The fact that the people there share the same resources, like water. That fresh, clean water is becoming scarce. That the area enjoys a lot of sunlight, which could be converted to clean energy. The technological advances being made with respect to the environment in some leading universities in the region. The opportunity to create good paying jobs, in the green sector of the environment, which could help neutralize ideological extremism. The possibility of creating some serious profits based on green. The availability of Arab and Western financing to promote green industries, as a way of diversifying away from oil, and at a time when there is heavy world demand for renewable energy sources. And the need to find a mechanism to mediate a peace in the region.
Put it all together, and it does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that a concerted effort to protect the environment could coincide well with business, with profits, with good paying jobs, with neutrlizing extremism, and eventually, with peace.
The West Bank, in which 4 industrial zones are currently planned, could be used as a model for creating good paying jobs which protect the environment. In this way you will be solving most of the world’s problems in one shot, and you could very well attract a lot of attention, and a lot of investment dollars.