Our Earth Day Blog
Israel builds regional ‘empathy’ and ‘mutual trust’ at expense of Palestinians
The Israeli film ‘Sustainable Nation’ is an Earth Day special. Produced in 2019 by OpenDor Media and the Jewish National Fund, it shows Israeli water innovators at work from California to Africa to Asia saving an increasingly parched world.
Of course, Israel’s theft of water from increasingly parched Palestinians is not allowed to intrude on this story of Israeli water innovators who are, in the words of the film’s director Micah Smith, “incredible role models for how individuals around the world can have an impact.”
This year’s Earth Day has a new twist. Israel’s water innovators do not have to go far afield to offer their “home grown” water solutions.
Instead, thanks to the Abraham Accords, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries – especially the UAE – now have the opportunity “to offer first-rate added value to normalization and relations between peoples, while calling for action to preserve the most precious natural resource in our region: water. Water gives life. This natural resource has what it takes to unite our people, by creating empathy and building mutual trust.”
The writer is Noam Bedein, director of the Sderot Media Center and founder of the Dead Sea Revival Project who is also billed as “an international speaker” on water sustainability.
The language of his Times of Israel Earth Day blog is wholeheartedly positive. Who could be against “creating empathy and building mutual trust”? Such qualities have been sorely lacking in a country where “Death to Arabs!” is both a football chant and omnipresent graffiti.
But something is totally missing from this optimistic scenario – the Palestinian presence. By airbrushing them out of the picture, Bedein makes them seem entirely irrelevant to an unfolding vista of regional harmony and prosperity.
Palestinians are not permitted to intrude on this “new Middle Eastern regional alliance, initially formed internally through an exchange of education and culture, and then externally by promoting regional and innovative environmental tourism for domestic and foreign visitors.” There is money to be made from an emerging ecotourism market in which the UAE and Israel - both “global leaders in water sustainability” - can take the lead.
A Times of Israel blog by Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the US and to the UN, takes a similarly rosy view.
The Abraham Accords and climate change have, he writes, turned the threat of a regional war over increasingly scarce water resources into “a solid opportunity for peace,” as countries “put aside their hostility towards Israel and work with us to combat this shared challenge.” Thanks to the Accords, “industrious and forward-thinking Gulf investors” are seeking connections “with Israel’s best Greentech innovators.”
Having pumped parts of the West Bank nearly dry, Israel is poised to woo the region with “examples of the incredible innovative and technological green solutions Israel has developed to address its own scarce water supply and dire agricultural needs” and is “eager and willing to work with and share our expertise with any country that needs help.”
The Palestinians do at least get a brief mention in the ambassador’s blog. He writes that the region’s water crisis could “draw Palestinian leaders into a peace process they have long resisted.” But this seems more of an afterthought than an objective to be strenuously pursued.
What Israel clearly does not want to do is hand over its control of West Bank water resources to the Palestinians, which would be on the table in any ‘peace process’ worth the name.
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Banner design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press