Can the Environment be a Peacemaking and State-building Tool?

Avner Vengosh and Erika Weinthal View Solving the Water Crisis in Gaza as a Potential Step Toward Collaboration p.5

Whether leaders on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian border will be willing, or politically able, to put aside differences and cooperate on Gaza’s water crisis is still an unanswered question. It may be months before scientists know if continued collaborations are possible, Vengosh says.

What is clear, he adds, is that both sides stand to gain by cooperating.

One of the most cost-effective, scientifically sound solutions to the problem, he and Weinthal believe, would be for Israel and the new Hamas leadership to negotiate a joint pumping plan in which saline ground water could be pumped and desalinized at Israelioperated treatment plants along the Gaza-Israel border, and then transported into Gaza.

“Israel has nothing to lose from this plan. Gaza has nothing to lose,” Vengosh says. “Rather than returning to armed conflict, cooperation over water would provide benefits for both sides. The Palestinian Authority gains another source of drinking water for its growing population, at a cost that is far less expensive than large-scale desalination of seawater.

“For Israel, the transfer of desalinated ground water could help to lessen the political tension between Israel and the new Palestinian leadership,” Weinthal adds. “It could serve as a source of environmental peace-building in a region shattered by decades of war.”

Tim Lucas is the Nicholas School’s national media relations and marketing specialist.

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