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BY MIKE UNGER
The Dead Sea is dying.
With each passing year the sea’s depth drops by 1.2 meters, yet Gidon Bromberg, WCL/LLM ’94, refuses to consider its demise inevitable. His goal: the ecosystem will be restored, and it will be done by Jews, Christians, and Muslims working in concert. Mother Nature could not have hoped for a better advocate.
“There is no place on the planet similar to the Dead Sea,” Bromberg says from his office in Tel Aviv, Israel. “We are talking about a stunningly beautiful place in the world. Desert mountains, mysterious waters, green oases. It’s a truly unique setting. There is no other river on earth that has the cultural heritage of the Jordan. The civilizations that have left their mark along the shores of the Dead Sea and the banks of the Jordan River include the very earliest permanent settlement of human kind, some 12,000 years ago. It’s the site of the baptism of Christ. Prophets of the Old Testament lived in the valley. Many of the companions of the prophet Muhammad of Islam are buried along its banks. For all three religions the river has a high importance, and yet we’ve completely destroyed it. Nothing can replace these ecosystems.”
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Tens of thousands of years old, the Dead Sea’s unique high salinity stems from its location as the lowest place on earth; it’s an astonishing 418 meters below sea level. It is treasured not only for its salt, but for the combination of bromide, potassium, and magnesium found in its waters.
Photos courtesy of Friends of the Earth Middle East
The Dead Sea’s receding waters are creating new peninsulas.
The sea’s main water source is the Jordan River, which today is in a great state of peril. Littered with sewage, agricultural runoff, and pilfered of its water primarily for use in farming by Israel, Jordan, and Syria, the river’s diversion is directly responsible for 70 percent of the Dead Sea’s water level decline. The rest stems from mineral mining.
The sea was 80 kilometers long a half-century ago; today, it’s about 50 kilometers.
“It’s dramatic,” Bromberg says. “It’s resulted in another phenomena called sinkholes. The land around the shores of the Dead Sea is collapsing, causing damage to infrastructure. We call it nature’s revenge.”
Advancing ecology and peace
In a part of the world with no shortage of problems, the environment often takes a back seat. It has a champion, however, in Bromberg, who, working from a blueprint he developed while earning an LLM from AU’s Washington College of Law in 1994, has devoted his life to restoring the Jordan River valley.
Gidon Bromberg, 43, is an Israeli, but truly, he is a citizen of the world. Born in Tel Aviv, he grew up in Australia, where his parents immigrated when he was a boy. It was in the vast and beautiful land Down Under that Bromberg came to appreciate the outdoors.
“I spent a great deal of time in the countryside,” Bromberg says, his voice still harboring a hint of an Aussie accent. “The environment is an issue of high priority in Australia. It was very much incorporated into educational programming at school.”
It wasn’t until 1986, however, that he began to appreciate the connection between the law and the environment. Bromberg took part in demonstrations against the building of a dam on the island of Tasmania, and although his participation was minor, the successful fight shaped his belief that social activism can have concrete results.
After earning an undergraduate degree in economics and politics and a law degree in Australia, Bromberg returned to Israel, where he was admitted to the bar. He worked in a law firm for four years and volunteered for a nonprofit environmental organization before landing a fellowship with the New Israel Fund, which sent him to WCL.
“He had a very clear vision as a student about what he was going to do,” says WCL professor David Hunter, who remains friendly with Bromberg. “He used his time as a student to engage professors on the issues he was interested in.”
In the wake of the promising Oslo peace accords, Bromberg’s WCL thesis on the environmental implications of the Middle East peace process intrigued many people around Washington. He managed to secure funding from American backers for a conference on the topic, and in December 1994, he chaired a meeting of key Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Jordanian environmental leaders in Taba, Egypt.
“I presented various options as to the type of cooperation and why we needed to cooperate,” he says. “On the second day a very bold decision [was made] to create a new organization, EcoPeace, playing on the two goals [of], advancing ecology and peace.
“We were the first regional organization ever to be created, and quite sadly, we remain the only regional organization ever to be created. The term window of opportunity is used loosely, but indeed we were fortunate to have a window. By ’96 the peace process had already deteriorated. It was a fortunate combination of a good idea at an opportune time. If we were to try to create such an organization today it would be utterly impossible.”
Indeed, through the years Bromberg and his friends in EcoPeace have been forced to endure threats and intimidation.
“The challenges are constant due to the heightened tensions of the conflict,” he says. “There is a general lack of trust and cynicism that peace is even possible. People in the communities that are willing to work together are labeled ‘collaborators’ or ‘working with the enemy.’ We overcome the challenges by having a greatly committed staff, brave people. Things can work for the benefit of all. We have experienced that amongst ourselves, and that gives us the internal strength to push forward, certain that peace is a possibility in the Middle East.”
A rare but welcome sight: Palestinians and Israelis united on the Jordan River on Earth Day 2006.
In 1997 EcoPeace joined the Friends of the Earth network, and two years later it adopted the name EcoPeace Friends of the Earth Middle East. Today, its 38 staff members and hundreds of volunteers work in offices in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank, and Amman, Jordan, lobbying governments to adopt environmentally favorable policies and trying to stimulate public awareness of the ecosystems at the grassroots level.
Brent Blackwelder, president of the Friends of the Earth U.S., has worked closely with Bromberg through the years. “You’re looking at an extremely talented young environmental leader who has been able, in the midst of incredible political relationships and hatred, to get Arabs and Jews to cooperate on common resources that they share,” he says. “He is a real treasure for that part of the world.”
An urgent job
The Jordan River valley needs Bromberg now more than ever. The diversion of water from the river slowly is killing the Dead Sea, but there are two proposals on the table to revive it. They include reducing subsidies paid to farmers, thus lowering the amount of agriculture in the area and the corresponding demand for the Jordan’s water, and the construction of a canal that would channel water from the Red Sea more than 200 kilometers away.
At this point EcoPeace favors rehabilitating the Jordan, but Bromberg says both options must be studied vigorously.
“It’s mostly the agricultural sector that would have to become more efficient,” he says. “The crops would have to face increased prices. Although water is the most scarce resource in the Middle East—we’re talking about the desert—water is being supplied to agriculture at heavily subsidized prices. Most of the crops grown there are exported to Europe and the rest of the Middle East. What are we exporting? We’re exporting our water. If the demand for water would be reduced the economic opportunity for leaving that water in nature could be realized.”
That opportunity comes in the form of tourism. Despite its morbid name, the Dead Sea region actually is a flourishing, diverse ecosystem. For years it has attracted vacationers from around the globe, but Bromberg and others fear those dollars will stop flowing into the economy if the Jordan River continues to decline.
“The magnificence of both the Jordan River and the Dead Sea is actually the 7,000-meter fault line linking Asia and Africa,” he says. “You have magnificent desert mountains that rise up above the shores of the Dead Sea. Below you is this mysterious deep blue water that is the Dead Sea. When you walk out of the Dead Sea you almost feel like you have a layer of oil on you. It’s surrounded by springs and subtropical oases. It’s very green and full of life even though the mountains around the Dead Sea are natural deserts. The springs coming down to the shores provide the lifeline for all the biodiversity.”
Nature acknowledges no political, ethnic, or religious differences, a reality Bromberg has stressed while crafting EcoPeace’s approach to conservation.
“The ecosystems are shared between Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians,” he says. “This is a good thing, as it creates mutual dependence.”
Maher Al Akasheh, left, the mayor of the Safi Municipality in Jordan, and Dov Litvinoff, mayor of the Tamar Regional Council in Israel, stand at the edge of a large sinkhole at a former camping-ground site near Ein Gedi in Israel. There are now more than 1,000 sinkholes that have opened up around the Dead Sea shores due to its receding waters, both on the Israeli and Jordanian sides. |
The organization’s Good Water Neighbors program involves 17 Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian communities along the banks of the Jordan River. Each is partnered with a neighboring community on the other side of the political divide to work on common water issues. The program has created a group of youth volunteer water trustees in each community and educated them about their water realities and wise water use; invested in a public building, such as a school, in each community and transformed it into a water-wise model building; launched a public petition concerning a common cross-border water problem; and organized workshops on water issues, focusing on the potential role of relevant stakeholders.
“[Bromberg’s] trying to convince different people in the region to deal with it as one problem,” says Nader Al-Khateeb, EcoPeace’s Palestinian director. “He’s committed to bringing Palestinians, Jordanians, and Israelis together to see how they can cooperate. He’s a citizen of this region and cares for its future. He believes in peace and the rights of everybody to live in harmony.”
Is any natural wonder safe?
If the Dead Sea does indeed die, is any natural wonder safe?
“The health of the Jordan connects to the whole system there,” Blackwelder says. “The Dead Sea is shrinking. What’s happening to that river is an unbelievable ecological degradation. It’s an urgent, difficult job to bring about restoration, but thank goodness for a person like Gidon who has the hope, the inspiration, the charisma, the talent to hold out promising solutions and to mobilize support for them.
“A best case scenario is that you bring the river back to maybe 80 percent of what it once was and that you start bringing back the kind of ecosystem that it had. I think he’s the best hope we have. You face difficult challenges, but I think he has the courage, the vision, and the potential, if anyone has it, to meet this challenge. It’s kind of like asking will anyone hit .400. I can give you a list of great hitters, but hitting .400 is [a tall task].”
Like the obstacles to peace in the region, the prospects of rejuvenating the Jordan River and the Dead Sea are daunting, yet Bromberg is convinced both can be achieved. “One of the things I treasure most in my work is the interaction with people on the ground who remember what the Jordan River used to look like, who remember the flood waters in winter that would soar down the river and into the Dead Sea,” he says. “The environment is a great impetus for peace building. The Middle East continues to suffer because of the political conflict and the competition over scarce resources. What we do in our work is turn things around and look at how we could all benefit if we cooperate together and manage the resources in more sustainable fashion.” |
