Her triangular computer mouse finds the blue circular logo with the white camera on the bottom of her screen. She hovers over it for a second, taking a deep breath before clicking on the icon. Remembering the last program meeting, Marina Lubanov commits herself to listening more to the other participants, prepping herself to take a step back and really absorb what everyone is saying. With nervous excitement, she clicks on her zoom app and is launched into a meeting with other young professionals from her home country of Israel, and neighboring Jordan and Palestine.

Lubanov is an Israeli participant in EcoPeace Middle East’s Water Diplomacy Training for Young Professionals. With offices in Tel Aviv, Amman, and Ramallah, EcoPeace works with communities and decision-makers across Israel, Jordan, and Palestine to collaboratively protect the region’s shared environmental resources. The young professionals program was established to foster connections between young professionals across the region and provide opportunities for them to collaborate in the protection of shared environmental resources, despite conflict in the region.

Cross-National Projects to Protect Cross-National Resources

As a part of the organization’s inaugural young professionals program, Lubanov, alongside her fellow Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian participants, is engaging in a series of training sessions over the course of a full year. Through these sessions, the young professionals learn about the region’s water resources and develop communication and negotiation skills to enable them to work collaboratively across the three countries. They then meet in groups to design grassroots projects that address a diverse collection of water-related issues in the area.

While focused on water and environmental stability broadly, the projects cover a wide range of topics and occupational sectors.

Mohammad Issam Arar, a Jordanian participant in the program, is working on a wastewater management project for Bethlehem in the West Bank. Currently, the city doesn’t have widespread wastewater treatment, so each building has its own septic tank. The wastewater from the septic tanks can infiltrate the groundwater and pollute the area. Arar’s group is working to implement a new technology that consists of a UASB reactor, a technology that breaks down biodegradable material for wastewater treatment, and a trickling filter, a filtration system that removes contaminants from wastewater, to provide the city’s inhabitants with treated water for agricultural use and fertilizer from the wastewater’s byproduct.

Meanwhile, Lubanov’s group is developing a policy paper that provides an overview of technological projects that could be implemented in Area C of the West Bank to treat wastewater and use it for agricultural purposes. In the policy paper, she said, they are piecing together all of the political, economic, and environmental variables that have an impact on available technologies, in order to analyze which solution is most suitable for the area.

In the first regional meeting for her group, Lubanov told me that she and her group members struggled to decide on a project. The Israeli participants started to ask the other members, “What do you need?” without really absorbing the information they were hearing from the other group members, she said.

Meeting through zoom for their second regional gathering, they worked to communicate more effectively—everyone listened more carefully, and was more receptive to what they were hearing. “It’s really listening, it’s really understanding what the other side needs,” Lubanov said.

Through the program, participants learned a form of “mutual gain negotiation,” Lubanov said, helping them to converse with each other and address the complexity of shared water resources despite the history of regional tension. Participants learned how to sit together at a round table and share their thoughts and needs, while also really listening and absorbing others’ input.

Conversing Across Geopolitical Tensions

Roy Kimhi, an Israeli participant, said the program is about learning how to solve complex water and natural resources problems in a situation where these resources transcend borders, and you have a collection of countries with different narratives and interests.

In the national meetings, Kimhi said, participants learned how to engage in conversations strictly focused on the shared issues, rather than the person with whom you are engaging. As a result, participants learn to move directly to the issue of water resources, and not to discuss the geopolitical tensions in the region.

This is not an easy task.

As a young professional from Palestine, Shahd Toum said that that she struggled to leave the political issues off the table. In the first meeting, it was difficult to be in a meeting room with young professionals from across the three states, and to talk freely without addressing the conflict, she said. However, you have to remember the benefits of working together and rising above the tensions, the mutual gain that can come from this cooperation, she said. “It’s not easy to avoid all things and just talk about the environment, but we can do it.”

In order to protect the natural environment, cross-border collaboration is essential, said Arar. “We should cooperate with each other regardless of any conflicts, so EcoPeace is trying to find solutions and tackle the problems regardless of any conflicts between Jordan or Israel or Palestine,” he said.

“As an Israeli, I almost never have any contact with Palestinians or Jordanians. There [are these] huge cultural and political barriers that don’t allow us to have an easy connection route,” Kimhi said. EcoPeace is just that—it provides a safe and legitimate platform to have these conversations and connect with environmentalists across borders, he said.

“For me, it was really cool to know that other people share the same interest for water, and it makes you feel more optimistic,” Lubanov said. It was exciting to share their environmental passions with each other, she said, and to have this opportunity to work together with other young professionals who are also eager to make a difference.

“We learned a lot from each other,” Toum said. “We’re sharing ideas, we’re sharing information, knowledge, even skills.”

Investing in the Future

In addition to drawing together young professionals from across the region, the program brings together participants with wide ranging backgrounds and experiences. It’s fascinating because each participant brings a different lens to the issue, so the program allows you to absorb so much from different sectors or arenas you wouldn’t traditionally come across within your own occupational sphere, said Kimhi, an environmental filmmaker.

It is great for the future of young professionals because it really widens your perspective on how to look at a problem, said Kimhi. “You can look at it as an engineer, you can look at it as an [economist], you can look at it as a storyteller, you can look at it as a lawyer. And all those lenses, all those angles, are very vital in order to solve the issues because you need them all,” he said. Everyone is bringing something special to the table, said Toum, a recent graduate in Civil Engineering.

Providing footholds for this mentality of cross-border cooperation that go beyond EcoPeace’s young professionals program is the ultimate goal of the organization’s cumulative work.

Many aspects of this process will stick with me forever, said Lubonv, who works on the policy side of Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. In the future she plans to draw on the knowledge she’s gained through the project when designing a policy or a project, and hopes that the program will help to establish the next generation of great leaders—“leaders in their field, in their own society, in their own community. This will be the biggest accomplishment of the program,” said Lubanov.

Toum said her hope is that the program will create the space for a more cooperative future among Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. A starting point for now, the region’s shared environment presents an opportunity for greater collaboration in the future. “I do believe that the environment could potentially be a way to do peacebuilding and…seeing our neighbors as equals and really trying to work together in order to solve our shared problem,” said Kimhi.