Resource learns about a project to provide Bedouin and Palestinian villages with free biogas, which is also dealing with waste and helping to promote peace in the Middle East.
The institute, founded in 1996 in the wake of the Oslo Accords, and currently accredited by Ben Gurion University in the Negev, aims to show ‘that nature knows no political borders’. The specific project that HomeBiogas is involved in was started by another alumnus, Ilana Meallem, who studied issues of sustainability in the Bedouin community of the Jordan Valley, which suffers from a lack of security in supply of water, energy and food, and also no longer has room to practice traditional nomadic herding. Teller tells me: “There are almost no nomadic people anymore – there’s no room for them to move anymore. But because they’re not nomadic, they actually have more of a problem with manure, because they corral the animals most of the time. So, historically, they used to roam around and the manure would be all over. Now it’s in one spot in one place, and it actually makes more of a problem.”Explaining the project in a video for the Arava Institute, Teller says: “There’s a few goals here. First of all is to help people. Help people have a healthier and cleaner environment. So the biogas system is actually a place for them to throw their waste, their animal waste, their food waste. Before that, you can see that they throw the animal waste into the river or burn it... and it makes a lot of smoke and sometimes even children get burned from it. So, there’s another way to use the manure and to reuse. Now, they have a place to throw it. It helps their environment and also of course helps them have clean gas for free.”
The project has more recently been expanded by the Peres Center for Peace, with funding from the European Union, and Teller tells me they have just finished installing 75 more systems in a few more Bedouin and Palestinian villages in the area. The Peres Centre for Peace, founded by former Israeli President Shimon Peres, has the stated aim of building ‘an infrastructure for peace by advancing social-economic cooperation and people-to-people relations’, and when I ask Teller what the project has contributed to peacebuilding in the area, he highlights the importance of interaction: “You can always talk about the other side, the ‘enemy’ or whatever, but the minute you meet, and you eat and drink with them and you build together, then you don’t see the other person, the other side as an enemy. You see another person who wants to build something good for the world, like you.”
He goes on to say that, despite an escalation of Israeli-Palestinian tension and violence starting in July of last year, the 60 students involved in the project are committed to working together: “In this time of tension,” he says, “they wanted to stop the project and not let the Israelis go into the Palestinian villages because they were afraid that something would happen to them, and vice versa... but despite the violence and the tension, the students already working on the project said they don’t care and they want to continue to work together.
“And I can say about me specifically, I have people that I work with. So, even though I’m Israeli and sometimes I’m not supposed to go certain places because it’s dangerous, I go everywhere in the Palestinian territories, I’m there morning and evenings with my Palestinian partner. And I work with Palestinians and we talk together about our families and our children, and about our lives, and we share our life with each other.”
He concludes with hope, albeit qualified hope, for peace in the region: “If more and more people like us are doing things like this, maybe the peace will come. I’m not talking about the political side, because politics will not succeed to change. There are big influences that are not just connected to Palestine and Israel, it’s connected to the world. But on the ground, there is a fire of peace and understanding and a willingness to build a peace between people. So, hopefully this will be a flame that in the end will influence politics. Between the people themselves – the students, my partners – in our hearts, we know there’s good people on the other side and we’re working together – there’s not another side – to do good for the world, and to do good for the environment, and to do good for the people that we meet.”
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