It may be a cliché to say that water knows no boundaries, but for Elizabeth Koch-Ya’ari, navigating the stream of ecology and peace making is bringing together Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists – people of different faiths from neighbouring communities – to mobilize and build friendships around their common source of life.
As a project coordinator with EcoPeace Middle East, Koch-Ya’ari leads a campaign to rehabilitate the Jordan River. Once a vital source of clean water throughout the Holy Land, the river has been sullied by untreated sewage and drought during the past 50 years.
“We come together and we use environment as a platform for peace-building,” Koch-Ya’ari told Episcopal News Service following a presentation in Tel Aviv in January, when she met with a United States interfaith delegation that visited the region on pilgrimage.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to enter into understanding these different communities that are bordering each other, that share the same water resources, that share the environment,” she said. “In this area of the world, water can bring us together, because water does not see all these walls and borders that we put between each other.”
The Jordan River has major significance in Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the site where the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land, where John the Baptist baptised Jesus, and where Prophet Mohammed foretold an event that happened years later.
EcoPeace has created a toolkit of resources for Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities, called Water and Ecology in the Jordan River, to encourage faith-based education and engagement around the issue of water.
“The reality is that many people who live along the Jordan River don’t experience its benefits. In many parts of its flow, it’s dirty, polluted, [and] it disappears in dry seasons of the year,” Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, one of the pilgrimage co-leaders, told ENS while visiting the Yardenit Baptismal Site along the Jordan River in the Galilee region of northern Israel.
“The work of the EcoPeace institute is to gather people from both sides of the river, from different faith traditions in neighbouring communities, to advocate and work for improvement of the water situation, to understand each other’s needs, and they come to understand each other as friends in doing that work,” she said. “It’s true peace-building work.”
“Communities across this region share so much,” Koch-Ya’ari said of the Holy Land. “Water is a basic part of life and to join together to rehabilitate shared water streams like the lower Jordan River, we gain a lot, not only for the environment but also to learn about each other, about our different faith communities and about how we can help each other [and] our shared ecosystems.”
Koch-Ya’ari is one of a number of leaders of grassroots initiatives in the Holy Land with whom the U.S. interfaith delegation met during its Jan. 18-27 pilgrimage. She and other grassroots leaders are certain that these sorts of initiatives will be the key to building the trust and breaking down the barriers that will ensure a lasting peace in the region long after the politicians broker any kind of deal.
Back in January, the interfaith group heard how Lior Frankiensztajn’s world changed a few years ago after he welcomed a Palestinian man into his home for two months. He got to learn many things about himself and his roots, but most importantly, he saw “how reality looks from a different perspective,” he told the interfaith pilgrims following lunch in a Tel Aviv restaurant. Unfortunately, “politicians manage the relationships, which limits the opportunity for progress. … There has to be a different approach to policymaking, to education.”
Article extracted from one published on the Episcopal Church on-line news service. Click here for the full article.
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