Gidon Bromberg

Israeli Director
EcoPeace Middle East
Israel

Mar 12, 2019

Gidon Bromberg is the co-founder and co-director of EcoPeace Middle East, an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental peacebuilding organization. With offices in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, their work focuses on both protecting the natural environment and using environmental resources to foster cooperation across Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. Gidon holds a Bachelor of Economics and a law degree from Monash University in Australia. He later earned a Master’s degree in International Environmental Law from American University. He has published extensively on issues relating to environmental policy, water security, and environmental peacebuilding in the Middle East. Gidon has presented before the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament and the advisory meeting to the UN High-Level Panel on Security. In recognition of his work, he has received a number of awards and honors, including being named, together with his Palestinian and Jordanian co-directors, as Environmental Heroes by Time Magazine in 2008, receiving the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2009, and Stanford University’s Bright Award for the Environment in 2018.

The original idea for EcoPeace Middle East evolved out of Gidon’s thesis which investigated whether peace was good for the environment at a time when environmental issues were not properly on the peace agenda. EcoPeace Middle East launched at the end of 1994 and quickly became a trail-blazer in regional environmental issues, as well as a way to encourage the inclusion of environmental issues in considerations of peace. Gidon’s work with EcoPeace Middle East has focused heavily on shared water issues between Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. This has included co-authoring proposals for how to move forward on a fair deal on water issues between Israelis and Palestinians, suggesting solutions for the water crisis in Gaza, and responding to broader water security issues that face the region as a result of climate change. Their work is strongly rooted in science and economics, and it highlights the concept that communities working in their own interests can have mutual gain, especially as it relates to the health and protection of ecosystems on which each community depends. The ‘Good Water Neighbors’ Project, which started with 11 communities (5 Palestinian, 5 Israeli, and 1 Jordanian), exemplifies EcoPeace Middle East’s creative and important approach to peace. The project emphasizes cross-community and cross-boundary shared water resources as a starting point for cooperation and peace, combining education and policy to demonstrate that cooperation and local peace among Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians is possible and can grow from mutual environmental understandings.

In another example, EcoPeace Middle East succeeded in stopping the building of a wall/separation barrier in an area of the West Bank/Israel by encouraging its listing as a World Heritage Site due to mutual environmental and shared heritage value for all the people who have lived in the region over the past 4,000 years. This example illustrates the power of shared heritage in transcending singular Palestinian and Israeli identities and prevailing over narrow security concerns that do not consider mutual value and shared opportunities.

EcoPeace Middle East’s work is also deeply rooted in the idea that environmental cooperation and activism is deeply political, and Gidon speaks of the ways in which the organization has reinvented itself in response to changes in political situations in the region: “In the early days, EcoPeace Middle East was associated with the idea that peace was happening, and addressed concerns of overdevelopment. The focus was on ecology and environmental issues while celebrating peace. However, as the peace process failed, we had to reconsider whether the organization was still relevant. What we saw, however, was that the relationships we had built over environmental issues showed that we can work productively together as Palestinians, Israelis, and Jordanians and that through our common efforts to manage our shared environment and resources, especially water, fairly and justly, we exemplified that peace between our peoples was possible, advancing self interests and mutual gain.”

For Gidon, environmental peacebuilding is about highlighting the interconnection between the environment and human security concerns to show that we must understand how our shared environment connects us across borders and use this knowledge to encourage further cooperation. Of the EcoPeace Middle East’s institutional membership in the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, Gidon says, “We are proud to be a founding member of the Association. There is tremendous value in the sharing of understanding, methodology, and experience of environmental peacebuilding across the globe. Membership will allow us to share methodologies developed in one of the most complicated parts of the world in terms of conflict and also learn from the important and inspiring experience from other groups.” The Association is a way to further the cross-country dialogue and knowledge sharing that EcoPeace Middle East has already started. For example, the Good Water Neighbors model has been adopted by Christian and Muslim municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a means to bring communities in conflict together around a shared river, an example of the power of applying shared methodologies of environmental peacebuilding. Gidon and EcoPeace Middle East are looking forward to the First Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in October 2019 as an opportunity to share and learn from like-minded practitioners and groups.