Trans-border pollution

ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE

A joint study of trans-boundary Palestinian-Israeli watersheds has received the top prize for river management strategies aimed at curtailing pollution of rivers flowing from the West Bank, through Israel and into the Gaza Strip.

Co-author of the study Prof. Alon Tal of Ben Gurion University said the three-year research project with his Palestinian colleagues found that most of the pollution was due to the virtual nonexistence of sewage treatment in the Palestinian areas and the over-use of agricultural pesticides by Israeli farmers.

“These are trans-boundary watersheds that really require coordination if we are going to restore them,” said Tal. “We sat down and tried to look at exactly what was in the water so we could clean it up.”

Pollution was not only destroying the rivers and connected eco-systems, but was also seeping into groundwater and harming potable water sources. The study was recognized at a major conference on water in Vienna recently with the first annual International Journal of River Basin Management Award.

“Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide came together in a spirit of cooperation to address a pressing regional environmental issue,” wrote Prof. Paul Bates, editor-in-chief of the Journal of River Basin Management. “When one considers the trans-boundary nature of the problem studied by Tal and his colleagues and the highly complex local political context, it becomes clear what a singular achievement this work represents.”

The two watersheds studied were the Alexander River – flowing from Samaria, or the northern West Bank, through Israel to the Mediterranean Sea – and the Besor stream from Judea, or the southern West Bank through the Be’er Sheva district in Israel and back into the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip until it empties into the sea.

The streams were mostly dry or flowed with effluent and other sewage, which accounted for about half of the pollution. What needed to be measured was the agriculture pollution, which came only as runoff dependent on the rain. A team of eight researchers lived basically on-call to rush out whenever random rain storms occurred, in order to track and test the intermittent water flow in the rivers.

“I guess one of the advantages of being a professor is you have graduate students to do that. We also established a series of automatic monitoring stations that could capture the water and sample it,” Tal said. “The main thing was, and I think that this is the happy news, when we got the data, it was clear that we needed to work together to start solving our problems.”

The main recommendation was that the Palestinians needed more infrastructure to deal with sewage and Israelis more supervision of the use of agricultural pesticides.

According to Tal, more than 90 percent of sewage produced in the Palestinian Authority is not properly treated. The Besor watershed has raw sewage flowing from the Hebron hills. The Alexander River, known upstream in the West Bank as the Zomar River, is often foul smelling and flowing with wastewater from Palestinian villages. A water treatment plant near the city of Tulkarem, built with German funding, was operating at “sub levels,” Tal said.

Palestinians have complained that Israeli policies were holding up sewage plants, while Israel says the Palestinians have preferred to invest in more ostentatious infrastructure projects.

“Sanitation is an area that has been neglected until now,” Tal said. “We can point fingers on either side for who is responsible, but most important is that we get down to work and start to make it happen.” He added, “There is a huge amount of international aid. It is not that expensive. It is not rocket science. Let’s start treating sewage.”

The research also found that Israeli farmers were causing pollution in the watersheds by their over use of chemicals.

“The Palestinians have agriculture, but it is low-input agriculture, so it doesn’t get all the pesticides and fertilizers that we see running off,” Tal said, recommending that the Israeli ministry of agriculture should enforce tighter regulations on Israel’s agriculture community.

The water study generated a number of suggestions, such as forming joint standards for rivers and restoration programs with trans-boundary parks.

Ironically, with the Palestinians mainly “upstream,” Tal’s researchers found that they were more committed to restoring their rivers than Israelis.

“The fascinating thing was that, even though their per capita income is far lower than Israelis’, it turns out that the Palestinians’ willingness to pay for river restoration is greater,” he said, explaining that it was due mainly to improving their own living conditions.

“When you think about it, the people who live in the West Bank don’t have any coasts, they don’t have much water resources and so the contaminated streams of Judea and Samaria really offer them an opportunity maybe to have a little bit of a waterfront.” He added that the “terrible mosquito hazards” and “horrible smells” were obvious reasons for wanting to clean up their streams.

“When we try to look at the situation and put some of our historic political baggage aside and look at the real issues that bother us, like our environment,” said Tal, “we are, at the end of the day, all human and we all want to have clean air and clean water for our children.”

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