In the desert oasis of Kibbutz Ketura, Israelis and Palestinians work together together to build a green future

An impossible Judean date palm grows in Kibbutz Ketura of the Arava Valley, deep in the Negev Desert.

Named Methuselah, the palm grew from 2,000-year-old seed excavated from the ancient fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Arching over 11 feet high, Methuselah is a botanical miracle in a desert oasis, marking the reincarnation of a long-extinct biblical tree to Israel.

The date palm isn’t the only miracle in Ketura. When war broke after the October 7 attack, Palestinian and Israeli students continued to dine together in the communal hall. Some even shared dorm rooms. When Israelis were called on for reserve duty, their Palestinian classmates kept anxious contact. At Yom Kippur last year, everyone gathered in the communal synagogue.

North of Erat, the kibbutz is home to the Arava Institute, founded in 1996 in the wake of the Oslo peace accords. It offers academic programmes where Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, and international students collaborate to tackle environmental challenges in the region with peacebuilding solutions. “Nature has no borders” is the guiding ethos. 

At the helm of Arava is Dr Tareq Abu Hamed, who was once the highest ranking Palestinian in the Israeli government when he became Acting Chief Scientist in the ministry in 2013. When asked with what nation he identifies, Abu Hamed said: “I personally don’t care. I’m human, we’re all humans.”

Dr Tareq Abu Hamed has been the executive director of the Arava Institute since 2021 (courtesy of the Arava Institute)[Missing Credit]

The Palestinian-Israeli grew up in the village of Sur Baherin of East Jerusalem, neighbouring kibbutz Ramat Rahel where he volunteered in high school during the First Intifada. “That was my first interaction with my Jewish neighbour,” he said. Living and working alongside Israeli Jews was formative. “That shaped my personality.”

Now, as executive director at Arava, he prides himself on the fact that cross-border dialogue at the kibbutz is a central principle. There’s a weekly session bringing together Palestinians and Israelis to speak about their differences in the hope of building unity. “They talk about the conflict, culture, religion, personal stories, family stories, identity, Nakba, Independence Day,” he said. “Palestinians share their experience living in the West Bank, in Gaza, in a refugee camp. Israelis share their experience serving in the army.”

Sometimes you hear students cry, sometimes you hear them shout at each other, but at the end of the day, the desert kibbutz is “in the middle of nowhere, and they have no other place to go”. The only thing they can do is keep talking and return to their shared dorms at nightfall.

Students socialising at Kibbutz Ketura in the Negev, north of Eilat (courtesy of the Arava Institute)[Missing Credit]

By October 7, term at was well under-way at the institute, and five students from the West Bank were living among Israelis. Because the students had already built up a foundation of dialogue, war didn’t break their bond. In fact, Ketura took in hundreds of displaced Israelis from the ravaged southern kibbutzim and Palestinians welcomed them with open arms.

“Through the academic program, you give people the opportunity to see the human in the other, to humanise each other. And it was totally natural for the Palestinian students to help the families who came from the Western Negev to the kibbutz,” said Abu Hamed.

As we speak, he is based in Athens for a conference about the future of energy, food and water in the region with a focus on the Gaza Strip. As part of the institute’s “Jumpstarting hope in Gaza” project, he hopes to begin the construction of off-grid shelters for over 20,000 displaced Gazans.

The project has already built four pilot shelters in Al-Mawasi, Hamad, and Dir Albalah, housing 5,000. But once Avara gets approval from the Israeli government to send the right equipment, the shelters will turn “green”. Powered by solar energy, they will be capable of desalination, wastewater treatment, and organic waste recycling.

Methuselah, a male tree, was bred with a female to produce the same date variety eaten in ancient Judea (courtesy of the Arava Institute)[Missing Credit]

For Abu Hamed, the shared precarity that the climate crisis plunges the region in is an opportunity to bridge political division. “Gaza has a lot of environmental challenges, water challenges, and the pollution in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. It impacts the aquifer that is shared with Israel, and impacts the eastern Mediterranean, and that impacts Israel,” he said.

“But the important thing for me is to use this environmental challenge to expose people to the human and the other. To give them the tool that helps them to humanize each other. There is no way that we can deal with the region's environmental problems alone. You have to be in touch with your neighbours.”

That’s why on October 8, a day after Hamas’ deadly onslaught that killed 1,300 people, Abu Hamed opened a Zoom with the institute’s Gazan partners and they pledged to continue their work. Before the war, his team successfully sent seven atmospheric water generators, powered by solar energy, to deliver clean drinking water to the Strip. The aim is to continue in this cross-border scientific collaboration which has gone on for seven years.

In the past 15 months, the relationship has been tough. Zoom calls are interrupted by bombs in the background, connection is lost. There’s a lot of anger and frustration on either side, but hope remains.

At the Arava Institute, Abu Hamed is determined to train the Palestinian engineers and technicians of tomorrow. He’s organised trips from the girls’ school in his home village of Sur Baherin to the Weizmann in Rehovot and to Harvard. “It’s exposure to science,” he said, but also “exposure to the other”.

In the communal kitchen of one of Arava’s pilot shelters in Gaza hangs the photograph of Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. The kitchen is named in her memory.

While some have dubbed Abu Hamed mission to forge peace through scientific endeavor naïve, he is confident there’s no other future. “I do this because it is good for my people. It is good for my people as an Israeli, for the Israelis, and it's good for my people as a Palestinian, for the Palestinians.”

You can make a donation to the Arava Institute here arava.org/about-our-community/about-fai/givingdonate/