Legal Coordination
While both Israeli and Palestinian laws contain sufficient basic statutes and regulations to address domestic challenges to water quality, there are many areas in the realm of transboundary contamination that require clarification and harmonization. Present normative provisions may be inadequate for cases where discharged wastewater crosses the border and reaches surface or groundwater sources or dispersion of leachate from solid waste facilities and discharges from new development that produce transboundary pollution. While measures to allow for such coordination will ultimately need to be integrated into each countrys statutes and regulations, rather than leaving the matter to chance, the substantive strategy should be driven by very clear provisions in a bi-lateral peace accord.
Coordination of water quality standards will also be essential. Israel traditionally has taken a position which expects the Palestinians to meet Israeli requirements, even as Israels own compliance with environmental standards is frequently deficient. Environmental expectations must be adjusted to meet available capacity. To some extent, the answer to this quagmire involves the gradual phasing in more stringent performance standards through realistic timetables.
To some extent, the answer to this quagmire involves phasing in more stringent performance standards for water quality discharges while at the same allowing for realistic timetables for compliance. Just as East German industries were allotted several years to meet the higher West German environmental expectations after unification, Israelis and Palestinians will need to agree that Palestinians enjoy a grace period to allow for the improvement of both their physical infrastructure and human capacity. While it will be hard for Israeli environmentalists to swallow, it is prudent to temporarily accept somewhat less stringent water quality standards in the interest of ensuring high compliance levels. The alternative may be creating a pattern of lip service regarding environmental compliance and alienation from shared environmental commitments for years to come.
For example, drinking water standards for Palestinian communities may, in the short term, need to be less stringent than those in Israel. Designing standards with recommended and maximum contaminant levels offers the public a clearer sense of what compromises are being made in drinking water quality so that individual decisions can be made with regard to purchase of mineral or bottled water.
Public Involvement
Encouraging public involvement has become such a frequently employed slogan in discourses involving environmental policies, that it often has come to mean very little. In the present context, the challenge is hardly trivial. Actually engaging Israelis and Palestinians in domestic much less joint -- efforts to protect water resources surely is no simple task given the range of other economic, social and security concerns which compete on the national agendas. Yet, it is clear that no water management strategy will be sustainable without substantial backing from local citizens. Because conflicts of interests may arise between agricultural and environmental uses of water, or when zoning imposes limitations in a watershed protection scheme, it is important that decision-makers enjoy public support. Water conservation efforts, almost by definition require the engagement of the public. It is also important that managers be able to leverage enthusiasm or at the very least a reasonable commitment to the peace process in their efforts to ensure sustainable utilization of water resources.
River restoration offers a particularly promising opportunity for public education programs that can engender a greater zeal for environmental and natural resource protection objectives. Even as the Palestinian public has seen little real utility to date from stream restoration projects, surveys suggest that there is especially keen interest in restoring local streams. This may be a result of the general paucity of parks and the total absence of beach front in the West Bank. Water agreements should include commitments for expanding recreational access of citizens to stream banks, with international assistance not limited to treatment technologies but to the public spaces and parks that can take advantage of upgraded water quality.
Israels Water Authority has recently begun to promote a policy where surface water and effluents are no longer be tapped for agricultural use at stream heads, but rather only after they have completed their flow downstream. Pumping water to farmers upstream often requires additional energy and infrastructure, but provides two uses from one stream flow. Such an approach increases the likelihood of support for stream restoration by farmers and those urban communities that can benefit from restored water ways.
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