Can British activists solve Middle Eastern water conflicts using permaculture?

There’s an asymmetrical conflict that’s been unfolding for decades in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that never makes the headlines and yet is having devastating consequences: it’s a war over natural resources in the mythical land of milk and honey.

Palestinians and Israelis alike face increasing environmental challenges as global warming affects the region – particularly desertification and an increasingly hotter, drier climate. Under Israel’s illegal occupation, however, which began in 1967, the environmental challenges are being exacerbated by Israeli measures to limit the adverse environmental affects on its population by increasingly restricting Palestinian access to Palestinian land and water resources. It’s a calculated process that Palestinians say is tantamount to ethnic cleansing and which breaches international law.

Spend any time travelling throughout the region and you will see scores of aid agencies involved in hundreds of humanitarian projects. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are among the top recipients of foreign aid in the world. Rather than tackle the root causes of the conflict, the West prefers to pour billions of dollars...

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