The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rise Again of the Middle East’s Most Ambitious Environment Scheme

For an initiative that has the potential to rework the Middle East, Project Prosperity would leave a remarkably small imprint on the ground. In its initial phase, Israel would build a new desalination facility on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. Deep within the Jordanian desert, an Emirati company would develop and operate a solar field on the Kingdom’s behalf. Drawing from mostly existing pipelines and a few new transmission links, the two countries would then funnel resources to one another––water to Jordan and renewably generated electricity to Israel––in ways that few citizens would even notice. So far, it is relatively uncomplicated.

But if the mechanics and, crucially, the economics of this project seem doable, the politics are another thing altogether. By binding Israelis, Jordanians––and, later, Palestinians––into mutual resource interdependencies, these ties would make it that much harder for governments to fight. And by helping to address shared climate and environmental crises, the project would increase the climate resilience of the region. All the while, this trade could foster the kinds of people-to-people interactions needed to build a more durable, equitable, and environmentally sustainable peace down the line. That, at least, was, and perhaps remains, the plan.

For years now, small teams of environmentalists from across these three countries have been at the forefront of regional peacebuilding efforts. Their core idea has always been that transboundary environmental woes, detachable as they are often seen from conflicts’ wider dynamics, could help crack open the intractable-looking Israeli-Palestinian mess, too. The grandiose Project Prosperity is supposed to be the culmination of some of that work. Though seldom publicly acknowledged as an influence, this scheme and others like it in the Holy Land have helped inspire similar cross-border regional environmental cooperation. Iran, for example, has proposed an anti-sandstorm coalition with its neighbors; the Arab Gulf states are alive with talk of pooling resources.

But while nobody involved with the project ever suggested it was going to be anything other than hard, few could have imagined that it would pan out quite so dramatically, so akin––as one negotiator said of it––‘to snatching failure from the jaws of victory.’ Based on interviews with both the team that originally conceived of the plan and largely non-attributable discussions with many of the officials charged with implementing it, this is the story of how they got so close to an improbable deal. It is the story of why it went so wrong and, amid the worst moment in recent Israeli-Palestinian history, how it might yet be salvaged. Ultimately, given the global interest in the project model, this might also be the story of the limitations to the otherwise exciting possibilities that come with harnessing the environment to peacebuilding ends.

As Nada Majdalani, the Palestine co-director of EcoPeace Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental NGO that dreamt up Project Prosperity, put it in a spring 2024 interview: “We act locally, but we think globally. Because if we can do this in this difficult, difficult place, then so can so many others elsewhere. The reality is just really ugly. The world is going really crazy. And here we are working to show that there is some hope.” 

The Origins

The seeds of this project were planted in very different, much more optimistic circumstances. It was the mid-1990s, and following the Oslo Accords and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, it seemed to many that ‘peace had broken out.’  Wary of the unrestricted development then proposed for a seemingly pacified new land, environmentalists banded together across borders to manage the anticipated pitfalls of success, such as massive new hotels along the Dead Sea. EcoPeace, which at the time included Egyptians, was one of the first organizations to try and yoke that energy.

It did not take long, though, for the optimism to fade, the mood to sour, and very soon for the positive vision to vanish altogether. Egyptian delegates dropped out of EcoPeace in the late 1990s, a consequence, EcoPeace says, of Cairo’s wariness of its civil society engaging with Israelis. The organization, which had rebranded as Friends of the Earth Middle East, was later stripped of its affiliation by that NGO because of intensifying anti-Israel sentiment through the second intifada, according to Gidon Bromberg, the organization’s longtime Israel co-director. By the early 2000s, environmentalists had concluded that, far from protecting the natural landscape from a non-existent peace, they could––and should––turn the entire equation on its head.

Since then, EcoPeace and other border-spanning organizations of its kind, such as the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, have seized upon shared troubles to deliver tangible water, air quality, and other improvements for communities across the region, many of whom face worse environmental outcomes as a direct consequence of the conflict. At the same time, these environmentalists have helped preserve a degree of Israeli-Palestinian contact even as encounters between their respective politicians and officials have become collector’s items. “There is always dialogue on the environment because it’s not built on trust. It just recognizes necessity,” said Bromberg, speaking in Tel Aviv on October 6, 2023, the day before everything went very wrong. “But you need that dialogue for other reasons, too. It’s harder to start meaningful cooperation again if the dialogue ever stops.”

But as the physical environment continued to deteriorate in line with the political one, EcoPeace, in particular, felt that this period of broken peace talks and a fast-deteriorating natural landscape called out for something more ambitious. Having unveiled their vision of a mutually beneficial resource swap, the stars suddenly began to align over the past half-decade. First, Jordan’s water prognosis, already among the worst of all non-island states, dropped off even more due to intensifying climate stresses and the apparent failure of its bids to source resources elsewhere. Amman had pinned its hopes on various costly schemes to desalinate Red Sea water and then pipe it to its populous north, but having struggled to secure international financing, officials were moved to consider securing additional water from Israel. “Jordan needs that water. And this is just one of the scenarios that we need to advance to meet our growing deficit,” said Yana Abu Taleb, EcoPeace’s Jordan co-director. “But we’re also highlighting the comparative advantage for us. Before, the trade was all one-way, just us buying water from Israel or just gas from them. Now we have something valuable that they need too [renewably generated electricity].”

(Once in the same bleak ‘boat’ as Jordan, Israel has improved its own water prospects through water reuse practices and the dramatic rollout of desalination technology, which now provides about three-quarters of its drinking water. Under the terms of their 1994 peace treaty, Israel already gives Jordan 50 million cubic meters (mcm) of water a year. Project Prosperity calls for the transfer of at least another 200 mcm.)

Then, in 2020, came the Abraham Accords, the Trump Administration-brokered normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE (along with a number of other regional states), and, a year later, the election of a new Israeli government. For the UAE, Project Prosperity seemed like an opportunity to draw closer to Israel and its vaunted environmental and defense technology while also turning a tidy profit. Masdar, the state-owned renewable energy giant that ultimately agreed to build the Jordanian solar plant, initially rejected EcoPeace’s overtures, deeming their plan for a series of small solar fields too small-time, Bromberg says. It was only when the project’s ambition grew that the company committed.

For its part, the Israeli administration of Naftali Bennett wanted both better relations with Jordan after years of weakening ties under Netanyahu and an opportunity to make good on its climate action commitments. More than half of Israel’s desert is a military zone, and most of the rest is dedicated to nature preserves, ensuring that it will struggle to roll out sufficient domestic solar to wean itself off of fossil fuels. 

Though, as Bromberg notes, the pre-Bennett Netanyahu government also recognized some of the project’s merits. After initially rubbishing Project Prosperity as a potential repeat of Israel’s previous unhappy experience of depending on neighbors for energy security, the then-energy minister did an about-turn in 2018-19. “If you secure funding for a pilot project, we’ll go along with this,” he said. EcoPeace duly did––from the Swedish Development Agency.

Finally, with the election of President Joe Biden and his appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry as climate envoy, there appeared to be a mediating team with the experience, gravitas, and mandate to push this over the line. (In involving itself, the US also helped to overcome any remaining Emirati qualms, negotiators said.) Once wary of quixotic-looking schemes, skeptics started to come around. “I must say EcoPeace is known as the dreamers of the Middle East,” said Tamar Zandberg, a longtime Israeli environmentalist who served as Minister of Environment in the Bennett government. “It seemed too ambitious, maybe even a presumptuous idea. But with Kerry, they got the breakthroughs.”

Challenges galore

Even with fortune seemingly smiling on it and political buy-in almost across the board, Project Prosperity still almost fell apart a dozen times in its early stages. There was the Palestine ‘obstacle,’ the rather glaring omission of Gaza and the West Bank from this resource bounty. That, EcoPeace emphasizes, was in breach of Project Prosperity’s plan, which also calls for the construction of a large desalination plant on the Gaza coast to help supply Palestinian and Jordanian water needs––and the transfer of Jordanian solar energy to Palestinian communities as well. But with a lack of interest among distrustful Palestinian politicians––and hardline pro-settlement politicians in the Israeli coalition government, among other complications, it was a matter of accepting the deal in this shape, with a view to expanding its parameters later or having no deal at all, negotiators say.

Relatedly, the inherent instability of the Israeli coalition, a patchwork of parties that extended from the left to the hard right and which could agree on little given that ideological breadth, ensured that negotiators were forever working against the clock and the likely return of less accommodating partners there, as indeed happened in the summer of 2022. The environment, Zandberg says, was one of the few areas of relative commonality. (Even then, navigating hardline ministers’ concerns required re-routing the electricity transmission lines so that they passed to the south of the West Bank from Jordan into Israel rather than through Palestinian territory where they could be harnessed for local state-building purposes.)

Just as importantly, there were the challenges posed to the deal by Jordan’s own domestic concerns. Politicians there were skeptical of their Israeli counterparts’ commitment to this project. Environmentalists were worried that that impression would only strengthen due to Israel’s bureaucratic infrastructure approval process, including the delays that would likely be imposed on the construction of the new Mediterranean-side desalination facility, and the fact that, while important for Israel, this project’s success is not “a government stays, or government falls” one for its officials, in words of one negotiator. By contrast, Masdar was ready to break ground on the solar field within months. “The truth is that we [the Jordanians] trusted the mediators––the Americans and the Emiratis. The Israelis trusted the Americans and the Emiratis. We just didn’t trust each other,” said Yana Abu Taleb.

Cognizant also of the deep public unpopularity of this kind of exchange with Israel, negotiators in Amman drove the hardest of bargains. One of the stickiest sticking points was Jordan’s determination that the water it received from Israel must be desalinated water alone instead of a mixture of desalinated and Jordan river water, as EcoPeace proposed. The NGO’s concept called for Israel to deliver water through its National Water Carrier, a pipeline that had been built in the 1950s and 60s to irrigate Israel’s arid south using the Sea of Galilee but which had recently been re-engineered to carry desalinated water in the other direction. From the lake through which the Jordan passes, that mix of river and now-usable seawater would then be left to flow downstream to its intended recipients. The use of mostly pre-existing infrastructure would save Jordan about $400 million, according to EcoPeace calculations, but Amman feared the optics of paying for dollops of water that many Jordanians (a majority of whom are of at least partly Palestinian origin) already deem to be their own. 

Above all, as many interviewees pointed out, nothing of this ambition has been tried anywhere in the world. The very fact then that the team got the main pieces in place while working on a tight schedule and among parties with high levels of mutual mistrust was remarkable. “We didn’t go in with any naivete. We knew the odds were stacked against this project. We knew this was unprecedented,” said David Livingston, a former senior advisor to John Kerry, who he noted was forced to fly in to salvage the deal on a number of occasions and whose own team had to act as conduits for messages between cagy rival negotiating teams. “Sure, Masdar knows how to build renewables, and Israel knows how to build desalination facilities at some of the most competitive prices. We knew that Jordan had ample land and could permit land effectively. We knew it had a workforce that could work on this and that they needed the water. But to put all of that together? Let’s just say it was… challenging.” 

The Fall

Many deals fall apart in a piecemeal fashion. Not Project Prosperity. Mere weeks before the parties were seemingly due to ratify the agreement at COP28 in Dubai, Hamas launched its assault into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 mostly civilian Israelis. At a stroke, and through the devastating Israeli campaign that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza since then, almost everything that smacked of promise in Israeli-Palestinian relations has been shattered. Most of the already meager civil society collective action has ground to a halt.

As an organization, EcoPeace has not been spared. One staff member in Gaza was killed. The deputy director of the Jordan office lost 27 members of his extended family in one day, while a member of the Palestine office has lost about 100 relatives to date. Given that seemingly everyone within EcoPeace’s offices knows someone killed, it is no wonder that the teams appear almost universally exhausted. “It is all,” as Bromberg puts it, “one big nightmare.”

For that matter, the same sense of discombobulation might be said to apply to the entire Israeli-Palestinian environmental space. On the desert kibbutz, which hosts the Arava Institute, displaced Israelis from around Gaza and now the country’s far north fill spaces where cohorts of Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian students have spent two decades bonding over bad communal kitchen food and transboundary environmental crises. 

But it’s at the country-to-country level where the deal looks––for the time being at least––to have hit brick wall-like obstacles. Furious at the scope of Israeli retribution in Gaza, the Jordanian foreign minister said in November 2023 that he would not green-light the deal. Furious at criticism of what is widely perceived as a just war in Israel, ministers in Jerusalem reaffirmed the impossibility of working with their neighbor on this soon afterward. With Israel still reeling from October 7 and Palestinians and Jordanians themselves furious and grief-stricken at the scale of their losses, there is less space for cross-border engagement than at any time in recent memory. The damage, in the form of even more prolific interpersonal distrust between people, could be long-lasting.

EcoPeace, whose pursuit of cooperation across borders has long inspired accusations of ‘normalization’ from some Palestinians and Jordanians, is at pains to justify its position amid mounting criticism at home. “There are several approaches to resistance. We’re building elements of the future Palestinian state. We’re helping communities to stay on their land,” says Nada Majdalani. “At a time when we’re seeing so much violence from settlers [in the West Bank], we’re deploying tools to help people’s water supply, to make their energy sources more sustainable, to keep them there for when we do have a state.”

Still, from this nadir, both EcoPeace directors and former negotiators remain cautiously optimistic that the deal can be revived in some form. And that, they say, is because many of the conditions that gave rise to the thing in the first place still exist—in spades.

The mismatch between Jordan’s water needs and available supply is only getting bigger, creating an imperative for Jordanian policymakers to continue engaging on water with Israel, no matter the political costs. Indeed, climate change in the Jordan basin, as in many other parts of the world, is proving a useful foil for states to cooperate in ways that politics might not otherwise allow. “Getting water from Israel is less politically dangerous than getting no water at all,” one Jordanian official told me. 

The economics of Project Prosperity, often the Achilles’ Heel of many of these lofty ideas, still make sense, too. “At the end of the day, it’s predicated on mutual needs and commercial attraction,” says David Livingston. “And the price outlook on other options is not looking great. Israeli desalination will be the least expensive, most efficient option for Jordan, while Israel will strongly benefit from being able to bring in solar energy from Jordan too.”

When the war in Gaza eventually ends, the scale of required reconstruction, with more than half of all buildings and almost every water source in the Strip damaged or destroyed, may provide additional impetus for ecologically savvy, cross-border fixes. After all, Gaza’s water and electricity access was woeful even before this round of conflict, a situation that many commentators suggest contributed to its explosion. Ultimately, given the interconnectedness of the Levant, there may be no choice but to turn once more to improbable-looking, region-wide solutions if the region ever again experiences a modicum of peace and prosperity.

The views represented in this piece are those of the authors and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.