Bridges Over Troubled Waters

"I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace."

— Joseph Conrad

We are three men in a boat, paddling down the beginnings of the lower Jordan. Jim Slade and I are joined by Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli Director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. We launched just below Yardenit, the popular baptism site, and the river here is delightful, lipped with palm trees and picnickers. There are rope swings and swimmers, guitars and flutes, mountain bikers and many boaters bumping about, including a couple of Hasidic Jews who go merrily paddling by. Some Hebrew lore puts the Garden of Eden along the Jordan River, and it's easy to believe that here.

It's holiday season in the Holy Land; it seems everyone is out enjoying family life, and half of them are on the river with us. Suddenly another canoe accidentally strikes our canoe's midsection, and we begin to wobble, almost to the tipping point, and come close to dumping into the convoluted vortex of this grand stream. It seems a metaphor for the conflicts and dangers that swirl around the Jordan.

The son of a Holocaust survivor, Gidon grew up in Australia, where he was involved in the successful effort to save the stunningly beautiful but little-known Franklin River from a dam. As he collected degrees in economics and law, though, he became more interested in the concepts and challenges of global peace. Gidon moved to

Israel in 1988 to dedicate himself to the peace process, and realized that perhaps the best way to bridge differences was the common concern with fresh water

Now, FOEME is the only organization in the region that has directors and staff from Israel, Jordan and Palestine, all working together to save the river that slakes their common thirst.

After just a couple kilometers on the lower Jordan we come to a low earthen dam, park the canoe, and climb up over the crest. On the other side, the spirited Jordan River we have come to enjoy is gone. It has been diverted almost completely— for irrigation and other water needs. In the ditch that was once the Jordan now pours raw sewage, and the corridor for the next sixty miles is mostly sealed from the public, a fenced military zone on both sides of the once full-bodied, fresh-water river.

On a Peaceful Island

Gidon believes that tourism could be a key to rehabilitating the Jordan. He points out that much of the Jordan's water has been siphoned for subsidized agricultural schemes, such as the growing of tropical fruits, that really don't belong in the desert. If ecotourism were to provide a viable economic alternative, the waters could again "fiercely flow into the Jordan."

But right now there are just three points along this part of the river that are accessible to the public. One of them is the hopefully named "Peace Island."

Where the Yarmouk, flowing from

Syria and Jordan, joins with the Jordan there is a grassy island, site of a giant, mothballed hydroelectric plant. Built by Pinhas Rutenberg and completed in 1933, the plant provided much of the electricity for Transjordan and Palestine for 15 years. The island was occupied by the Israelis in the 1948 War, but then returned to Jordanian sovereignty as part of the 1994 peace treaty.

In a unique and ennobling example of trans-border cooperation, Jordan leased the island back to Israel, and Peace Island is now a tourist destination, with its brilliant views, flyway birdlife, and graphic architectural history. It is the only place along the Jordan where foreigners and Israelis alike can cross into Jordan without a passport, visa, payment or even a permission slip.

Beyond the island, the river is just about dry. According to Gidon, prior to the diversions 50 years ago, the average amount of water that flowed down the Jordan to the Dead Sea each year was 1.3 billion cubic meters. Today it's around just 100 million, and it's mostly saline water and sewage. (The planted eucalyptuses here, though, seem cheerfully oblivious, their tiny leaves fluttering to both sides of the trickling riverbeds.)

Historical Interludes 

We stare downstream at a system that bends and oxbows so much it takes 200 miles to cover the 60 miles to the Dead Sea. Jim recalls the first navigation of the river by American naval lieutenant William F. Lynch, who boated from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea in 1848. The lower Jordan was then raging with rapids, so many that most of the travel party's time was spent portaging. One of the wooden boats was wrecked halfway through the week-long expedition, and its crew almost drowned

The river was full of fish, and wild boar, badgers and tigers ambled along its banks. In his report to the Secretary of the Navy, Lynch described the Jordan as more meandering than the Mississippi, and wrote, "The Jordan is the crookedest river what is."

Our next stop is the Three Bridges Park at Old Gesher, where the remains of Roman, Ottoman and British bridges stand side by side at what was once the major thoroughfare between the eastern Levant cities and the Mediterranean. Gidon is campaigning for a trans-border ecological peace park here, with bike paths and nature trails that would connect with Peace Island to the north and with archeological sites to the south, uniting kibbutzim on the Israeli side with Jordanian villages to the east.

We continue south down the highway parallel to the Jordan riverbed, through the

West Bank and the Palestinian Territory, and turn west into the Judean hills, up an irrigation aqueduct called Auja. Mohammed Saaydeh, a Palestinian field researcher for FOEME, takes us up the Auja valley, past children sliding down a sluiceway through citrus orchards, past banana groves and fields of red poppies, to the headwaters of a dancing cool clear creek rimmed with green tamarisk.

This is the only oasis with year-round water on the West Bank that flows to the Jordan, and it is blissfully beautiful, a paradise now and hopefully forever. Mohammed, in concert with Gidon and other environmentalists, is lobbying for the Auja valley to become a proper nature reserve, one that would be administered by Palestinians, attract ecotourists from all nations, and provide an alternative livelihood for the local farmers so they could give back diverted water to the Jordan.

Mohammed is not alone in believing that this may be a formula for a balance between nature and man in this troubled region, a formula that in some measure introduces the bracing air of peace.