2018 | 5 minutes
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon
Gabriel Diamond
EcoPeace Middle East (formerly Friends of the Earth Middle East) is a unique organization that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists. Their primary objective is to promote cooperative efforts to protect the shared environmental heritage of the region. In so doing, they seek to advance both sustainable regional development and the creation of necessary conditions for lasting peace in the region. EcoPeace has offices in Amman, Bethlehem, and Tel-Aviv. The organization is a member of Friends of the Earth International, the largest grassroots environmental organization in the world. EcoPeace approaches cross-border environment and peacebuilding issues by first developing a regional strategy. They hire local researchers – Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli – to gain a regional understanding of the root causes of problems, and then they develop a common vision of how to influence decision makers, the media, and the general public. A key to EcoPeace’s success is that once the common vision has been developed, staff from each office take the same vision and present it to their respective national audiences: Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli.
