They still sometimes struggle to find the right words. The Israeli Guidon Bromberg and the Jordanian Munqeth Mehyar discuss their Peace Park project to the south of the Sea of Galilee. “Israel gave up this land in the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan,” says Guidon Bromberg. “No, not ‘gave up’, they ‘gave it back’,” protests Munqeth Mehyar. “OK, gave it back,” concedes Bromberg. In the environmental organization Friends of the Earth Middle East, Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians work together on an equal footing.

Here is where the River Jordan marks the border between Jordan and Israel. It flows 200 km south from the Sea of Galilee through the Jordan Valley and into the Dead Sea. The place where it meets its most important tributary, the Yarmouk from Syria, is marked by a small island surrounded and created by a system of man-made canals. The Jordanians call the tiny island Bakoora, while the Israelis refer to it as Naharayim.

If Bromberg and Mehyar get their way, the land between the Yarmouk, the entrance to the Naharayim Kibbutz, and all the way further south to the Gesher Kibbutz will soon bear the name Jordan River Peace Park.

The border fence can be seen from here. Because it has been a designated restricted military zone, the land has remained practically untouched for decades. Until 1948, the hydro-electric plant built by the Russian hydro engineer Pinchas Rotenberg produced electricity from both rivers for Israel and Jordan. In 1948, the Jordanian air force bombed the plant. The area has remained abandoned ever since. The former Rotenberg power plant now stands as an industrial ruin in the landscape, inhabited only by bats. In the plans drawn up by Friends of the Earth, the building will form the visitors’ centre of the new park. Yet, this is all still wishful thinking.

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