
By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
At the founding of the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion spoke of making the desert bloom. Today, Jewish National Fund is doing exactly that.
The organization hosted representatives from Wadi Attir for a pair of speaking engagements in Portland at Rose Schnitzer Manor on Monday, Nov. 18 and at Congregation Beth Israel on Tuesday, Nov. 19.
Wadi Attir, founded by Dr. Mohamed Al-Anbari, is a holistic regenerative agriculture project site in the Negev desert in southern Israel. Al-Anbari, a Bedouin scientist, founded the project to help create better opportunities for not just Bedouins, but everyone in Southern Israel.
“We brought this innovative approach to make a change in the community,” he said to in-person and virtual attendees at Beth Israel. “We’re bringing the heritage and legacy of the Bedouin, how to survive, and demonstrating it as a model of socially and economically upgrading the community by facing the issue of climate change.”
Saul Korin, Pacific Northwest regional director for JNF, told The Jewish Review that the projects at the Wadi Attir site span a range of methods of getting the most out of a harsh environment while also minimizing the ecological impact of human habitation on the land.
“They’re doing soil rehabilitation, agri-diversity, water and soil conservation,” Korin explained, “all the stuff that’s important when you live in a desert and don’t have a lot of environmental resources.”
While the project is Bedouin founded and owned, the team running it and the people who benefit from its work include all those living in Southern Israel.
“It is shared with the society in the Negev,” Al-Anbari said. “It does not belong to any village or any tribe.”
One part of that society is the project CEO, Nimrod Rogel, who presented with Al-Anbari in Portland.
“As a Jewish Israeli family man that lives in the Negev,” Rogel told the audience at Beth Israel, “for me to have a shared society and a project that is doing positive work with my neighbors, this is the best thing that can happen to my community, and my community is not only the village that I live in, but also my neighbors of the Bedouin villages around me.”
Rogel explained that when living nomadically, Bedouins would leave no trace of their presence when they left an area. Now, as Southern Israeli communities have become less nomadic, paid modernization has left desert landscapes filled with trash. As the portion of the Bedouin population over the age of 65 has dwindled to two percent, Rogel and the Wadi Attir project are racing to recapture Bedouin knowledge and apply it to the challenges of modern communities.
“Bedouins survived the desert for thousands of years, so they have enormous knowledge and amazing knowledge on how to survive and how to live in the desert in a sustainable way,” Rogel said. “We’re trying to take all of this knowledge and maintain it, write it down.”
While Wadi Attir’s work has enormous potential to benefit the lives of Jewish Israelis, JNF is also supporting the project as part of its commitment to aid development throughout Israel, for all Israelis.
“Bedouins don’t always get the services that the rest of Israelis get, so this is a way that we work with them, one of our most vulnerable and marginalized communities,” Korin told The Jewish Review. “JNF really does its best to provide for the whole community.”
Learn more about this work online at my.jnf.org/wadiattir.
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