Nada Majdalani

Palestinian Director
EcoPeace Middle East
Palestinian Territories

Apr 19, 2021

Nada Majdalani is the director of EcoPeace Middle East’s Palestine office. She has served in this role since 2017, and previously worked on water, sanitation and waste management projects with various international agencies in Palestine. She completed her Master of Science in environmental assessment and management at Oxford Brookes University and her Bachelor of Science in biology from Birzeit University.

Nada’s work involves both top-down diplomacy and bottom-up social transformation. On the diplomacy front, EcoPeace Middle East advocates for the Green Blue Deal For the Middle East, a water security roadmap for Palestine, Israel, and Jordan piloted by the organization in 2020. Due to the lack of water access, conflict, refugee inflows, and climate change, millions of people in Palestine and Jordan lack secure access to water, which poses risks of civil unrest, uprisings, migration, and extremist recruitment. The Green Blue Deal would expand the amount of water available by increasing desalination and waste treatment. Israel and Palestine would produce and sell desalinated water to Jordan, while Jordan would produce and sell solar energy to Israel and Palestine (in part to provide the energy that desalination requires). Furthermore, the Green Blue Deal provides a framework for advancing sustainable socio-economic development in the shared Jordan River Basin. Nada believes that cooperation on water can occur before resolving other sensitive issues and without implying the normalization of ongoing hostilities. She hopes that implementing the deal can build the trust needed to address other unresolved disputes such as borders and Israeli illegal settlements.

While her diplomatic work with EcoPeace Middle East advances policy ideas for a secure future, Nada’s involvement with educational programming also helps to build the political will necessary to implement those solutions. The Youth Education project teaches Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli youth about environmental peacebuilding in the region, takes students on field visits to desalination plants and other facilities, and provides opportunities for youth to meet with peers from across the border. By 2022, the program is expected to reach 22,000 people.

Nada notes that both this regional exchange program and the Green Blue Deal proposal are often criticized by Palestinians, who see collaboration with the oppressor as normalization. Similarly, many Israelis and Jordanians see cooperation as treason. She emphasizes that “the goal of the exchange is not to make friends, but to understand shared environmental problems and the mutual benefits of cooperation.” Nada explains that these exchanges also aim to work against negative stereotypes of the other side that can hamper peace efforts.

Nada’s mode of environmental peacebuilding emphasizes cooperation on shared interests amid hostilities to ensure sustainable access to environmental resources. She became interested in environmental peacebuilding through participating in a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace camp similar to the ones that EcoPeace Middle East now hosts. “The environment knows no borders,” she says, “so cooperation across borders is essential to environmental security.” She joined the Environmental Peacebuilding Association to exchange methods and experiences with environmental peacebuilders in other conflict affected regions. “It is very easy to give up in places torn apart by conflict,” Nada notes, “but these exchanges give me hope.”