RUTHFULLY YOURS

EL BUREIJ, Gaza Strip — It was not much of an escape.

Moments after Ibrahim al-Awawda climbed over the nine-foot fence separating the Bureij refugee camp on Gaza’s eastern edge from Israel, he was surrounded by six Israeli soldiers. They arrested him, interrogated him and, after he spent a month in two Israeli prisons, sent him back to the poverty, death and destruction in Gaza that had led him to flee.

“I knew they would capture me,” said Ibrahim, 15, whose father was killed in an Israeli strike in 2002 and who has since lived through three wars between Israel and Gaza militants, including last summer’s bloody 50-day battle. “The war shook me,” he added. “I told myself I may find a better life. They served me good food, but later, they threw me back to Gaza.”

A Green and Pleasant Land

Long-awaited winter rains, plus my recent trip to the Arava in southern Israel are the inspiration for this week’s blog. The Arava region in Israel’s Negev “desert” now produces 60% of Israel’s exports of food crops, right alongside massive fields of solar panels. It is a microcosm of Israel’s advanced agricultural technologies that combine with its cleantech innovations to help generate a green and sustainable planet.

My journey south centered around Kibbutz Ketura, just 50km north of Eilat, which hosts the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. It also contains a 5MegaWatt solar field, with self-cleaning robots, built by Arava Power, which is now constructing a 40MW field just across the road. It has a factory growing special algae that makes Ketura the world’s leading source of the natural anti-oxidant astaxanthin.

Two innovative joint research projects have just been approved, involving scientists at MIT and at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. You can probably guess the goals of “Self-Sustained Agriculture Based on Marginal Water”, but you may have more trouble with “Identification of Epigenetic Quantitative Trait Loci Associated with Tomato Seed Germination”! Before we leave the Negev, Israel’s Brenmiller Energy has just announced that it will establish a 10MW solar power station in Dimona, capable of generating electricity from solar energy for an average of 20 hours a day.