Wael Al Saad - What Does a New Start Look Like in Palestine? Returning Home to Create a Holistic Green Economy

By Wael Al-Saad • May 11th, 2009 at 20:26 • Category: Culture and Heritage, Ideas and Projects, Newswire, Palestine, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance

Background Currently I am making plans to return to my Palestinian homeland after 17 years of secure living, studying, and working in Germany. Meanwhile, I have become a citizen of Germany, so I will be returning to Palestine as a dual national living my global humanistic openness.

The main motivation for my return is a feeling of responsibility to our Palestinian society, which is suffering from a social, economic, and political collapse, as a result of too many factors to list here. Just some facts: We do not have a state. We still suffer from over 60 years of Israeli occupation, and at the same time our own political system is disordered. All is flavoured with blaming games, making the whole situation very complicated and overwhelming and frustrating for the masses.

Time is now!

Though we do not have an independent state, but we have communities we can build from within so that we can climb an upward spiral of development. If we do not, we will instead collapse in a downward spiral of destructive chaos. Building and developing a community is about connecting to communicate and cooperating to create. To create what? I’m convinced that we have enough land with high capacity (for instance for dryland permaculture) for innovative production methods in which we can invest resources, and become more productive building our nation. Any step towards the development of our indigenous communities, our living environment, and our economical productivity, will have positive effect on our political structure.

The Idea

That was a sketch of the background for the sensitive and kind of complex broad communal green-business idea which I would like to share with you below. It is meant to attract broad non-partisan political and civic support.

The basic idea is to build a network of modular green business production-parks/cells spread in rural areas with centralized RID (Research-Innovation-Development) / ICT (Information-Communication-Technology) departments besides a new-art open administration-network.

The production-cells produce food products in highest quality for own consumption, local market and export, beside other appropriate industries and services. Each cell functions as an “Integrated Ecosystem of Production”, which means mainly:

• Equity and direct ownership of complete system of production: The parks are cooperatively owned by the community owned. The community is the farmer, the worker, the engineers, and all are participating in the sustainable economic growth and involved community development.

• Re-invest in community: In addition to business beside, the social gravity of our indigenous rural communities will carry and develop all the domains (see graphic) incorporated/integrated with community economical development. Through revenue – and therefore success- a diverse community will grow, and innovation will expand to include new products/industries/community and business need infrastructure.

• Ecological stewardship: Sustainable preservation and reservation of Ecosystem (e.g. permaculture, xeriscaping, recycling, environmentally-sensitive architecture.. ) will be an integral part of the formula in order for its success.

• Social, economic and political reconstruction through unified nexus trademark “THE EARTH” (name is a proposal) of production. I will explain this point bellow.

• Green-Business-Products: Contribute on economic growth and exchange with all possible markets and balanced practices through meaningful work and propitiate technologies. Here are some production and industry examples:
  Agriculture, Farming: Food, beauty and care, Botanicals. herbal medicine, Ecotourism and wellness (local and foreign), Indigenous handicraft, Green industry (evolving): Raw material, Animal Food, Composting, Recycling, Regenerative Energy Systems, Indigenous Architecture, Water Conservation and Management, housing and construction, Consulting and Solutions

Technically all is quite do-able, and we have all national and political resources needed to realize it.  We do not need even funds for it. We need minds, hands, will, the earth, and each other!

Indigenous roots as basic for innovation

The idea is basically based on our indigenous culture/structure/identity in our Palestinian rural areas. Over 5000 years of community survival and tradition Palestine was not ever broken by the mightiest of empires, even against mighty ancient empires, hence, a strong social gravity and rural cooperation is a significant base to build upon. The proper strategic nourishment can have very positive economic and social impact on Palestinian local communities, and even abroad.

“THE EARTH” as nexus trademark for stretched community

Our community in the diaspora is also an integral part to this. Another feature within the idea is the concept of "stretched-community-franchising"! It means the concept of an international marketing network, which should include the construction of “THE EARTH”-stores in many cities where Palestinians live. The core principles of “THE EARTH” Association should be implemented within the franchised business to influence the involved community, stretching the productivity of local communities. The larger community will be more productive and developed as a result. This way, a healthy affinity will be generated within our national identity through “THE EARTH” social ecological embedded economy and development (SEEED).

In total, it will contribute as well to the global social change movements because of its open learning and development nature. A global Palestine will emerge!

If we can develop the first network of "Integrated Ecosystem of Production" as solution, it could be benchmarked in different areas with similar conditions. 

Back-immigration to Build Palestine

One of the major effects predicted is that this will stimulate many professionals and experts to undertake back-immigration to Palestine to further develop the communal association I am proposing, as many of us have a strong drive to build Palestine and many like me would do it now if they find collective benefit through their passionate social commitment.

From the Idea to a Scenario to a broad comprehensive Plan

In our open world, in which the social-media gain increasing dynamic and performance, it is wrong to hold any constructive idea back. To keep it buried till I have returned to Palestine would mean losing time for its growth, spreading it and wealth from getting feedback and related proposal, ideas from our open sphere, where the ideas actually originated.

From current point of view I am looking forward to:

I. Creating a diverse Scenario-Building Palestinian Team

A friend of mine told me to pay attention on the current nation-building development in South-Africa, exactly to check the DINOKENG scenarios which includes the concept of “diverse scenario-building team”, which I will make use of it here. The team is diverse, meaning:
• It represents a broad spectrum of Palestinian society.
• The members have different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.
• They did NOT agree on everything!

What team members have in common:
• A deep concern that things are not what they should/could be in Palestine.
• A desire to contribute to the construction of a sustainable future.
• Together, their diversity and shared intent is a core strength of process

II. Creating a supportive community around the idea.

Any contribution in form of critique, feedback, thought, idea, comment, link, .. etc. is very welcome. Especially help the web2.0-collaboration beginner. How to feature this post? How to build an intelligent collaborative environment in order to manage information-flow and contributions?

With off/online Discussions, Conversations, Workshops, analysis, research and writing work we will develop a comprehensive concept which will allow broad public facile engagement with the political leaders, citizen and affected community. All open questions to the scenario should be answered in this concept. How, When with whom ..? The answer on these and other questions will emerge later I think.

It would be great to make the adaptation of the idea unstoppable. For now on, it is your idea if you like it. I would be thankful if you keep me along your way for it.

If any one willing to support this initiative, please write me an email: globalpalestine@...

For now any one can follow the development of the idea on twitter by following

http://twitter.com/ComGreBusinsPls 

The article is published under http://globalpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/05/return-to-construct-broad-communal.html 

Thanks!

Wael Al Saad 

PS: please write to Wael for a presentation under construction about the concept.

Photo from Notes from the Field the site of the Michigan Peace Team, which shows a project where an orphanage reclaims land for agricultural use (permaculture) reducing the need to depend on imported fertilisers and food products. http://mptinpalestine.blogspot.com/2008/11/orphanage-in-bethlehem.html