UFS’s Israel tour promotes flow of water expertise

A four-member group from the University of the Free State (UFS) has recently returned to South Africa from a five-day study tour on transboundary water and wastewater management in Israel.

The tour, which started two weeks ago, was the outcome of an agreement between UFS and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an academic studies and research institute located at Kibbutz Ketura on the Israeli side of the Arava Valley.

“The agreement was to promote institutional ties between the two organisations on academics, research, and all manner of areas of common interest,” says Clive Lipchin, the South African-born Israel-based director of the Arava Institute’s Centre for Transboundary Water Management. “As a result, the study tour was planned to introduce some faculties from UFS to some of the issues that we’re working with here in Israel, expose them to what Israel is doing in water, agriculture and all kinds of things, and to use that as a basis for pursuing more long-term projects of mutual engagement.”

Lipchin got in touch with UFS after he was introduced to Hussein Solomon, a senior professor in the department of political science at UFS, on one of his trips to South Africa. “For many years, he has been very supportive of Israel, and has maintained a lot of Israeli connections,” says Lipchin. “We began talking about the ways we can work together. He mentioned the best way would be to set up some kind of agreement between the two organisations and use that as a basis for co-operation.”

After they signed the agreement, Lipchin travelled to Bloemfontein, where he met Dr Ralph Clark, the director of the Afromontane Research Unit (ARU) at UFS’s QwaQwa Campus.

“He was interested in what I had to say about our work in Israel and the cross-border work that we do with Palestinians,” recalls Lipchin. “He said, ‘I’m putting on an international conference in February [2022]. It’s about mountains, and it’s going to be in the Drakensberg. I would like you to be present to get a sense of what we do.’”

At the end of the conference, Lipchin and the colleague who was with him proposed that the next logical step was for a faculty from the UFS to come to Israel to further the two organisations’ ties.

This came to fruition just two weeks ago, when Clark embarked on the tour with three other people from UFS – namely Dr Patricks Otomo, a senior lecturer in the department of zoology and entomology; Professor Olusola Ololade of the Centre for Environmental Management; and a masters student based on the QwaQwa campus. A director of a Free State water company accompanied them on the tour.

The focus of the tour was on water because that’s Lipchin’s field of expertise. “We designed it around looking at different water issues in Israel,” he says. “We also looked at things like agriculture and using innovative technology to promote better irrigation and more efficient agriculture, with a lot of focus on water quality, water quality treatments and wastewater treatment. We visited a number of institutions and desalination facilities. We arranged talks and study visits with colleagues from around the region. We spent a day looking at the Dead Sea issues while also getting some free time to explore Jerusalem. We went to the West Bank as well.”

While on tour, Clark observed similarities between Israel and South Africa. “We have similar challenges to Israel, in which you have only a certain amount of water resources produced by our mountains, but the demand is almost at capacity,” he says. “Some of the climate-change forecasts are that we will become more arid, more water-stressed. In that case, we could do co-learning with Israel because it’s a problem Israel hasn’t solved with its neighbours.

“We have parts of South Africa where water infrastructure is well managed, and we have other parts where it’s a bit of a catastrophe, particularly regarding wastewater. The Vaal River system, for example, is in a very poor state because of failing sewage systems and treatment plants. That’s why the tour was really about looking at options to help our local municipality in terms of upscaling, alternative technology, or remedial options to alleviate that pollution pressure from wastewater. We also saw how Israel uses its wastewater for agriculture. That’s another option we would like to consider locally.

“We didn’t sugar-coat things. Where Israel doesn’t look good, we don’t pretend,” Lipchin says. “We are a serious institute which presents Israel like any other country, warts and all. None of the participants on the tour came with an agenda. They were very open. They were just so happy to visit Israel.

“It was interesting going to a country that’s referred to by the media very strongly,” says Clark. “Yet, you just felt more stable and more first world than South Africa. I mean, we landed back to stage-four loadshedding. Jerusalem was probably more functional than Johannesburg.”

Lipchin hopes the tour will lead to a long-term relationship between the Arava Institute and UFS.

“In August, I’ll be coming back to the Free State and, for the first time, QwaQwa,” he says. “I’m going to give some lectures and pursue further opportunities for collaboration on research and faculty exchanges, bringing Israeli students to the Free State and vice versa.”

Clark aims “to start having at least one postgraduate co-supervised by Arava and ourselves from next year, possibly some typical upskilling courses for the local municipality here with Arava, and possibly something around invasive-species management. In Jerusalem, there’s a particularly nasty tree from China. We have research on that tree in South Africa because it’s a problem here too, so we can share knowledge directly with Arava. The other thing is that we have made ourselves available for Arava to bring some of its courses to us and to invite some of its neighbouring partners.”