A tour of Kibbutz Ketura is fascinating, introducing a meeting between the cooperative community and the diverse industries on the kibbutz. The tour starts in the lobby of the guest rooms and passes through the first solar field in the State of Israel and the Middle East, an opportunity to view the only field in the world automatically cleaned by robots and provides a five megawatts electricity company.
The tour visits a “detached village network”, a demo village with developing technologies adapted to advanced countries that are not connected to the electricity, sewage and water networks. The tour demonstrates a water purification system for drinking, self-energy production and food supply.
The tour then passes through the date plantation and the Algatek algae production in hundreds of miles of glass tubes used in the cosmetics and medicine industry. A visit to “Methuselah” – an Otani relic of the Temple period – a date tree that sprouts from a core that is in the excavations in Masada.
The tour concludes with a glimpse at the “Arava Institute” for Environmental Studies where Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian and other students study environmental studies together, thus promoting coexistence.
Photo: Kibbutz Ketura
