Breaking the Grip of Militarism: The Story of Vieques
By Lawrence Wittner | CounterPunch | May 2, 2019
Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants. Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists. But, for about six decades, Vieques served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Navy, until its outraged residents, driven to distraction, rescued their homeland from the grip of militarism.
Like the main island of Puerto Rico, Vieques—located eight miles to the east―was ruled for centuries by Spain, until the Spanish-American War of 1898 turned Puerto Rico into an informal colony (a “nonsovereign territory”) of the United States. In 1917, Puerto Ricans (including the Viequenses) became U.S. citizens, although they continue to lack the right to representation in the U.S. Congress and to vote for the U.S. president.
During World War II, the U.S. government, anxious about the security of the Caribbean region and the Panama Canal, expropriated large portions of land in eastern Puerto Rico and on Vieques to build a mammoth U.S. naval base. As a result, thousands of Viequenses were evicted from their homes and deposited in razed sugar cane fields that the navy declared “resettlement tracts.”
The U.S. Navy takeover of Vieques accelerated in 1947, when it designated the base as a naval training installation and storage depot and began utilizing the island for firing practice and amphibious landings by tens of thousands of troops. Expanding its expropriation to three-quarters of Vieques, the navy used the western section for its ammunition storage and the eastern section for its bombing and war games, while sandwiching the native population into the small strip of land separating them.
Over the ensuing decades, the navy bombed Vieques from the air, land, and sea and conducted military training exercises averaging 180 days per year. It also used the island for tests of biological weapons.
Naturally, for the Viequenses, this military domination created a nightmarish existence. “When the wind came from the east, it brought smoke and piles of dust from their bombing ranges,” one resident recalled. “They’d bomb every day, from 5 am until 6 pm. It felt like a war zone. You’d hear . . . eight or nine bombs, and your house would shudder. Everything on your walls . . . would fall on the floor and break,” and “your cement house would start cracking.” In addition, with the release of toxic chemicals into the soil, water, and air, the population began to suffer from dramatically higher rates of illnesses.
Eventually, the U.S. Navy determined the fate of the entire island, including the nautical routes, flight paths, aquifers, and zoning laws in the remaining civilian territory, where the residents lived under constant threat of eviction. In 1961, the navy actually drafted a secret plan to remove the entire civilian population from Vieques, with even the dead slated to be dug up from their graves. But U.S. President John F. Kennedy blocked the plan from implementation.
Long-simmering tensions between the Viequenses and the navy boiled over from 1978 to 1983. In the midst of heightened U.S. naval bombing and stepped up military maneuvers, a vigorous local resistance movement emerged, led by the island’s fishermen. Activists engaged in picketing, demonstrations, and civil disobedience―most dramatically, by placing themselves directly in the line of missile fire, thereby disrupting military exercises.
But this first wave of popular protest, involving thousands of Viequenses and their supporters throughout Puerto Rico and the United States, failed to dislodge the navy from the island. In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. military clung tenaciously to its operations on Vieques. Also, the prominence in the resistance campaign of Puerto Rican nationalists limited the movement’s appeal.
In the 1990s, however, a more broadly-based resistance movement took shape. Begun in 1993 by the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, it accelerated in opposition to navy plans for the installation of an intrusive radar system and took off after April 19, 1999, when a U.S. navy pilot accidentally dropped two 500-pound bombs on an allegedly safe area, killing a civilian.
Rallying behind the demand of Peace for Vieques, this massive social upheaval drew heavily upon the Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as upon the labor movement, celebrities, women, and university students. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans participated, with some 1,500 arrested for occupying the bombing range or for other acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. When religious leaders called for a March for Peace in Vieques, some 150,000 protesters flooded the streets of San Juan in what was reportedly the largest demonstration in Puerto Rico’s history.
Facing this firestorm of protest, the U.S. government finally capitulated. In 2003, the U.S. Navy not only halted the bombing, but shut down its naval base and withdrew from Vieques.
Despite this enormous victory for a people’s movement, Vieques continues to face severe challenges today. These include unexploded ordnance and massive pollution from heavy metals and toxic chemicals that were released through the dropping of an estimated trillion tons of munitions on the tiny island. As a result, Vieques is now a major Superfund Site, with cancer and other disease rates substantially higher than in the rest of Puerto Rico. Also, with its traditional economy destroyed, the island suffers from widespread poverty.
Nevertheless, the islanders, no longer hindered by military overlords, are grappling with these issues through imaginative reconstruction and development projects, including ecotourism. Robert Rabin, who served three jail terms for his protest activities, now directs the Count Mirasol Fort―a facility that once served as a prison for unruly slaves and striking sugar cane workers, but now provides rooms for the Vieques Museum, community meetings and celebrations, and Radio Vieques.
Of course, the successful struggle to liberate the island from the burdens of militarism also provides a source of hope for people around the world. This includes the people in the rest of the United States, who continue to pay a heavy economic and human price for their government’s extensive war preparations and wars.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press.)
Baseline of a Desecrated Land X: Demographic Threat
Behind a curtain of wine, war, and industrial tourism, Israel is losing a pyrrhic population race with the more fertile Arabs.
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
“We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters, Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms.” Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minster, urging Jews to move to his country.
“Israel is on the road to an ecological, social and quality of life disaster as the population rises it becomes more violent, congested and unpleasant to live in and absolutely no room for any species other than humans.” Professor Alon Tal, Institute for Desert Research, Ben Gurion University on Israel’s population explosion.
The Demographic Threat
Israel has been in an officially declared State of Emergency since 1948. The word ‘crisis’ is as expected in their daily news feeds as fish is expected on seafood restaurant menus. Threat after threat. The population scarcely has time to digest the crisis du jour before the next is on the doorstep.
In this environment, the fact that Israel’s population is growing at 1.58 percent compared with 2.71 percent for Palestinians, is known in the Jewish state as, ‘the demographic threat.’ To forestall this dire eventuality Israel has brought millions of Jews and Jewish-when-it-suits-them people from Russia, Europe, the Bronx or wherever, and they’re always recruiting for more. Any Jew from anywhere in the world can hop on a plane to Israel and be handed citizenship, a gun, help finding a job, and an apartment. Then there’s one more person sucking up a couple hundred liters of water a day. Still, the demographic threat continues to increase because: Jewish recruitment to Israel is slowing down, many Jewish immigrants leave Israel after a few years, and Israelis on the whole are quite a bit older than Palestinians.
The median [half are over, half are under] age of females in Israel is 30.6 years-old. Female median age in the Occupied West Bank is 21.3 years-old. Female median age in Gaza is 17.5 years-old. And so, as Israeli women are aging out of their child bearing years, Palestinian women are just moving into their peak child bearing years. This means that even though Palestinian life expectancy is ten years less than Israeli life expectancy a few miles away, and, even though Palestinian infant mortality rates are five times what they are on the Israeli side of the segregation wall, Palestinian women have more children than Israeli women at total fertility rates of 3.91 children/woman and 2.92 children/woman, respectively. In addition, there are another 5.5 million Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.
One of three core demands of the Palestinian (BDS) movement is that Palestinians–and their descendants–who the Zionists drove off their land in 1948, have the same right to return under international law as say, German Jews have the right to return to Germany. At the end of World War II Germany passed a law that any Jew who fled the Nazis–and their descendants–could get citizenship in Germany. This is why Israeli Jews are “…the largest group of German passport holders in the world outside Germany.” So Israelis get the concept, at least when it’s applied to themselves.
When success arrives for the BDS movement, as it eventually must, how will the land fare? Right now the Israeli Jewish population and the Palestinian population inside Israel and in the OPT are even at about 6.85 million each, (although the Jewish number counts Israelis living outside the country, including up to a million living in America, who probably won’t settle back to Israel). If all the Palestinians in the diaspora return there will be 19.2 million people in that small arid parcel.
Population density in perspective
What would America look with the population density of Israel, the West Bank or Gaza? America has 327 million people on about 3,797,000 square miles. Israel has 8.45 million people on 8019 square miles. The West Bank has 2.7 million Palestinians on 2,183 square miles—except Israel has effectively annexed two thirds of the West Bank Area C, so the Palestinians get 742.22 square miles. Gaza has 2 million people on 141 square miles.
Doing the math as simple ratios, if Amerca had Israel’s population density we would have over 4 billion people. That wouldn’t be viable. We’re already strapped with less than a tenth of that population If America had the full West Bank’s population density we’d have about 4.7 billion people. If America had the West Bank’s population in Area’s A and B but not including Area C, we’d have 13.9 billion people. If America had Gaza’s population density we’d have 53.86 billion people.
Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza have a combined area of about 10,343 square miles. Combining the three populations and the diaspora (about 19.2 million total) on that 10,343 square miles, would give a population density of 1,856 per square mile. Applying that same population density to America’s 3.797 million square miles, would give us a population of 7.081 billion people. That’s more than the entire 2011 human population of earth.
At the end of the day, if you could snap your fingers and make everybody in Israel and the OPT either Jewish or Palestinian, it wouldn’t matter. They’d still be high and dry, water-wise.
Tourism
American support for Israel, especially among college students, has been going down like a tire iron in a swimming pool. It took less than ten years of social media to break the dam holding back a reservoir fifty years deep in carefully crafted Zionist narrative. Today anyone with the inclination can see unfiltered truths about what’s going on in the occupied territories. That, combined with the Trump/Netanyahu bromance culminating in the U.S. embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has created what Israelis view as a public relations crisis. How can Zionism sell American college students on Israel and the embassy move at the same time? They’ve allocated something over $120 million on a tourism campaign called; ‘One Break, Two Cities.’
At some level you’ve got to hand it to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism for trying. Where’s the embassy going? Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. You can go too.
‘One Break, Two Cities’ has a 30 second commercial with two girls, who are clearly majoring in bums and boobs, snapping selfies at the beach, the fountains, the bars, and a boat at sea. What strikes a viewer, after the bums and boobs, is how much clean water there is. Tourists expect water and use more of it than they do at home. They commonly take multiple showers per day. Higher rated hotels use more water than lower rated hotels. The websites want visitors to know that Israeli beaches have public showers.
A typical tourist to Israel spends $1,500 in 8.2 days. Even if they only averaged 300 liters of water per day, the 3.6 million tourists in 2017 soaked up 8,856,000 metric tons of water, which has got to be hard to watch from Gaza or the West Bank where people pay high prices for water and get less than 70 liters per day.
A little glass of wine
Growing wine for the European market in what is now Israel goes back to 1870 when Barron Rothschild funded Mikveh Israel, the first Jewish experimental agricultural station in Palestine. Today, freed by imports from needing water for growing grains and feed, Israeli entrepreneurs use the water for more lucrative crops like cut flowers and wine. The water footprint of that 148 ml (5oz glass) glass of wine on the table is about 130 liters. Over a million Palestinians get less than 60 liters of water per day and in West Bank Area C thousands get by on as little as 20 liters of water per day. (20 liters is what Americans use for every flush of an older toilet.) So, each glass of Israeli wine you pour represents between two and six days worth of water taken from some destitute Palestinian.
In spite of that, or because of it, Israel has built an archipelago of wineries in the West Bank, Syrian Golan Heights and within Israel itself. They’re lucrative and they suck up phenomenal amounts of water that formerly went to Palestinians. Because of mounting European’s concern about the plight of Palestinians, and Israeli concern that the Boycott over Israel’s occupation will cut their market, Israelis attempt to disguise the origin of grapes and wines from the OPT by claiming tiny Israel has five grape growing regions some of which overlap between occupied territories and areas inside the Green Line. Westerners are increasingly aware that Jewish wineries in Palestine are given special concessions by the Israeli government in the form of subsidies, seized [Palestinian] land, extra water, and military troops to protect them. In return, many wineries normalize the occupation by promoting themselves as tourist destinations and offering tours, lodging, hot tubs, etc. Advocates have filmed grapes harvested in the OPT being trucked straight to a major wine maker inside Israel. With no way to be sure that an Israeli wine didn’t come from the occupied territories Americans and Europeans increasingly boycott Israeli wines.
War
The Zionist’s perpetual ‘State of Emergency’ has overwhelmed water infrastructure, and contaminated ground water, surface water, and sea water with petroleum, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, ordinance, radioactive isotopes…and that’s just inside their own country. They’ve invaded all the neighbors multiple times commandeering their water supplies when they can and damaging them when they can’t, in the process making millions of people refugees in over-crowded, water-strapped refugee camps.
Because the United States government has made it a law that Israel will always be the dominant military power in the region, the Israelis brandish the latest American weapons systems with the predictable result that their neighbors try to keep up which creates an endless cycle of water wasting escalation.
Footnote on populations”
Palestine
Population: 5,04,041 (West Bank and Gaza plus about 1.1 million in Israel and 300,000 thousand in E. Jerusalem. Not to mention over 1.5 million Palestinians in camps in neighboring countries, plus 4 million in neighboring countries outside refugee camps.)
Median age Gaza both: 17.2 years (CIA factbook, 2017 est.)
Male Median age Gaza: 16.8 years (CIA factbook, 2017 est.)
Female Median age Gaza: 17.5 years (CIA factbook, 2017 est.)
Median age West Bank both: 21.1 years (CIA factbook, 2017 est.)
Male Median Age West Bank: 20.9 years
Female Median Age West Bank: 21.3 years
Palestine growth rate 2.71% (as of 2017)
Net change per day: 361
Life Expectancy male 71.83 years
female 75.74 years
both 73.73 years
Mean age at childbearing 28.86 years
Total Fertility rate 3.91 children/woman
Sex ratio at birth 1.05 males per female
Infant mortality rate 17.8 deaths/1,000 live births (Gaza)
Infant mortality rate 14.1 deaths/1000 live births (West Bank)
Under 5 mortality rate 20.827 deaths/thousand
*40% of the Palestinian population is under 14 years old.
Israel
Population: As of February 2018, 8,404,916. (Israeli census includes the 650,000 Jewish colonists in the OPT as Israeli citizens but does not include the millions of Christian and Muslim Arabs that live there.)
Median age both: 29.9 (CIA Factbook, 2017 est.)
Male Median age: 29.3 (CIA Factbook, 2017 est.)
Female Median age: 30.6 (CIA Factbook, 2017 est.)
Israel growth rate 1.58% (as of 2017)
Net change per day: 355
Life Expectancy male 81.03 years
female 84.31 years
both 82.74 years
Mean age at childbearing: 30.698 years
Total Fertility rate: 2.92 children/woman
Sex ratio at birth: 1.053 males per female
Infant mortality rate: 2.732 deaths/1,000 live births
(infant mortality among Arab Israeli babies is about 3 times higher than Jewish babies)
Under 5 mortality rate: 3.361 deaths/thousand
*Jewish people from former Soviet Union and Europe and their Israeli born descendants (Ashkenazi) are 50 percent of Jews in Israel. About 6.5 percent of Israel’s Jewish population lives in OPT colonies.
USA:Population: 325,916,518
Median age both: 38.1 (CIA Factbook 2017 est.)
Male Median age: 36.8 (CIA Factbook 2017 est.)
Female Median age: 39.4 (CIA Factbook 2017 est.)
US growth rate 0.93 (as of 2010)
Net change per day: 6,298
Life Expectancy male 77.34 years
female 81.88 years
both 79.62 years
Mean age at childbearing 29.514 years
Total Fertility rate: 1.886 children/woman
Sex ratio at birth 1.04 males per female
Infant mortality rate 5.195 deaths/1,000 live births
Under 5 mortality rate 6.079 deaths/thousand
MLA Citation Palestine population: (2017-12-20) Retrieved 2018-01.07, from http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/palestine-population/
(*Graphic at top by artist Kari Dunn http://kdunnart.weebly.com)
Recognition 10: Demographic Threat Wine, War, Tourism: Selected Sources
04.30.2017 This is how Israel inflates its Jewish majority Haaretz Editorial Haaretz calls the annual Israeli population report “a ludicrous piece of propaganda” that includes the 650,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied territories but excludes the millions of Palestinians who live there. Article shows a map of Israel published in the report that doesn’t include any borders of the occupied territories, so it looks as if the Palestinian territories have been absorbed into Israel.
02.16.2015 Leaders reject Netanyahu calls for Jewish mass migration to Israel The Guardian by Peter Beaumont. “We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters, Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms.” Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minster
09.25.2015 Israel’s soaring population: promised land running out of room? Reuters by Tova Cohen & Steven Scheer. “Israel is on the road to an ecological, social and quality of life disaster as the population rises it becomes more violent, congested and unpleasant to live in and absolutely no room for any species other than humans.” Professor Alon Tal, Institute for Desert Research, Ben Gurion University.
04.08.2012 Jews stream back to Germany Forward by Donald Snyder.
Dr. Sima Saltzberg of Bar-Illam University ‘says over 100,000 Israelis have applied for and received German passports.’ “This is the largest group of German passport holders in the world outside Germany.” says Emanual Nashon, Deputy Chief of Mission of the Israeli embassy in Berlin. Article notes that ‘under German law, since 1949 any Jew—or the decendents of a Jew, who fled Nazi Germany has the right the right to become a naturalized German. (emphasis added)
05.01.2017 Editorial/This is how Israel inflates its Jewish majority Haaretz
08.01.2017 Can Israel bring home its million US expats? Jerusalem Post by Ben Soles. Article says hundreds of thousands, up to a million, Israelis have moved to America.
08/0213Average Tourist Spends $1,500 in Israel Y Net news, Israel Travelhttp://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4412806,00.html
Water footprint of wine is 125 ml (4.2 oz glass) costs 110 liters of water to grow.
08.21.2012 Wine Talk: Deep in the desert Jerusalem Post by Adam Montefiore.
Yatir winery close to the Dead Sea.
Tel Arad wineries in the the Negev:
Boker Valley—on route 40, lodge and cabins, hot tub, gift shop. About 15 miles from Eqypt border.
Midbar Winery—in Arad.
Rota Winery—in Erez Rota.
Kadesh Barnea—Nitzana near Egypt border.
Sde Boker Winery—at Kibbutz Sde Boker off route 40
Carmey Andat Winery—off Route 40 near Adat
Neot Smadar Winery—southernmost winery 60 km from Eilat
Israeli Wine Direct
Agur
Assaf
Cremisan
Ein Teina
Kadita
Kishor
Margalit
Meishar
Midbar
Pelter
Ramot
Naftaly
Shvo
04.2011 Forbidden Fruit: The Israeli Wine Industry and the Occupation Aprilhttp://whoprofits.org/content/forbidden-fruit-israeli-wine-industry-and-occupation-0
Coalition of Women for Peacewhoprofits.org The Israelis have built hundreds of wineries in the West Bank, Syrian Golan Heights and within Israel itself. They try to disguise the origin of grapes and wines from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by claiming Israel has five growing regions some of which overlap occupied territories with Israel areas inside the Green Line. Wineries are given special concessions by the government in the form of subsidies, land, and extra water. In return, many of them normalize the occupation by promoting themselves as tourist destinations and offering tours, lodging, hot tubs, etc.
01.17.2018 Israeli’s wine industry grows better with age. Jewish News Syndicate by Elina Rudee.“A big part of what we are trying to do is sell Israel as a product.” Vera Ben-Sadon, founder of Tura Winery in the OPT.
03.12.2013 The Best Kosher wine in Israel may not be from Israel Smithsonian, by Yochi Dreazen. “Everything we do is about settling more Jews in Israel.” says Daniella Weiss (chief backer of West Bank Winery, who indicates she thinks the West Bank is part of Israel)
Baseline of a Desecrated Land VI: Awash in Sewage
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
Sewage Quiz and nowhere to go
“… with clear waters and action packed beaches, each one of Tel Aviv’s 16 beaches has its own style and attracts certain personalities.” Israeli Ministry of Tourism website
“But you cannot have clean water if people are still defecating in the river.” The visionary Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization.
Okay, fellow Americans. It’s time for a pop quiz.
1) How many metric tons of raw or hardly treated sewage go straight into the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza every day?
a) 1 Mt
b) 11 Mt
c) 11,000 Mt
d) This is a trick question. Hamas wants to drive Israel into the sea.
2) Which direction does the current in front of Gaza flow?
a) north
b) south
c) in circles
d) Towards Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
3) How far from Gaza is Israel’s nearest Israeli desalination plant in Ashkelon?
a) 5 miles
b) 50 miles
c) 500 miles
d) Doesn’t matter. God gave it all to Israel.
4) How many times in 2016 did the Ashkelon desalination plant shut down because of massive sewage plumes coming from Gaza?
a) twice
b) at least four
c) never
d) Gay kaken ofn yam. (Yiddish insult, “Go shit in the ocean.”)
5) Gaza’s water and sewer infrastructure collapsed because:
a) The Israeli military destroys the sewage plant, power plant, and underground pipes every few years.
b) Israel’s blockade against Gaza is over ten years old and counting.
c) Gaza can’t make repairs because Israel won’t let supplies through the blockade.
d) Arabs hate Israel more than they love toilets
e) Israel routinely cuts fuel and power to Gaza so the plants don’t run even when they’re otherwise viable.
f) Israel is intercepting ground water that would refill the Coastal Aquifer.
g) Israel doesn’t allow West Bank Palestinians to share West Bank water with Gaza
h) all of the above except d.
6) According to the United Nations, Gaza is in a humanitarian crisis and will be uninhabitable by 2020 because what percent of the drinking water is unfit for human consumption?
a) 14 %
b) 32 %
c) over 97 %
d) The UN lies. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
7) In 2015 Israeli authorities closed Tel-Aviv beaches when they deliberately dumped how many cubic meters of sewage while making beach upgrades?
a) 3
b) 9
c) 180,000
d) None. Israel doesn’t deliberately dump sewage.
8) How many streams flowing through the West Bank/Israel are polluted with sewage?
a) all
b) five
c) two
d) none
9) The German government funded a sewage treatment plant on Palestinian land in the West Bank village of Salfit. It didn’t work out for the Palestinians because:
a) Israel denied permits for the project for years.
b) Israel wanted to connect an illegal Jewish colony to the project.
c) The Israeli army stole the equipment.
d) Arab sewage treatment is an existential threat to the Jewish and democratic state of Israel.
e) Israel permitted the project at another site then announced a segregation wall will be built between the project and Salfit, cutting off the Palestinians but leaving the project accessible for Jewish colonies.
g) a, b, c, and e.
10) Israel has been criticized for allowing Christian baptisms in the Jordan river when coliform bacteria counts are how many times above the maximum where the Health Ministry is supposed to close Israeli beaches?
a) 6 times higher
b) 3 times higher
c) 2 times higher
d) half as high
11) Israel’s Health Ministry is supposed to close beaches when fecal coliform bacteria counts are above 400 per 100 ml of water. Tel Aviv once closed beaches to swimming, sailing and fishing after a sewage spill produced fecal coliform bacteria counts of:
a) 500/100 ml
b) 8,000/100 ml
c) unknown because fecal coliform tests exceeded the lab’s testable maximum of 20,000/100ml.
d) under 400/100 ml but beaches closed just to be on the safe side.
12) Who is responsible for dumping sewage on Palestinian land?
a) America for enabling Israel.
b) Jewish colonists.
c) Israeli cities who export their sewage sludge to the OPT.
d) Palestinians.
e) Israeli military camps.
f) all of the above more or less in that order.
Okay, pencils down. How’d you do? Answers are: 1)c, 2)a, 3)a, 4)b, 5)h, 6)c, 7)c, 8)a, 9)g, 10)a, 11)c , 12)f . If you answered ‘d’ to every question the Israel Lobby may fast-track you for a seat in Congress.
Gaza sewage to Israel: turd terrorism
Day by day a non-political northbound current calmly, quietly, carries 11,000 metric tons of what Gaza Palestinians had for dinner last night right onto Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israeli desalination plants. Here’s a free slogan for the Tourism Ministry: Come to Israel, where Hamas is in the water.
For most of history Gaza was what UNESCO has called, “One of the most important coastal wetlands in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Wadi Gaza, was one of just a few high quality migratory bird stop-over stations along the flyway between Europe/Asia and Africa. Soaring birds like cranes, flamingos, storks, and raptors that migrate using thermal updrafts along the coasts all congregated at this bird oasis. The place had a clean water supply and a naturally productive ocean fishery whereby hundreds of families made a good living.
Today Gaza’s ecosystem has devolved into a vast man-made breeding lagoon that produces two million diadromous turds a day. These foul fish migrate down the wadis, take a right when they reach the Mediterranean, and start swimming for Israel. Birds still land on wadis and wetlands, because they have to, but the shore is so contaminated that over half the water samples off Gaza contain sewage parasites and contaminants. Beaches smell bad. People regularly end up in the hospital after beach outings. A little boy died last summer from infection caused by a family trip to the beach.
During the summer of 2017, away from the coast in northeast Gaza, raw sewage was piling up and Palestinians, with no way to treat it, watched it run into Hamun stream that flows out of Gaza past an Israeli colony and west towards Ashkelon. In what can only be described as a ‘Code Brown’ the Israelis brought fleets of vacuum trucks to try sucking mess out of the stream on their side. The attempt would’ve made a great joke video on the internet. Undaunted, elite units of the most powerful military in the Middle East stormed into Gaza and attacked the little stream, trying to block it on the Palestinian side by plowing in dirt. When that also failed, the head of the nearby Israeli Jewish Council said, “What we’re seeing here is an ecological terror attack.” I kid you not. An ecological terror attack. The Councilman called on the Israeli government to resolve the crisis.
As turd terror heads north in ever increasing concentrations the Israeli technological solution is… wait for it… they want America to fix it! No really—they do. Israel blows up Gaza’s sewage treatment plant and won’t allow repair materials or fuel to run the plant through the blockade. For years they laughed at suffering Gaza. But now, as shoals of turds wash onto beaches like spawning grunion a group of Israeli mayors wrote a letter to US Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt asking the US to clean up Gaza’s sewage catastrophe—that Israel caused—because, “Without providing a fundamental and long-term solution to the crisis, it will be coming to our doorstep.” Reading between the lines, of course, what they want is for America to pay for a cleanup.
Should we do it? Sure we should, but with two provisos: 1) We take the money right off the top of the billions we give Israel every year and 2) if Israel blows up Gaza’s water and sewer infrastructure again we stop funding Israel altogether. This would benefit everybody. Gaza gets cleaned up. Israel no longer has Gaza sewage in their beaches and Bibi’s coffee; and America does a good deed in the region for a change.
West Bank sewage to Israel
Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority Environmental unit says all nine major West Bank streams are badly polluted. How bad is it? There are an estimated 178 kilometers of sewage stream flows overall. A 2007 analysis revealed sewage, salts and heavy metals leaching into the mountain aquifer below the West Bank. Contaminated streams are the Kishon, Shechem, Kana, Shilo, Soreq, Mod’in, Michmash, Kidron and Hebron. To take one example, 43 km of Hebron stream is untreated sewage water.
The West Bank produces about 56 million cubic meters of sewage per year, of which an estimated 17.5 mcm/year is excreted by Israeli colonists. In addition, tens of thousands of occupation troopers do their ‘daily duty’ while on duty in the OPT.
Jewish colonists, have taken over and built their settlements on the West Bank’s high grounds. It’s common practice—well documented—for the Jewish colonies to divert their sewage onto Palestinian fields and groves below the colonies. During the last olive harvest, for instance, Jewish colonists from the illegal colony of Elon Moreh stole the Palestinian’s olives (Palestinian farmers in that place are not allowed in their orchards except to harvest but Jews are allowed to go into those Palestinian orchards anytime), then the Jews dumped their sewage down the hill onto the olive trees. This treatment doesn’t just make the Palestinian’s lives harder. It renders the land unusable, and eventually the stuff is carried to streams by surface runoff or seeps down into everyone’s water table.
Israeli sewage impacts in Israel, the OPT, Jordan, Syria
Do you suppose a place that irrigates crops with treated wastewater; a place where sewage has tested positive for Wild-type poliovirus-1 (WPV 1), hepatitis, and other ills, would be anything less than hyper-vigilant? Or, do you imagine they’d deliberately dump massive amounts of sewage into waterways? Well, actually it’s… number two.
Israelis deliberately dumping their own sewage into their own waters is a strange but recurrent phenomenon. In 2015 Ashdod’s pumping station needed to fix a pipe so they simply diverted the main sewage line sending tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage into Lachish stream. Nahal Kidron, which was called the most polluted stream in Israel and the West Bank in 2015, flows with a foul composition largely of untreated sewage from illegal Israeli Jewish colonies, Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem, and from villages the occupied West Bank. The gunk runs into a reservoir where part of it is treated and piped to illegal Israeli settlements to water Jewish date groves in the occupied Jordan valley. North of Jordan valley, in 2017, thousands of cubic meters of sewage killed fish and turtles in Galilee’s Betzet stream.
Nahal Sorek is a wadi that Israel made flow year round by the technological advancement of running Jerusalem’s sewage through it. The Israeli Water Authority bought into a scheme to build holding reservoirs for treated sewage which would later be pumped to irrigate Israeli crops. Things went down the drain in 2016 when Israel had to shut down the country’s largest desalination plant after sewage from the reservoirs was deliberately channeled into Soreq stream. It seems the Water Authority had decided to stop paying for holding reservoirs, filth was piling up, so someone made the decision to press the lever and flush the mess out to sea.
A dangerous modern component of sewage is prescription drugs that people either pass through their digestive systems or flush down the toilet without using. Sewage samples turn up estrogen from birth control pills, heart medications, ketamine, hydrocodone, barium enemas and, especially in Israel, the central nervous system stimulant Ritalin. 904,453 Israelis, over 10 ½ percent of everyone in the country, are on Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) or Ritalin-type drugs. Side effects of this drug may include psychosis, aggressive behavior, anxiety, nervousness, confusion, agitation, and… Hey! This might explain some things… Drugs end up concentrating in and around the waterways, where they can mix and synthesize with other prescriptions and a variety of petro chemicals, industrial solvents and fertilizers. Most sewage treatment plants don’t filter out even half of the drugs that go through them.
Israel’s poor performance with sewage is made worse by politics as the country has notoriously used money it owes the Palestinians to build sewage treatment plants on the Israeli side of the Green line. It works this way: decades ago, as part of the Oslo accords, Palestinians agreed to a five-year interim plan, part which included a scheme where Israel would collect tax money on behalf of the Occupied Territories then turn what was collected over to the Palestinian Authority. Israel is still collecting that money all these years later and, instead of turning the money over so the PA can treat Palestinian and Jewish colonist sewage at the source, Israel lets it contaminate the OPT and tries to clean it up when it reaches the Jewish state.
Israeli Beach Sewage
In the winter of 2016-7 various Israeli beaches were closed for a total of 310 days. On a beach where people were swimming and surfing, the Israeli environmental group Zalul, found fecal coliform to be 69,000 per 100 ml of sea water. That’s over 170 times the level where authorities are supposed to close the beach. Also in 2017 an Israeli main sewage pipe collapsed closing seven beaches near Tel Aviv.
In 2015 six Tel Aviv and Herzliya area beaches were closed until further notice after the authorities decided to deliberately pump 180,000 cubic meters of sewage runoff into the sea while the Israelis were making beach ‘upgrades.’ The following year sewage samples taken around Tel Aviv between December, 2016 and June, 2017, showed 7 of 15 were positive for hepatitis A virus. Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach has closed multiple times because of fecal contamination. The technological solution in 2011 was to run a sewage pipe to a marina where nobody swims and discharge the stuff there.
In 2010 Israel’s Health Ministry shut down fifteen public beaches in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Herzliya, and Ashdod because of sewage contamination. Apparently the technological solution to Israel’s aging sewage system is to pump the stuff out to sea when the system becomes overwhelmed. Environmentalists also accuse industrial plants of regularly pumping chemical waste into the sea.
In 2017, years of clean-up work were undone in a few days by a massive deliberate raw sewage discharge into the Yarkon from a treatment plant that, its operators claim, was being inundated by four times more sewage than the plant was designed to treat.
Countries promoting themselves as a tourist destination, find protracted beach closures are terrible for the image. After hearing that surfers at an Israeli beach had burning throats and other symptoms from contaminated seas, Maya Jacobs, Executive Director of the Israeli environmental NGO Zalul developed a Smart phone app, with help from the public, the road-navigation app developer Waze, and the Health Ministry, that sends users a pop-up alert on pollution conditions when they get within 12 miles of a waterway.
“Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe.
That all was lost.” John Milton 1608-1674, Paradise Lost
Recognition 6: Sewage: Selected Sources
07.17.2013 Sanitation recognized as a basic human right United Nations Israel signed on with 122 other countries to recognize Sanitation for All, as a basic human right.
07.30.2017 Watch: thousands of fish found floating in Yarkon river Jerusalem online by Becca Noy. Fish killed by sewage iand pollution n the river.
5.19.2017 Israel launches criminal investigation into water treatment execs over sewage spill Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat “ongoing illegal pumping of raw sewage into the Yarkon River Basin.”
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.02.28.2011 Sewage without borders Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
11.13.2017 Sewage pours into northern Betzet stream, kills fish and turtles. Jerusalem Post by Max Schindler. Thousands of cubic meters of sewage into Betzet stream.
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.
10.24.2018 Israeli colonists flood dozens of Palestinian olive trees with sewage International Middle East Media Center. Jews from illegal colony of Elon Moreh flooded Palestinian olive trees with Jewish sewage. The Palestinians are only allowed onto their own land twice a year to harvest olives and prune trees. That’s when they discovered the sewage and that Jewish colonists had stolen the crop from many of the trees because the Jews can go on the land at any time.
10.11.2017 Pollution kills thousands of fish in Lachish River. Ynet news. by Ilana Curiel. A local diver reports that this, “happens almost every year.” Authorities diverted river to Mel Ami beach supposedly to make an escape route to the sea for fish that were still alive. Unsure exactly what is killing the fish, authorities warned people to stay away from that beach.
03.17.2016 Gaza Sewage Crisis is a ticking time bomb for Israel The Jerusalem Post by Michelle Maealha Grossman. [nothing could be more Israeli than this headline.]
07.06.2017 Gaza sewage forces shutdown of Israeli beach The Jerusalem Post by Sharon Udasin and Tovah Lazaroff
08.31.2017 Israeli mayors call on U.S. to solve Gaza electricity crisis CNN by Oren Liebermann and Baeer Salman. ‘Electricity crisis’ is the sanitized-for-US-viewers euphemism to describe Gaza’s sewage treatment collapse.
08.20.2017 Al Mezan: Suspected cause of death of child is sea pollution and delayed medical referral International Middle East Media Center A little five-year-old boy, Mohammed Salim Al-Sais, died in Gaza City. Because of extreme heat, and no air conditioning due to the Israeli siege cutting off fuel, the boy’s parents took their kids to the beach, which is rank with sewage, also courtesy of the Israeli siege. The kids got sick. Next morning when the boy wouldn’t rouse his parents took him to hospital. Diagnosis was Ekiri Syndrome—a lethal toxic encephalopathy (brain swelling) from swimming in the water. Doctors didn’t have what they needed to treat the boy—also because of the siege. Parent’s couldn’t get permission cross the Israeli check points to get him to Palestinian hospital in Ramallah. After a week, in intensive care he slipped away, and died.
08.07.2017 Reign of sewage in biblical valley may be coming to an end Reuters. Ari Rabinovich. 12 million cubic meters of sewage per year, [33,000 cubic meters per day], flow down from Jerusalem and West Bank. Some is collected in a large pool that is used to water sewage resistant date trees. [yuk]
0.7.20.2017 Ongoing hepatitis A among men who have sex with men (MSM) linked to outbreaks in Europe and Tel Aviv area, Israel, December 2016-June, 2017 Europsurveillance, Yael Gozlan, et al. of 19cases of hepatitis A virus (HAV), 17 were identified in Tel Aviv area. 7 of 15 sewage samples were HAV positive.
07.03.2017 Israel shuts down beaches along central coastal city over sewage spill Haaretz by Ido Efrati sewage pipe collapse closes eight beaches.
06.25.2017 How safe are Israel’s beaches? The Jerusalem Post by Sigal Ben David.
04.21.2017 Israel pumps sewage water onto lands in Bethlehem. Eye on Palestine. Jewish military camps have been pumping sewage onto Palestinian lands. Landowners have been filing complaints to Jewish authorities since 2002, to no avail. Farmers don’t plant there so as not to contaminate their crops. The sewage harms local plants and animals but encourages rats and flies which spread disease.
05.06.2017 UN envoy warns of dire crisis as Gaza faces power cuts, gallons of raw sewage pouring into the sea. “An environmental disaster for Israel, Egypt, and Gaza is in the making.” Nicolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
05.11.2017 Gordon beach closed after sewage discharge Ynet news Gordon Beach closed again from sewage because of pumping station failure. Article notes the same thing happened last year.
08.25.2016 Gaza is sick of sewage and time is running out to contain it the Middle East Eye by Kiernan Cooke. Ashkelon desalination plant shut down at least four times because of Gaza Sewage this summer.
11.29.2015 Deliberate sewage dump closes 6 Tel Aviv beaches Times of Israel Staff report. Beaches closed because authorities decided to release some 180,000 metric ton’s of sewage while they are making beachfront ‘upgrades.’
09.30.2015 Sewage leak kills thousands of fish near Ashod Haaretz by Ben Zikri. Raw sewage deliberately diverted to stream for 10 hours while workers repaired a pipe. Thousands of cubic meters of sewage killed thousands of fish, stream organisms and animals that drink from the stream.06.18.2015 Baptism by mire? In lower Jordan river sewage mucks up Christian rite.Times of Israel by Melanie Lidman. Christians are being baptized in effluent soup of ‘treated and partially treated sewage, agricultural runoff, fish and pond waste, and saline waters from springs to reduce salinity of the Sea of Galilee.’
11.19.2012 Check this app before you swim in Israel Israel 21c by Karin Kloosterman.
06.05.2012 Sewer runs through river at heart of Israel’s most important Nature reserve. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
07.12.2011 Sewage shuts Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach again Haaretz by IIan Lior Beach closed for third time since May because of high coliform bacteria counts. The city diverted the suspect pipe flow to a marina where nobody swims and reopened the beach.
08.12.2010 Sewage row on Tel Aviv’s beaches The JC by Anshel Pfeffer. Israeli Health ministry closed 15 beaches so far this summer because of excessive sewage. Cities were beaches closed were Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ashdod, and Herzliya.
09.22.2008 ‘Polluted West Bank streams pose threat to a third of Israel’s drinking water’ Jerusalem Post by Ehud Zion Waldoks.
05.11.2017 Gordon beach closed after sewage discharge.YNet News
07.30.2017 The “apolitical” approach to Palestine’s water crisis al-Shabaka by Muna Dajani.
Gist of the article is that well-meaning donors are helping Israel pull the focus off Palestinian water rights.
09.18.2016 Drowning in the waste of Israeli settlers Al Jazeera by Jaclynn Ashly. Jewish colony of Ariel has fouled al-Matua spring and stream with sewage. Ariel, Ariel West and Barkum colonies’ treatment works break down, or over flow often and when they do the Jews aim their sewage down hill at Palestinian villages and streams.The smell keeps people awake at night, mosquitoes are rampant, children get sick from the sewage, sheep die from drinking the water. Local rabbits, deer, foxes and other species that used to live there and come to the spring are gone.
Abu Dis, at Wadi Abu Hurdi, the Jews built a toxic waste dump on Palestinian land. It’s the largest dump on the WB. Chemical smells make people sick. Liquid waste pools kill sheep.Israel closed the dump in 2015 as part of a plan to forcibly evict local residents.The local Bedouins were forcibly relocated to live near the dump in the 1990’s. Now Israel wants to remove them altogether or, alternatively to flatten out the dump, put dirt on it, and make the Bedouins live on top of the dump itself. Finally, Jewish colonists from Qedar dump their swimming pool water into the valley where Palestinian sheep get sick from the chlorine.
Altogether about 19 mcm/yr of the West Bank’s 83 mcm/yr of waste water/sewage is from the illegal colonies (Knesset Research Institute). About 12% of Jewish colony sewage is dumped untreated into Palestinian streams. In 1967 Israel declared that uncultivated land, hilltops where it’s hard to grow things for example, was state of Israel land. Taking over the hilltops also made it easier for Jews to oversee and control the area. As the Jews built settlements they forced the Arabs further down the hills.
06.09.2017 Swimming in sewage. World ignores Gaza’s waste water crisis Middle East Eye. Because of the Israeli siege there’s no fuel, because of no fuel the power plants can’t operate, because the power plants can’t operate the sewage treatment plants can’t operate, because the sewage treatment plants can’t operate 11 million liters of sewage runs out of Gaza every day, because 11 million liters of sewage goes into the Mediterranean from Gaza the tide carries it north to foul Israeli beaches and into the intakes of Israel’s desalination plants. Gaza has the 13th highest growth rate in the world (4.2%/yr). with a fertility rate of 4.4 children per woman. In 1997 there were 300,000 in Gaza. Today there are 2 million. 75% of the population is under 25 years old.09.02.2015 Most polluted river in Israel and West Bank to stay filthy because of government vacillation Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. ‘Nahal Kidron the most polluted water way in either Israel of the West Bank…’ The river is an open sewer for untreated sewage from illegal Israeli Jewish settlements and Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The sewage flows into a reservoir where part of it is treated and piped to illegal Israeli settlements to water date groves in the occupied Jordan valley.
07.21.2015 Gaza-Cholera Outbreak AP Video Riyad al-Zaanoun, Chief Palestinian health official, confirmed that 20 cholera cases are in hospital. This is the first cholera outbreak in Gaza for 20 years. Officials are worried that the disease could spread rapidly in Gaza’s overcrowded slums and refugee camps.
06.18.2015 Baptism by mire? In lower Jordan river sewage mucks up Christian rite.Times of Israel by Melanie Lidman. Christians are being baptized in effluent soup of ‘treated and partially treated sewage, agricultural runoff, fish and pond waste, and saline waters from springs to reduce salinity of the Sea of Galilee.’
04.18.2015 Parting the brown sea: Sewage crisis threatens Gaza’s access to water Al Jazeera by Jen Marlowe. [Very well done article] Because of the Israeli siege, Israel destroying infrastructure, and choking electrical and fuel supplies, every single day 24 million gallons of raw or partially treated sewage goes into the Mediterranean off Gaza through seven pipes. It has created massive sewage lagoons, destroyed wetlands, plankton, fish and fisheries. Over pumping Gaza’s only aquifer is resulting in sewage laced seawater intrusion of the aquifer. This is a crisis that the UN says could make Gaza 100% of water undrinkable by 2016 (96% is unfit for human consumption now) and Gaza uninhabitable by 2020. [Article doesn’t mention that prevailing currents flow from south to north up the coast. Meaning that what is coming out a Palestinian’s ass goes right upstream to Israeli desalination plants and into an Israeli’s mouth every time he or she drinks water.]
06.05.2012 Sewer runs through river at heart of Israel’s most important Nature reserve. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. Nahal Sorek is a Wadi that Israel made flow year round with the technological advancement of running Jerusalem’s sewage through it. The Israeli Water Authority came up with a scheme to build reservoirs that would hold treated sewage which would be later be pumped to irrigate Israeli crops.
09.22.2008 ‘Polluted West Bank streams pose threat to a third of Israel’s drinking water’ Jerusalem Post by Ehud Zion Waldoks. Most West Bank sewage from Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages is untreated. Ariel Cohen of Nature and Parks Authority Environmental unit says all nine major West Bank streams are badly polluted. 2007 analysis revealed sewage, salts and heavy metals leaching into the mountain aquifer below the West Bank. Streams are Kishon, Shechem, Kana, Shilo, Soreq, Mod’in, Michmash, Kidron and Hebron. Palestinians produce estimated 56 million cubic meters of sewage per year, Israeli occupiers produce and estimated 17.5 mcm/year of which 31.5% isn’t treated. 43 km. of Hebron stream is untreated sewage water. There are 178 kilometers of sewage stream flows overall.
Baseline of a Desecrated Land I: Food Supply
Part 1 of a 12 part series examining the ecological impacts of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
How Israel’s water and agricultural technologies don’t even work for Israel
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
“California I hear has a big water problem. We in Israel don’t have a water problem. We use technology to solve it…” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to California Governor Jerry Brown in March 2014.
“If you were planning to grow a new strain of tomato—don’t do it, because there is no water. Stop planting. Stop sowing new seedlings. There’s no water.” Giora Shacham, Chairman of the Israeli Water Authority, to Jewish farmers at a December, 27, 2017 Israeli agriculture conference.
Introduction
A new mythology has it that Israel can save American agriculture and cities from drought. To accept this is to ignore the wilderness instructor’s maxim: “In a survival situation the first thing you need is recognition.”
Our situation is that we in America have 324 million people and our country exports more food every year than any country in the history of the planet. Israel has eight and a half million people, exports almost no food, is entirely dependent on imported food, and every indicator is screaming that the Jewish state ecosystem is a dying patient on the gurney.
We will mostly bypass what suffering Israeli water colonization has caused Palestinians. Instead, this piece looks at what fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls ‘Shifting Baselines,’ where some good thing is degraded over time and each successive generation adopts what is in front of them as their baseline reality. At some point an environment emerges that would terrify our ancestors. We Americans should look hard and honestly at Mother Earth groaning under Zionism in today’s Israel and ask, ‘Does America, or any country desiring a good future, want to follow that road?’
Before we start, it helps to know that Israel is 1,600 square miles smaller than the state of Vermont, the West Bank is smaller than St. Lawrence county in New York state, and the entire Gaza Strip is about the size of Bakersfield, California.
To evaluate Israeli land and water use technologies, these twelve recognitions might serve as jumping off points for discussion.
1) Israel cannot feed itself.
2) Israel pretends desalination impacts don’t exist.
3) Israel takes Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian water.
4) Israel’s one and only large, natural water body may be gone within twenty years.
5) Over half of the Jordan river valley’s biodiversity is already gone.
6) Israel and the Occupied Territories are awash in human sewage.
7) West Bank/Israeli streams and groundwater are over exploited and drying up so completely that centuries old trees in the nature reserves are dying of thirst.
8) Israel’s water, forestry, agricultural and military technologies have compromised agricultural land to the point where half of it is depleted and at risk, pesticide use is highest in the OECD, the land is absorbing more heat, and, in the long run, drip irrigation may do more harm than good.
9) Israel is the Flint, Michigan of the Middle East with a history of spectacular toxic spills, dumped military/industrial carcinogens, hundreds of contaminated wells, hundreds of millions of tons of contaminated ground water, millions of tons of oil stored right on the beach, massive unregulated hazardous waste sites built above aquifers, and the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, sitting 18 miles from the Syria-African fault line—with 1,537 documented defects in its aluminum core.
10) Wine, war, industrial tourism, and an unwinnable competition with the faster growing Arab population are the water marks on Israel’s self-portrait.
11) Israel is stuck with being the love-child of 1950’s American water engineers and 1800’s ‘make the desert bloom’ fundamentalism.
12) Israel is a cautionary tale.
Baseline Recognitions
Recognition I: Israel can’t feed itself
“Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs… Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.” USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Report, Israel Grain and Feed Annual 02.18.2015 by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez
Humanity uses most of its fresh water to grow food. Current estimates for Israel’s total annual water consumption run between 2¼ and 2½ billion cubic meters per year. An item missing from that buoyant assessment is the fact that life in the Jewish state depends on importing four times as much, over ten billion metric tons, of virtual water every year via container ships. Virtual water is J.A. Allen’s elegant concept that, instead of trying to understand the value of agricultural commodities in terms of carrots, steaks, bushels of wheat, or how much money those bring in, we should view farm products as compact, transportable carriers embedded with all of the water it took to grow them.
If we include the embedded water footprint of millions of tons of grains/feed/soybeans (GFS) as well as meat, dairy, fruit and other commodities to the equation, Israel’s total annual water requirement quintuples.
The agricultural water footprint for a given commodity includes green water (rainfall that ends up in the root zone), blue water (irrigation from surface and ground water), and grey water (water it takes to dilute agricultural runoff). Below are water footprints of some mainstay Israeli food imports for Market Year 2016.
(commodity in 1,000’s metric tons-Mt) X (tons water to grow a ton)=Water footprint
Corn 1,515 1,222 1,851,330
Wheat 1,758 1,827 3,211,866
Barley 376 1,977 743,352
Soybean Meal 135 2,145 289,575
Rice, milled 115 2,172 249,780
Sorghum 30 3,048 91,440
Rye 4 1,544 6,176
Rape seed meal 140 1,115 156,100
Sunflower meal 240 3,366 807,840
oil, rape seed 44 4,301 189,244
oil, soy bean 374 4,190 1,567,060
sugar, centrifugal 518 865 448,070
total 9,611,833
sources: USDA Foreign Agriculture Service Database. and The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.
- This 9,701,833 Mt water footprint of foodstuffs multiplied by 1,000 tons—because the commodities in the first column are in units of one thousand tons—gives 9,701,833,000 Mt of water.
Now add Israeli beef imports which average over 75,000 metric tons/year. This is in carcass weight equivalent (CWE) which means the cow after it has been gutted and skinned, with the head, tail, hooves removed. About 70 percent of the CWE is red meat. To find the amount of water in 75,000 Mt of red meat we multiply CWE by 0.7, which gives 52,500 Mt of meat. Global average to raise one Mt of red meat is 15,400 Mt of water. Multiplying 52,500 Mt of meat by the 15,400 Mt of water it took to grow them, we get 808,500,000 metric tons of water sent to Israel every year in the form of red meat. That by itself is a third above Israel’s entire annual desalination production.
Add other agricultural imports like 46,000 tons of various protein powders, soup stock, cheese, fresh fruits, 80 million eggs per year, etc and we’re looking at a total virtual reservoir of over 10.5 billion tons of water that Israel does not have to draw from its own resources.
How much is 10.5 billion metric tons of water?
*It’s enough to drain the Sea of Galilee dry more than 2½ times. (when the SoG is full—which it isn’t and hasn’t been for years.)
* It’s around 4 times larger than the entire annual national water consumption of Israel: the whole enchilada including domestic, industrial, meeting Israel’s agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians, etc.
* It’s enough to flood the entire Gaza Strip 28.8 meters (94.5 feet) deep. — [given that Gaza Strip is 365 square km and each square km = one million square meters] 10,500,000,000 cubic meters of water divided by 365,000,000 square meters] = 28.8 meters. 28.8 meters rounds to 94.5 feet.
*And it’s not enough. Israel’s population is growing at a rate of 1.58 percent per year. Grain imports are growing accordingly. By 2021 the country is predicted to require about 5.5 million tons of GFS alone. As the Mideast droughts continue import numbers will only increase.
The Food Security Index
At this juncture the alert Israel supporter might point with satisfaction to the Economist’s 2017 Global Food Security Index which placed Israel at 19th highest of 113 countries. Future factors, like global warming impacts, dropped Israel down to 24th place in the same report, but still, if the index is correct, either 19th or 24th would imply Israel is doing pretty well, wouldn’t it?
Or maybe not counting millions of Palestinians living there shifts the tally. A follow-up 2017 Economist report written with Italy’s Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, on the Food Security Index, gives an Israeli population of 8.5 million. That number implies Israeli Jewish colonists in the occupied territories (where Israel gets a third of its water and grows a lot of food) are included but the report doesn’t count 2.5 million food-insecure Palestinians who live on that same parcel of land, and also doesn’t include 2 million extremely food-insecure Palestinians in Gaza.
Alternatively, Israel’s place on the index may be artificially high because the index doesn’t adequately survey factors in the Jewish state like the scale of water pollution, erosion, and exhausted agricultural lands.
Then again, the list may just reflect the catastrophic condition of the rest of the world’s food supply. Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the United States supply most of Israel’s food imports. The index places four of these lower in food security than Israel, raising the question, ‘When your food security depends on distant places that are less food secure than you are, how secure is that?’
Israel’s food suppliers have weathered record breaking droughts on multiple years during the past decade. Their aquifers are dropping. Population stress, economic and political upheavals, and armed conflicts like those between Russia and Ukraine, can be expected to adversely impact grain production and distribution.
Another threat, peculiar to Israeli food security, is the growing worldwide boycott (BDS) of the country because of Israel’s 50+ years-long occupation of the Palestinian territories. If one or more of Israel’s food suppliers joins the boycott it will be a serious loss of calories with few, if any, other nations willing or able to take up the slack.
Before leaving this section, it’s fair to say that America imports agricultural products too, a lot of them, but according the USDA, they’re mostly from nearby Canada and Mexico, and mostly things we could get along without like coffee, spices, cut flowers, nursery stock, etc. rather than food we need to keep from starving.
Whatever happened to the early 1900’s Zionist agricultural model?
A good, simple measure of how well a country’s farming methods work is how well the farmers are doing. How many citizens work in agriculture? Do they earn a decent living? Are they viable? Are they happy with their choice of livelihood?
A hundred-twenty years ago when European Zionists began moving enmasse to Palestine to build their dream of a Jewish cooperative agricultural utopia, optimism was in the air. Most people, young to old, worked on the land. Their collaborative farms, kibbutsim and moshavim, were Jews-only community collectives. Other than the racist aspect it was a progressive experiment in many ways.
That social landscape has changed. In 2016 Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director, pointed out that only 15,000 Israelis still live by farming and 20 percent of those are part-time.
That’s less than a third as many farmers as there were in the 1980’s. The average Israeli farmer now is 62-years-old. Young people are leaving the land for better prospects. Says Solomon, “While the Israeli government is crowing about Israeli farmers in order to attract foreign investment, so that doors will be opened to them overseas, in Israel they are being trampled. Israel is using agricultural knowledge to promote its diplomatic relations and foreign relations, but its policy in recent years has a price, and in the future, Israel will have nothing to offer the world… The Government’s policy is slowly eliminating the small growers, and when there is no renewal of fields, there is a shortage of produce and the land becomes arid.”
Israeli farmers hold lively (for farmers) protests where they do things like smash tomatoes on the road out in front of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Or, a bunch of them drive tractors through the streets of Jerusalem. Or, they hold up traffic at intersections. Their main complaints are inevitably water costs and water allotments.
Israel depends on other countries to grow its food even on farms inside Israel
If most Israelis are getting out of farming, who is working the remaining farms? Heavy, dangerous agricultural grunt labor, like planting, weeding, spraying pesticides, herbicides (commonly with no protective gear), setting up irrigation equipment, harvesting, and loading trucks, is accomplished by some 25,000 ‘guest workers’ from Thailand, who come to Israel on five-year contracts.
They work through extreme summer heat—greenhouses can be over 120 degrees Fahrenheit—and winter cold, especially at night, which the Thais aren’t adapted to. One hundred twenty-two Thai workers died in the five years between 2008 and 2013. Of those, 22 died for unknown causes because no autopsy was done. Five committed suicide. Forty-three formerly healthy, young Thai males died from something Israelis call, “sudden nocturnal death syndrome.” During the same period only 32 Israeli occupation troops died in military conflicts. Chances of dying at work, then, were about four times higher for Thai farm workers than Israeli soldiers.
Noa Shuer from the worker’s rights group Kav LaOved, said her organization did a survey of 500 Thai workers. None of them was being paid minimum wage. Instead Thai workers are told to sign a time sheet they can’t read because it’s in Hebrew. Almost none of them get a copy. They work up to seventeen hours a day, seven days a week with four days a year off. Workers have to pay a fee, sometimes over $10,000, to brokers to work in Israel. Room, board, income taxes, and national health care fees come out of their wages. Living conditions are often squalid with workers being packed into former animal sheds or sheds where farmers keep pesticides and other chemicals.
Jewish farm owners have tremendous power over Thai workers because they know the workers have to pay back broker fees and don’t want to go home with no money. Someone who makes trouble, like asking to be paid what he or she is supposed to get, can be sent packing back to Thailand with no way to collect what they’re owed. Workers might be assigned other duties besides farming. There are many allegations of dangerous living situations and abuse, including sexual abuse. Some workers had no toilet and were told to use the field out back. In one case there was a single female living among forty male workers with a shared shower. Another woman was awarded $53,000 after she proved the farmer she worked for used her as a sex slave.
Clearly the Thais aren’t counted in the 15,000 Israeli farm workers statistic. Neither are thousands of Palestinian workers who, bereft of their own lands, are forced by economic necessity to work on farms in Israel and the occupied territories. The Palestinians also work under bad conditions for lower pay, plus they have to wait at Israeli checkpoints, both going to the fields and returning home, some rise at 3 in the morning to get in line. Palestinians working for Israelis are supposed to have Israeli-issued permits. Those without permits can be paid less money and they can’t complain because they’re working illegally and they might get carted off to jail. For the most part the Israeli government looks the other way.
Hydro diplomacy
Israel’s water technology media stream flows across the digital landscape like the Amazon River. Its headwaters are a combination of hyperbole, wishful thinking, and putting a new hat on old technologies. Headlines like, “… Israel overcomes an old foe, drought’, ‘Israeli innovation could feed the world…’ ‘12 top ways Israel feeds the world’ are the sort of nonsense Americans expected from the National Enquirer back in the 1970’s but people still buy it. So much so that it would be no surprise to read, “Israeli scientists invent fish that can breathe underwater.” or “Israeli scientists discover a plant that makes its own food from sunshine.” AIPAC leader, turned pro-Israel water author, Seth Siegel provides a simple explanation for the media stream. An interviewer asked Mr. Siegel,
Q: “Do you think Israel’s use of water saving technology can help its relationship to the outside world?”
Siegel replied: “Absolutely. I make that point in the book. There are countries that vote against Israel in the UN but when it comes to water, they invite Israel in. It is hydro-diplomacy.”
This is pretty much what the Agricultural Union’s Yaron Solomon quoted Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel saying, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
How realistic are claims that Israel has solved its water problems with technology? We need look no further than Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Arial in December, 2017, when he called on the Israeli public to assemble at the Western Wall to PRAY FOR RAIN! Yes, as the fifth straight year of drought came knocking at the Damascus Gate, the country’s agricultural front-man was out there channeling Steve Martin in Leap of Faith. Nothing wrong with a good prayer, but ten thousand years of agriculture has shown we don’t want to bet the farm on it.
And yet here comes undaunted Israel with the audacity, the chutzpah, to claim that they can bail us out of water shortage at the very same time we are shipping them billions of tons of embedded water. American water infrastructure, especially in the West, is heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. The time approaches when we’ll have to evaluate the growing harm of sending Colorado River water, what’s left of the Ogallala Aquifer, and other precious dwindling water resources overseas.
Baseline 1 Selected Sources:
10.2018 Tony Allen. Bio. King’s College, London, website. Good thumbnail description of the virtual water concept and the good Professor, who was awarded the Stockholm World Water Prize (2008), the Florence Monito Water Prize (2013), and the Monaco Water Prize (2013).
03/05/2014 Netanyahu Offers to Help Brown Manage California Drought Bloomberg News by JonathanFerziger https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-05/netanyahu-offers-to-help-brown-manage-california-drought
02.18.2015 USDA Foreign Agricultural Service: Israel Grain and Feed Annual: Prepared by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez. Approved by Ron Verdonk, Minister-Counselor [From the Executive Summary: “Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs…Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.”] *Note that Gilad Shachar did excellent work and his graphs and charts were clear and concise. After 2015 another author took over. [I found subsequent reports are not as clear or complete on imports and, in 2016, contain odd biblical references that I’ve never seen in technical writing.] As a work-around, you can access import/export data for most commodities from any country at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s amazing database here: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/home There’s a row of blue bars across the screen. Choose ‘Custom Query’. There are four boxes on the new screen: Commodities, Attributes, Countries, Market Years. Click on the commodity you want to see in the first box, that brings up the Attributes menu in the next box over. Click on ‘Imports’, for Country click on ‘Israel, then select the year you want. Click the green Run Query button on lower right of screen. When you want to search for other commodities, there is a red Back to Query button to click on the upper right screen.
02.12.2016 Will beef export volume increase in 2016? Beef Magazine, by Joe Schuele,(75,000 tonnes beef.)
The National Water Carrier (Ha’ Movil Ha’ Artsi) Shmeil Kantor Formern Chief Engineer and Head of Planning Dep. Mekorot Water Co.
http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eshkol/kantorb.html
Also see: Fanak water: Israel Dr. Clive Lipchin, Director of Transboundry Water Management, Arava Institute for Environmental studies, Israel.
The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.wfn.project-platforms.com/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf
2017 Global Security Index: Measuring food security and the impact of resource risk The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Dupont. Countries lower on the list than Israel, that supply food to Israel: Hungary-30, Brazil-38, Russia-41, Ukraine-63.
2017 Fixing Food: The Mediterranean Region The Economist/Intelligence Unit with Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition.
11.20.2014 Exporter Guide USDA Foreign Agricultural Service—GAIN Report. Prepared by Gilad Shachar, Approved by Orestes Vasquez, Sr. Agricultural Attaché’. damage to Israeli crops from Protective Edge.
2015 data from USDA Economic Research Service Agricultural Trade page https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/agricultural-trade/
10.18.2012 Israel to label all egg imports Green Prophet: sustainable news from the Middle East Israel imports around 80 million eggs/year from Turkey.
12.24.2017 Israeli Agriculture Minister’s solution to drought: mass western wall prayers for rain. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
01.21.2015 A raw deal: abuse of Thai workers in Israel’s agricultural sector. Human Rights Watch Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division.
Israeli Casualties of War Wikipedia is the source of 32 combat casualties.
11.22.2016 Israel’s farmers: an endangered species Globes: Israel’s Business Arena. by Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director. Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel quote, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
08.12.2015 How Israel will save the world: (sic) an interview with Seth Siegel. Orthodox Union by OR staff. Hydro-diplomacy quote and assertions about drip irrigation.
01.19.2018 Dry, dry, again: After several wet years, big drought is back again in Israel Haaretz by Hagal Amit. This article has the Gioria Shacham quote about don’t grow new tomatoes.
When Government Lies to You
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | April 3, 2019
Fake news is everywhere, and governments can be a rich source. For example, a flyer distributed in the mail last week by Canada’s Revenue Agency – aka the taxman – tells us a pack of lies.
Against the will of elected leaders in four provinces, our federal government has just imposed a carbon tax. The price of gasoline has jumped at the pumps. Home heating costs have risen. This is just stage one, since the tax bite will increase every year.
The flyer begins by declaring:
Pollution has a cost. It impacts the air we breathe, our children’s health, and our economy. That’s why the Government of Canada has put a price on carbon pollution.
What nonsense. Carbon taxes are supposed to discourage people from burning fossil fuels not because of dirty black soot (sophisticated, anti-pollution technologies already exist), but because an invisible, odourless gas gets emitted whenever fossil fuels are used.
The entire climate scare rests on the idea that humanity is adding too much carbon dioxide – CO2 – to the atmosphere, and that this will hypothetically destabilize the climate.
Now is a good time to point out that the Canadian government admits this country is responsible for a mere 1.6 percent of global CO2 emissions. Between them, China (26 percent), America (14 percent), and India (6.4) are responsible for nearly half of all human-produced CO2 (46 percent).
It’s also a good time to remember that, over the past 50 years, experts have predicted one environmental catastrophe after another, none of which materialized. Even smart scientists with powerful computers are terrible at forecasting the future.
The flyer says this measure is all about fighting pollution. But CO2 wasn’t pollution when Al Gore called it that. It wasn’t pollution when Barack Obama called it that. And it isn’t pollution now.
As we all learned in Biology 101, bears, bunnies, and humans all exhale CO2 – which is then absorbed by grass, flowers, and trees. Without CO2, there would be no plants. Without plants, there would be no oxygen for wildlife or humanity to breathe.
CO2 is therefore an integral part of the natural, virtuous circle of life. It does no harm to our air quality. It does no harm to our children’s health.
And whatever harm a climate crisis might one day inflict on Canada’s economy must surely be balanced against the genuine hardship being experienced right now.
Every time people near the bottom of the economic ladder fill up their car in order to get to work, they’re being punished. Every time they pay their heating bill they’re being penalized by their own government. That’s what carbon taxes do.
We can argue endlessly about whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will be perilous over the long term. But the ‘pollution’ angle is total hogwash, dreamed up by political sleazeballs.
A planet without CO2 would be a wasteland, bereft of both plants and animals. Calling CO2 pollution is therefore abjectly dishonest.
Let me say this one more time: If CO2 is pollution, every human being is a non-stop pollution factory. Your neighbour’s newborn. Your grandmother. That blind child.
What a sick, dangerous perspective on the world.
Deadly Dust: US Spreading Radiation and No One Wants to Raise the Issue – Author
Sputnik – April 3, 2019
In a new book named “Deadly Dust – Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World” German author Frieder Wagner gives a detailed account of how the US has contaminated vast territories using depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and the cover-up strategy of the military, industry and governments, as well as those in the media and politics.
Sputnik: Mr Wagner, in your book “Deadly Dust — Made in the USA: Uranium Weapons Contaminating the World” you talk about the use of uranium ammunition. What is especially dangerous about these weapons?
Frieder Wagner: Weapons containing uranium are produced from nuclear industry’s waste (byproducts of uranium enrichment). If, for example, you want to produce a ton of natural uranium fuel rods for nuclear power plants, you get about eight tons of depleted uranium. It is a source of alpha radiation — radioactive and, moreover, very poisonous. It needs to be stored somewhere, and it is not very cheap.
Sputnik: How can it be used in weapons?
Frieder Wagner: About 30-40 years ago, military scientists made a discovery: uranium is almost twice as dense as lead. If you turn depleted uranium into a projectile and give it proper acceleration, then within a fraction of a second it will pierce through tank armor, concrete or cement.This, of course, was an important discovery. Furthermore, when a shell hits an armored tank the impact produces dust caused by the detonation and the subsequent release of heat energy causes it to ignite and it explodes at a temperature of 3000 to 5000 degrees — incinerating the tank’s interior and destroying it.
Sputnik: But what happens afterwards is also a problem — after the use of DU ammunition, isn’t it?
Frieder Wagner: Yes! After its use depleted uranium, which, as I have already said, is a source of alpha radiation (that is, a radioactive and very toxic substance), burns down to nano-particles that are a hundred times smaller than a red blood cell.
This way, I would say, a sort of metallic gas forms that people can inhale, and which is released in the atmosphere and can be carried anywhere by wind. People who inhale it are at risk for developing cancer.These nano-particles can also penetrate the body of a pregnant woman, overcoming the barrier between a child and a mother, and affect the health of an unborn baby, can infiltrate the brain and by travelling through the bloodstream end up in any human or animal organ. Everything that goes around the planet, sooner or later settles and, of course, contaminates, in particular, drinking water and everything else.
Sputnik: In what wars have DU weapons been used so far?
Frieder Wagner: It was actively used during the first Gulf war in 1991 against Iraq. The military has admitted that about 320 tons were used. Then in the second war in Iraq in 2003 over 2,000 tons were used. In between, it was used during the war in Kosovo, in Yugoslavia (1999), and in Bosnia in 1995, and after 2001 in Afghanistan, where it still used today.
Sputnik: Your book title says Made in the USA, were these weapons only used by the United States?
Frieder Wagner: They were being developed in several countries at the same time. In Germany, they were also working on these weapons, as, of course, in Russia. However, it was used and on such a large scale, only by the US. They were reckless and they did not pay attention to any possible side effects — just as it was back when the first atomic bombs were used. That’s why I called the book: “Deadly Dust — Made in the USA”.
Sputnik: How did you manage to prove the use of this ammunition in the course of your research?
Frieder Wagner: For example, the Serbs gave us maps where they showed the locations where depleted uranium was used. When we were in Iraq, we talked to the locals. We traveled to places where large tank battles took place and took soil samples there, as well as dust samples from tanks. Looking at the tank, you can see whether it was hit by an ordinary projectile or a uranium munition.
Uranium munition leaves dust that burns everything around the hole made by the projectile. So you can determine the use of uranium ammunition. In all soil samples, we found depleted uranium. Unfortunately, uranium-236 was also found in most of the soil and dust samples — it is even more intense and poisonous. Its radiation is even stronger and does not occur in nature. It can only be produced artificially during reprocessing of fuel rods. This means that we were able to prove that the military, the United States and its coalition allies used uranium munitions made from spent uranium fuel rods.
Sputnik: Your book is based on the films The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children of Basra (Der Arzt und die verstrahlten Kinder von Basra, 2004) and Deadly Dust (Todesstaub, 2007). What did you see in Basra during your work on the documentary?
Frieder Wagner: It was horrific and still sometimes haunts me in my dreams. These were children with deformities, which we saw in orphanages in Basra and Baghdad. Some of them had such deformities that they had almost nothing human anymore.
There were children without a head or a nose, either with one eye or without eyes at all, with internal organs in a kind of “sack” outside their body. These ‘creatures’ can live only for a few hours, experiencing terrible pain, and then die.
Sputnik: The film “Deadly Dust” is linked to the book, but it is no longer distributed. WDR channel after this film did not make any more orders? Why is that?
Frieder Wagner: My exposes which I sent to WDR, as well as to the ZDF channels were rejected. Then I contacted an editor at WDR, for which I always made good films and with which I always had good relations with, because these films had doubled or trippled their ratings, and asked him: “What’s going on here?”” And after some hesitation he said: “Yes, Frieder Wagner, someone must tell you this. WDR considers you a ‘difficult’ person. And most importantly, the topics you suggest are especially hard. Right now I’ve got nothing more to tell you.” And that’s when I understood everything. It was in 2005.
I can also tell you the story of how, for example, a female editor at ZDF offered the TV channel a story on the use of these weapons during the war in Yugoslavia and also in Croatia. She wanted to talk about it with me prior so I could share my experiences. But when her boss found out that she wanted to talk to Frieder Wagner, he refused to pay for her trip — without any further explanation.
Sputnik: The so-called “deadly dust” is, as you have already described it, is spread by the wind. So should the use of uranium ammunition, in fact, be considered a war crime and banned?
Frieder Wagner: This is definitely a war crime. The dust from southern Iraq is carried to the north by the constant storms, the so-called desert storms — for example, to Erbil, where it meets the mountains and can’t travel further as the mountains make it difficult for it to go past towards Turkey. So this huge mass of dust settles in Erbil.We, for example, took samples of beef from around Erbil, and this is what we found out: depleted uranium used in ammunition has a characteristic atomic “fingerprint”. In northern Iraq we found the same “uranium fingerprint” as in the south. This means that the uranium dust that had originally settled in the south of Iraq is now also in the north, and children are now getting sick there and are born with deformities. It is now spreading all over the world.
Sputnik: Have the victims of uranium munition use in Kosovo or, for example, in Iraq, tried to go to court?
Frieder Wagner: So far no such attempts have been made in Kosovo or Iraq. Now in Kosovo, a whole group of lawyers are working on a lawsuit against NATO, because after the war they unleashed, people were injured, fell ill and died. The morbidity rate has increased by 20 to 30 percent, and there are more effected each year. So there will be an attempt to file a lawsuit.
Out of the approximately two thousand Italian soldiers stationed in Iraq and Kosovo, 109 have later developed cancer and died — this is proven information. 16 families, out of the 109 dead, filed lawsuits and won their cases. The courts ordered the Italian state or the country’s Ministry of Defence to pay them compensation. Since each cancer was of a different type, the payout amounts differed. But they ranged between 200,000 and 1,4 million euros.
Sputnik: How are things in Germany? Have there been lawsuits filed by the soldiers of the Bundeswehr?
Frieder Wagner: The German Ministry of Defense constantly denies any connection to this. Our soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan and Kosovo. About 100,000 soldiers served in Afghanistan, and we found out that about 30% of those who returned got sick, although at first, of course, they do not notice this. If they subsequently marry and have children, then there’s a great risk that their children will have disabilities.These children will have the same toxic substances in their DNA as their parents. And this will be passed on for several generations — from children to grandchildren and to great-grandchildren.
Sputnik: But none of these people ever filed a lawsuit?
Frieder Wagner: In Germany there were no such precedents. About 600 servicemen went to court in the United States who could not appeal on their own behalf, but they filed lawsuits on behalf of their children who were born with developmental disabilities. And we’re not talking about a mere 90 or even 900 million pay out, but about billions of dollars now. The United States, of course, will try to delay the adoption of a ruling as much as it is possible and hope for a “biological” resolution of the situation — that is, that the plaintiffs will simply die.
Featured Video
Stanislav Krapivnik: Massive Escalation – Attack on Putin’s Residence
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Truth and Public Policy in the Digital Age
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – 10th part of the series “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 9, 2016
… In Among The Truthers Kay repeats the core idea of The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad. As Kay would have it, 9/11 confirms the role of Israel as the West’s primary bulwark against Islamic savagery. In making this case Kay repeats the assertion of Benjamin Netanyahu that 9/11 was good for Israel.
Kay asserts, “Following the attacks supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining. The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one. Now the whole world would see and understand the sort of nihilistic hatred that Israelis confront every day.” As Kay sees it, Jews are being enlisted en masse to serve as primary soldiers in a war of civilizations.
He writes, “The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.” … Read full article
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Rod on How Intelligence, Politics, an… papasha408 on Trump Says Hamas Will Be Given… papasha408 on Is Israel About to Return to G… Bill Francis on NSW Premier Admits New “Securi… Richard Ong on Israeli forces arrest writer a… Bill Francis on How reporting facts can now la… loongtip on Europe’s Panic Economy: Frozen… Gemma on Israel’s diamond industr… Bill Francis on Victoria Moves to Force Online… papasha408 on The Empire of Lies: How the BB… loongtip on US Weighs Port Restrictions on… Bill Francis on Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate…
Aletho News- Did Netanyahu just ask Trump for another war — and get it?
- As Israel bans aid orgs in Gaza, notorious mercenary firm seeks “Targeter”
- The Bari Weiss Playbook: How a Zionist Operative Conquered American Media
- How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- The new German totalitarianism
- Stanislav Krapivnik: Massive Escalation – Attack on Putin’s Residence
- Gaza races to preserve what remains of its 5,000-year-old archaeological legacy
- Dayton At 30: US Betrayal Old And New
- UNRWA head slams ‘outrageous’ Israeli law to cut water, energy to agency’s facilities
- If Americans Knew
- Tikvah Fund Secures $10.4M Grant From Trump, Pushes for Censorship to Advance Zionism
- Did Netanyahu just ask Trump for another war — and get it?
- Israel suspends operations of multiple humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders
- Cold kills another Palestinian baby in Gaza as Israel continues to block shelter aid
- AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.
- Gaza health officials report outbreaks of water-borne illnesses, flu – Not a ceasefire Day 82
- TCN Warns – “ISRAEL FIRST: U.S. May Attack Iran Again”
- Hamas calls on Israel to allow impartial investigation into 7 October attacks
- Indiegogo Withholds $51K In Donations From MintPress in Financial Censorship Crackdown
- Gaza races to preserve what remains of its 5,000-year-old archaeological legacy
- No Tricks Zone
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
- Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
Aletho News 