The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) — an international watchdog organization focusing on conflicts, the arms trade and nuclear proliferation — released a new report on Monday that claimed that Israel has nearly a hundred nuclear warheads, more than previously thought.
The SIPRI report described Israel’s nuclear arsenal as follows: 30 gravity bombs capable of delivering nuclear weapons by fighter jets; an additional 50 warheads that can be delivered by land-based ballistic missiles; and an unknown number of nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles that would grant Israel a sea-based second-strike capability.
In total, the SIPRI report estimated that Israel possesses between 80 and 90 nuclear weapons, an increase over previous years. SIPRI was unable, however, to confirm those estimates with Israel’s government, which has a long-standing policy of refusing to comment on its nuclear weapons program — a policy it describes as “nuclear ambiguity.”
As a result of this “nuclear ambiguity” policy, the actual number of Israeli nuclear weapons is unknown. Some other organizations, such as the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, have estimated that Israel has produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to arm between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads. Israel is one of only five nations in the world that refuse to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international treaty aimed at ending the proliferation of nuclear weapons and achieving global nuclear disarmament.
During a speech last August in front of the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to use nuclear weapons to “wipe out” Israel’s enemies. More recently, Netanyahu and his allies in the U.S. accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, despite the fact that intelligence agencies of both the U.S. and Israel have long recognized that Iran has no such program.
Unsafe, but only for those whose lives don’t matter
Just as the new SIPRI report has again brought scrutiny to Israel’s nuclear program, new information about Israel’s nuclear facility — the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which houses the Dimona reactor — has also raised concerns about the facility’s safety.
Late last week, an Israeli court heard arguments that the site had leaked radioactive waste on more than one occasion and that information about those leaks had been hidden from some of the facility’s employees. One of those employees, Faridi Taweel, is suing the facility after learning he had cancer, which he suspects was the result of exposure to leaked radioactive material at the site.
The exposure of the numerous leaks at the Dimona facility is greatly concerning, especially in light of the revelation just a few years ago that the Dimona reactor is believed, according to a group of Israeli scientists, to have an estimated 1,537 defects. Israel has reportedly refused to consider replacing or fixing the aging nuclear core.
The fact that the site has leaked and is rife with defects should be a major issue for Israelis, as the facility is just 30 miles south of Israel’s capital Tel Aviv. Yet it is the city of Dimona itself that is in the greatest danger, as it is located just eight miles from the highly defective reactor.
But Dimona is largely populated by Jews from Northern Africa. This minority, referred to as “Black Hebrews” in Israel, is routinely discriminated against by Israel’s government, a recent example of which was the revelation of a covert Israeli government program of forcibly sterilizing African Jewish immigrants.
In addition to its large population of African Jews, Dimona and the surrounding Negev Desert are home to several Palestinian Bedouin villages, villages that are frequently labeled as “illegal” and demolished by Israel’s government. The fact that there is no political will or effort to clean up the site or prevent future leaks, coupled with the fact that the most at-risk populations are minorities frequently discriminated against by Israel’s government, reveals yet another troubling and overlooked aspect of Israel’s secretive nuclear program.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
ZEMBLA investigates the collateral damage of the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) battle for nature conservation. ZEMBLA discovers that WWF promotes birth control programs that include contraception and even sterilization for men and women.
The fight against poachers is getting grimmer all the time. ZEMBLA travels to India, where local inhabitants are wrongly accused of poaching, are being tortured and sometimes even killed. On camera, guards from Kaziranga National Park state that they are allowed to shoot unwanted people.
From 1966 to 1996, some 193 nuclear tests were carried out by France around the islands of French Polynesia, including Bora Bora and Tahiti.
In a historic first, France has officially acknowledged that French Polynesians were forced into accepting almost 200 nuclear tests conducted over a 30-year period, as the French parliament issued the admission in a bill reforming the status of the collectivity of 118 islands in the South Pacific, reports The Telegraph.
The parliamentary bill acknowledges that the islands were “called upon”, or “strong-armed” into accepting the tests for the purposes of “building (its) nuclear deterrent and national defence”.
The legislation also says the French state will “ensure the maintenance and surveillance of the sites concerned” and “support the economic and structural reconversion of French Polynesia following the cessation of nuclear tests”.
According to MPs this move should make it easier for the local population to request compensation for illnesses caused by radioactive fallout, such as cancer and others.
Patrice Bouveret of the Observatoire des armements (Armaments Observatory), an independent organisation tasked with gauging the impacts of nuclear testing carried out by France in Polynesia since 1984, hailed the bill:
“It recognises the fact that local people’s health could have been affected and thus the French state’s responsibility in compensating them for such damage.
“Until now, the entire French discourse was that the tests were ‘clean’ — that was the actual word used — and that they had taken all due precautions for staff and locals.”
The expert also deplored the lengthy 23 years it had taken France to officially recognise its responsibility.
Scepticism was also voiced by Polynesian MP Moetai Brotherson, who claimed there were no specific steps towards financial reparation cited in the bill.
Polynesian MP Maina Sage insisted the reform was “recognition of clear acts of compensation” and “the fact that this should translate into support on a sanitary, ecological and economic level.”
Last year, French Polynesian President Edouard Fritch confessed the population of the islands had been lied to for years by its leaders regarding the dangers of nuclear testing.
“I’m not surprised that I’ve been called a liar for 30 years. We lied to this population that the tests were clean. We lied,” filmed footage showed Fritch as saying.
France carried out 193 nuclear tests from 1966 to 1996 around the paradise islands, including Bora Bora and Tahiti, famously captured on canvass by Paul Gauguin.
Bowing to decades of pressure, in 2010 the French government offered millions of euros in compensation for the government’s 201 nuclear tests in the South Pacific and Algeria.
While this resulted in 1,500 cases of compensation for military and other personnel at the Polynesian nuclear sites, a clause suggesting the tests were of “negligible risk” for the rest of the population made it impossible for them to apply, despite disproportionate rates of thyroid cancer and leukemia among Polynesia’s 280,000 residents.
To date, only a few dozen have received compensation, despite compelling figures, such as cancer rates standing at 30 per cent above average.
Three years earlier, declassified defence ministry papers exposed the tests as more toxic than previously acknowledged amid reports that the whole of French Polynesia had been hit by levels of plutonium due to the testing.
Tahiti, the reports claimed, was exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation.
The US has failed to prevent the Runit Dome temporary nuclear waste storage site from leaking into the ocean, leaving the inhabitants of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands and cleanup workers with an array of health problems.
“There was never any lining put in that dome,” Ernest Davis, an Enewetak Atoll cleanup veteran, told RT, noting that the US government apparently had never planned to replace the temporary dome with a permanent containment structure that would be properly sealed from radiation leaks. “Nobody said anything about going back in and removing it or making it permanent. We were told that it was permanent.”
“I don’t think it was ever [the US government’s] intention to further clean up the island. It was too costly,” Brooke Takala Abraham, who lives in the Marshall Islands, told RT.
Also on rt.com Cold War ‘nuclear coffin’ leaking radioactive waste from US tests into Pacific Ocean – UN chief
The United States detonated 43 atomic bombs around the Marshall Islands in the 1940s and 50s. The highly contaminated debris left over from the weapons tests was then dumped into a 100-meter-wide bomb crater on Enewetak Atoll. US servicemen sealed it up with a concrete cap to create a structure called the Runit Dome. The work, however, was allegedly carried out without any proper safety consideration for the cleanup crew.
“Those people who were involved in the cleanup… did not receive proper protection from radioactive elements,” Abraham said.
Furthermore, the government has never even bothered to study the long-term health issues of those exposed to radiation waste.
“There was no radiation study with us. Certain ones would leave the island and they will have them fill a big jug with urine and I guess they were supposed to test it,” recalled Davis, who left just before the project was completed. “Some of the dosimeters that were given to us, the rad-badges – they just did not work. So we can’t say that any radiation study was done whatsoever.”
After a three-year decontamination process which began in 1977, the US government declared the southern and western islands in the atoll safe enough, allowing residents of Enewetak to return and the cleanup crew to go home. However, people who now live on the island say the dome began leaking almost immediately after the engineers left.
“The waste has always been leaking from the get-go. The cleanup of the entire atoll was not complete” before the native people were allowed to return, Abraham told RT.
“That is just a portion of the radiation that exists on the atoll. A large amount was dumped straight into the ocean. It was dumped into a lagoon. And it was dumped in open pits on other islands.”
Over the years, Enewetak’s population began feeling the deleterious effects of the radiation. “The radiation affects us on a daily basis. We have many illnesses in our community from cancers to weakened immune systems, and other noncommunicable diseases as well,” Abraham explained. “And they’re still struggling as well with the transgenerational effects of radiation.”
“Most of us have come up with some type of illness, whether it’s cancer… many of us have peripheral neuropathy on our feet without being diabetic,” Davis recalled, noting that many of the roughly 8,000 people involved in the decontamination process have since died. “They told us we would not be exposed to any more radiation than having maybe two or three x-rays a year, which was a total lie.”
On Monday in Paris, four UN bodies released a summary of an 1,800-page report about threats to biodiversity. It declares that “fundamental structural change is called for…for the broader public good.”
On Tuesday in Geneva, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released another report. Its press release tells us that sand needs to be planned, regulated, and managed by the UN. Yes, really. Sand.
Apparently, those who currently trade in sand and gravel sometimes do so in an unsustainable manner. “[R]ules, practices and ethics” apparently differ worldwide. Imagine that. Moreover, “irresponsible and illegal extraction” needs to be curbed. In other words: the UN has now set its sights on this industry.
While this report says it merely wants to spark a conversation, that it doesn’t intend to be “prescriptive,” Msuya’s remarks belie that. She advocates “improved governance of global sand resources,” talks about implementing global standards, and looks forward to the creation of brand new “institutions that sustainably and equitably manage extraction.” What’s another level of red tape, after all?
UN bureaucrats see only one conceivable solution to every problem: meddling from above. This woman wants to “cut consumption of sand and gravel” by “reducing over-building and over-design.” In her view, keeping her nose out of other people’s business isn’t an option. She doesn’t trust poor nations to become more environmentally responsible on their own schedule. It doesn’t occur to her that people struggling to drag themselves out of poverty don’t need UN busybodies second-guessing the trade-offs they’re compelled to make.
How did this report come about? Last October, UNEP invited 19 ‘experts’ to gather in Geneva. Three were UN employees. Activist organizations were also well-represented: the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Awaaz Foundation, SandStories.org, and the World Economic Forum.
Also in attendance were a lobbyist, a sustainable energy expert, a researcher from the Responsible Mining Foundation, a journalist who’s written a book about sand, and a representative of Switzerland’s federal environment ministry. As far as I can tell, only two people had any connection to entities that do things with sand in the real world.
Based on the conversation that took place at this one-day event, a report got written which was then reviewed by 11 other people – including, once again, representatives of the WWF and the IUCN.
You see what’s going on here. The wholly activist WWF writes a report which then gets cited repeatedly by the UN. Like money-laundering, the questionable nature of the original source becomes obscured. The public will now get told that illegal sand mining threatens fish, birds, turtles and dolphins. After all, the UN says so.
The public is unlikely to be advised that the UN’s only source for this claim is an activist document. Because activists never indulge in hyperbole. They never ever exaggerate.
Oh, wait. Didn’t Greenpeace argue in court recently that it is “well-known for advancing…opinions, not hard news”? When accused of using phony photos and phony videos, didn’t Greenpeace tell the court that ordinary people “clearly understand” its accusations aren’t factual but are merely an “interpretation”?
The bottom line is that there’s an octopus of aligned/interconnected interests out there. UN bureaucrats. Activists. Academics. These people work hand in glove, pushing certain ideas into the public square in an orchestrated manner.
It’s no accident that the UN press release and the WWF’s press release yesterday had the same headline – Rising demand for sand calls for resource governance – and shared nine paragraphs of identical content.
Here we ago again. For some time, I’ve warned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a template, that the United Nations is up to the same tricks elsewhere.
Jonathan Watts, the UK Guardian‘s global environment editor, has already told us everything we need to know about this ‘IPCC for Nature.’
Under the headline Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn, he insists this report was written by “The world’s leading scientists.” Funny, that’s how compliant, gullible journalists described IPCC personnel. For years and years. Until I began to notice that some of those involved were graduate students in their 20s.
Watts further tells us that:
The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear… [bold added by me]
In other words, as happens at the IPCC, scientists are recruited to write a report. Afterward, they draft a summary known as the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). Then politicians and bureaucrats representing national governments attend a plenary meeting where the summary gets examined line-by-line and rewritten.
Fairy tales tell of turning straw into gold. The UN takes scientific summaries and transforms them into politically acceptable straw. The resulting document, which will be solemnly released today, is what a roomful of political operatives have all agreed to say out loud.
But it gets worse. Over the next few weeks, the text being summarized – the underlying, ostensibly scientific document – will also get changed.
That’s not how things normally work, of course. Summaries are supposed to be accurate reflections of longer documents. At the UN, they represent an opportunity to alter those documents, to make them fall into line.
No need to take my word for it. This is standard IPCC operating procedure, and is openly admitted in a 56-page guide to how the IPBES operates.
see page 39 of this guide to the IPBES’ internal workings
Imagine, for a moment, executives at a television station examining the script of an investigative news show line-by-line. Imagine them re-writing that text at the behest of major advertisers, and in accordance with various political sensitivities. Would the end result be trustworthy?
Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, now leads the IPBES. His online biography, over at the University of East Anglia, tell us he is a ‘UN Champion of the World for Science and Innovation.’
When the IPBES was established in 2010, we were informed point blank that its purpose was “to spearhead the battle against the destruction of the natural world.”
In other words, there’s all sorts of deception here. This is no sober scientific body, which examines multiple perspectives, and considers alternative hypotheses. The job of the IPBES is to muster only one kind of evidence, the kind that promotes UN environmental treaties.
That’s how the United Nations works, folks. Machinations in the shadows. Camouflaging its political aspirations by dressing them up in 1,800 pages of scientific clothing.
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.)
… GretaThunberg has stated repeatedly that her strike will continue “until Sweden is aligned with the Paris Agreement.” Therefore, by her own statements, this is the singular, overall purpose and goal of the strike. The foundation of the Paris Agreement is the expansion of nuclear, the financialization of nature, further privatization at an unprecedented scale, “large scale CO2 reduction” (carbon capture storage), a desperate attempt to revitalize economic growth, and more market “solutions” that will further perpetuate our multiple crises. Therefore, the Thunberg campaign is in part to create a demand upon governments across the globe to align with the Paris agreement. (A demand to obtain what the ruling classes have already decided to unleash on us, our planet, and all life.) As adherence to the Paris Accords is a running theme in the mainstream NGO movement, the marketing campaign is helped along by 350.org, Avaaz, WWF, Greenpeace, in tandem with the UN (“Changing Together”), the World Bank (“Stepping Up“)[2], and more recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF). … Read full article
“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/
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)
“It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
“The mountainsides were cut in terraces, many of them but a few yards wide, bearing olive, fig, and apricot trees, and numerous extensive vineyards… The whole face of the country, since leaving Jerusalem, bore evidence of a high state of cultivation… immense fields of ripened grain, the thick clustering stems bending to the breeze, their golden surfaces chequered with the shadows of passing clouds. Behind us were the rugged mountains, before us the lovely plain dotted with villages, and covered with a whole population gathering the harvest… Long before sunrise, the next day, the industrious fellahin [Palestinians] were at work in the fields.” W.F. Lynch, Commander US Navy Jordan River and Dead Sea expedition, March, 1848.
The Land
Sixty-five years ago, arable soil on the Siren Plateau was 100 cm thick. During the first fifty-years of Jewish domination the soil depth dropped by a quarter. That is a breathtaking loss in a place where it can take 2,000 years to add 10 centimeters of soil to the landscape. It is a man-made loss brought about by modern technology.
Starting well before World War I, Zionists and their antecedents had determined to replace ‘primitive’ Palestinian farming methods with the latest agricultural developments on the largest possible scale. Thanks to generous financial support from world Jewry, imports of well-boring machinery, tractors irrigation pipes, fertilizers, trucks, lumber, etc. poured into Jewish communities in Palestine. “Indeed, in the period between 1929 and 1940 Palestine’s important industrial machinery was valued at $29,500,000 [$540,090,000 in today’s dollars]. A still larger sum for transport vehicles, and agricultural machinery.” (Lowdermilk: Palestine Land of Promise).
A few, short decades of Israeli technology, intensive agriculture, and environmental contempt has left the soil so damaged that Israel’s Soil Conservation and Drainage Department of the Agricultural Ministry estimates that nearly half of country’s farm lands are at risk. Erosion from wind and water, exacerbated by intensive cultivation, salt buildup, and heavy farm equipment compacting the soil are making ‘primitive’ Palestinian methods look pretty good.
When Golda Meir first immigrated to Palestine in 1921 she had to have been met with agriculture built up and tended as a labor and love of the land by Palestinians she would later claim didn’t exist. Otherwise, what had happened to the lush terraced agriculture and fertile plains Captain Lynch described in 1848 Palestine? According to The Times special correspondent Phillip Graves writing in 1923, they were still there. He describes driving from the “… sandy steppe of Egypt … into the rich soil of Philistia and the Sharon Plain (a swath roughly from lower Gaza to Tel Aviv), a belt of flat prosperous tilth.” Graves also notes, “From Lydda, you have time to take car and drive to the outskirts of Jaffa to see the great orange groves, rich deep green leafage jeweled with golden fruit against the bright tawny dunes of the coast.” (the Jaffa groves were planted by Arabs in the 1800’s before Zionism was founded.)
Amnon Neumann, who took part in ethnic cleansing on the Jewish side, testified that in 1951 Arabs who had been pushed off their lands into Gaza would sneak back to their villages at night. “There was a special kind of agriculture in the dunes north of Gaza where the grape vines needed to be tended. So they would go there at night, they did not know they would never return. And we waited for them there… And we would shoot and kill them.”
Even today, it’s a long running complaint of Palestinian farmers in the occupied territories, that Jewish colonists not only take over their land but will, under protection of the Israeli army, drive front end loaders onto Palestinian farms, scrape up the top soil, load it onto dump trucks, and drive it back to Jewish farms. If Palestinian soil were really sub-par, as Israelis claim, why would they do that? And how did the concept of making the desert bloom take root in a place that was already populated and cultivated?
The Jewish National Fund
The Jewish National Fund (JNF), formed in 1901 in Switzerland to buy Palestinian lands for European Zionism, has always been a key player in shifting Palestine’s baseline to the Israel we know today. This organization is intimately connected with the present regime and they are among the largest landowners in Israel, holding a reported 13 percent of the land. Diaspora Jews make donations large and small to Israel from all over the world through the JNF. Many Jews recall a distinctive box kept in their parent’s kitchens where the family would accrue money to donate. The Jewish National Fund seems to mean well, as far as Jewish interests go, but for Arab interests, not so. As far as the land’s interest, JNF is an example of the old saw, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Draining the Huleh Valley Lake and marsh in the 1950’s was a JNF project. Re-flooding a segment of Huleh Valley after the crops tanked, pesticides contaminated Lake Kinneret, the lake species were annihilated, and the peat started to burn was also a JNF project. Funding equipment to drill Jewish wells all over Palestine was JNF. When springs that had been around for millennia dried up as a consequence—that was also JNF. A series of reservoirs in the Negev was JNF. When the intercepted ground water no longer flowed to Gaza’s Coastal Aquifer—JNF. Planting 240 million trees—JNF. When thousands of acres of the trees burn like gasoline because so many of them are pines planted too close together—JNF. Expanding forests—JNF. Kicking Arab families off their land to do so—JNF.
Salt and suspended solids buildup in the soil
“Water transport still contributes an estimated 170,000 metric tons of chlorides to the soils and ground water in the center of the country.” Alon Tal. Seeking sustainability: Israel’s evolving water management strategy.” – Science Magazine. 08.25.2006
“The fact that rain isn’t falling is big trouble. The expenses are crazy. We’re irrigating in November and December, which we haven’t done before. Irrigation costs a lot of money. Secondly, we’re irrigating with treated waste water, and the rain purifies the land from salt. When there’s no rain, surplus salt accumulates in the land, and that damages the trees… In addition to all that, we don’t know what will happen to the ground water reservoirs we need for next year. We’re hanging by a thread with the reservoirs, and we don’t know what’s ahead. The water quotas for both waste water and potable water have been used up, and we’re paying a heavy toll in fines.” – Johnny Aganmia, Kibbutz Matzura farmer, Western Galilee, on why the kibbutz was ripping out its fruit orchards.
Lake Kinneret becoming more salty is not just a problem for drinking water. Salty water pumped to the dry south via Israel’s National Water Carrier for irrigation is bad for the land. Kinneret water was saltier in 2017 than it has been in fifty years, including 2006 when Alon Tal wrote that 170,000 metric tons of chlorides were being dumped on the soil in the middle of the country.
Farmers can only use the soil as a coffee filter for so long. Over time salts and suspended solids deposited by irrigation water build up in the soil to the point where crops can no longer grow there. This includes deposits from wastewater Israel uses to water crops. Whatever is in that water making it unfit for human consumption is leaching out into the ground and also being taken up into the plants. In his superb book, Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner describes in a compact and digestible way how salt builds up in soil and proposes that the great, ancient desert civilizations may have collapsed due to salt buildup rather than drought.
Israeli Forestry: Foreign pines replace ancient olive trees that had provided shade and a living for centuries
You sometimes see claims that the Jewish state is one of the few countries, or even the only country, to have more trees now than they did a hundred years ago. That’s not the case. The U.S. has more trees than it had a hundred years ago. Most of Europe has more trees—Ireland, for example, was under 1% forested when it achieved independence in 1929. Today Ireland is about 11% forested. France, Sweden, Finland, the UK and others all have more trees than they did a hundred years ago. We don’t have many of the ancient ‘big pumpkins’ that used to make up old growth forests, and we have severe problems with invasive insect species killing trees, but for the time being, and such as it is, we’ve got more forest than we did a hundred years ago.
Even if the Israeli forest statement were correct, Palestine a hundred years ago was a fairly low bar, having been relentlessly logged by Europeans and Ottomans for centuries. Compared with a country like Bhutan, with its 86% tree cover, Palestine in the early 1900’s wasn’t Longfellow’s ‘forest primeval.’ What they did have going for them in trees was orchards; the Jaffa orange groves and olives—especially olives.
a. olives are among the world’s oldest living trees. There are olive trees in the Mediterranean estimated to be over 3,000 years old and they still produce fruit.
b. Olive trees are well adapted to the region and can resist drought, disease and fire.
c. Olive trees are to Palestinians what buffalo were to Native Americans on the Great Plains. The olive harvest has long been the most important agricultural and social event in the Palestinian year. Tens of thousands of Palestinian households depended, and still depend, on olives for their livelihoods. Some families have tended the same trees for centuries.
d. Between 1967 and 2012 the Jewish state destroyed over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees. That would be the same as ripping out all the trees in New York’s City’s Central Park—33 times.
e. Jewish religious law prohibits destroying fruit bearing trees and yet Jews destroy thousands of Palestinian olive trees per year to this day.
f. If Israel had left them alone, the ghost trees of Palestinian olive orchards would be the largest forest in Israel.
g. Even the 1,800 acres of ghost olive trees Israel bulldozed and killed along the‘buffer zone’ Jewish troops have razed on the Gaza side of the segregation fence would make one of the larger forests in Israel.
American soil proponent and Zionist propagandist Walter C. Lowdermilk, who we will meet again in section 11, gave no credit to Arab agriculture for anything and so he had little to say about Palestinian olives. Still, a plank in his platform to rehabilitate soils was reforestation. Trees, he pointed out, hold soil in place which minimizes erosion. The Jewish National Fund adopted reforestation with a vengeance. It became a symbolic gesture for American Jews to plant a tree in Israel as a manifestation of their support for the Jewish State. Most of what they were planting a few decades ago was Aleppo pine. Those seemed like a good choice for an arid region because they’re drought resistant, grow quickly, store substantial carbon dioxide, and can replenish themselves quickly from cones that germinate after a fire.
Diaspora Jews visiting Israel would pay ten bucks, be handed a sapling and a shovel, and go out to plant on a hillside near Jerusalem. The Diaspora was shocked in 2000 when an Israeli newspaper published an expose’ about JNF workers ripping the saplings out as soon as the tourists were gone so the site would be clear before the next crowd showed up to climb the hill and plant trees in the Homeland. JNF responded to the scandal by threatening to sue the paper for libel. They also claimed it was an isolated incident, promised an investigation, and said that 60 percent of the trees planted there died anyhow.
The bad news with Aleppo pines is: they’re not great shade trees, their wood’s not worth much, and they’re resinous so they burn faster than a natural forest with species diversity. Trees in many areas were planted too close together. When such a forest goes months without rain, with strong easterly winds blowing, all it takes is a careless campfire or cigarette for the whole place to ignite explosively as sparks fly tree to tree on the wind.
Fire Season
A terrible fire roared through Mt. Carmel’s Forest in 2010 killing 44 people and burning thousands of acres. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government was entirely unprepared and had to plead for help from other countries, including the Turks who Israel had been loudly accusing of helping terrorists in the weeks before.
Israel’s approach to fire season is different than Americans and Canadians in the Western regions. For us, when haze tints the sun blood red a hundred miles away from the fires; communities, states, and provinces call out their firefighting equipment and mutual aid agreements bring in hot-shot crews from all over. Local people plan their evacuation routes. In the interior you see signs like, ‘Extreme Fire Hazard! Don’t Even Fart in the Forest!’
When it’s fire season in Israel, government officials, still inadequate to the challenge, go on TV and blame the Arabs. 2015, 2016, and 2017 saw big fires with 2016 burning almost as much acreage as the 2010 Carmel fires. More than 60,000 people had to be evacuated from Haifa.
Netanyahu’s government, with no evidence, blamed the fires on ‘arson terrorism’, and promised perpetrators would be caught and punished. They arrested about two dozen Palestinians, interrogated them for weeks, then quietly let the last of them go without prosecuting.
In 2018, as Gaza Palestinians participated in civil disobedience during the “Great March of Return” at the Gaza border, groups of young people actually did start hundreds of fires in southern Israel by lighting wicks doused with combustibles on the Gaza side of the fence and sending them into Israeli territory on kites and balloons. The American media ran the ‘kite terror’ story in an endless loop.
At first most of the incendiaries did nothing or started small fires that were easily put out. As months went by without rain and the heat went over 100 degrees F, Israeli snipers escalated shooting and killing Palestinians. (by fall over 200 Palestinians were dead/20,000 injured by shooting, tear gas etc.), the burning kite campaign escalated, too. By October Israel claimed thousands of acres had been burned or partially burned and was threatening to invade Gaza again.
Some things Americans might keep in mind about Israeli claims of extent of fire damage from Gaza kites. 1) During the heat wave in July, 2018 there were forest and brush fires burning all over Israel that had nothing to do with Gaza or Arabs. Those fires were virtually ignored in the American press. 2) Israeli government officials have a history of falsely accusing Palestinians of starting fires and inflating the extent of them. 3) Israel pays Jewish citizens compensation for damage by terrorist attacks. After the 2016 fires, Israeli politicians accusing Arabs of ‘pyro-terrorism’ sputtered into silence when hundreds of Israelis began lining up to be compensated by Israel’s national tax authority. 4) Every year Jewish colonists and the Israeli military burn Palestinian crops, usually just before harvest when things are driest. Arabs are not compensated for Jewish terrorism. 5) forest is a relative term. Israeli ‘forests’ around Gaza are mostly planted and have large tracts with few or no trees on them. So acreage estimates are open to scrutiny. 6) The Israeli government appears incapable of facing its role in the country’s failure-proven agricultural and forestry practices during fire season.
Burning tires and changing albedo
Albedo (litearlly whiteness) is something glaciologists talk about where I live. It’s a scale of light reflectability between zero and one. White reflects heat away. Black absorbs heat. Ground temperatures over 150 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded in burned-over forest floors on a sunny day. Charcoal then, has an albedo of almost zero. Fresh snow’s albedo is almost one. When atmospheric dust lands on a glacier it lowers the albedo. You might not notice it walking on big ice in summer but a faint layer of dust and pollen is absorbing more heat and making the glacier melt faster. When we get multiple low snow years, dust layers collect on top of each other until the surface ice can be almost black in places.
I imagine the Middle East as a pure white ice field. Then I imagine what it would look like after all the smoke from all the fires and burning tires-fires great and small-starting in 1991 when Saddam Hussein torched 700 oil wells in Kuwait. Imagine the albedo change in 2006 when Israel bombed Lebanon’s Jiyeh Power Plant’s oil tanks darkening a hundred miles of coast with an oil slick and darkening hundreds of square miles of land as soot from tens of thousands of tons of burned oil settled out. Imagine the settling soot from those gigantic, deliberate 2016 oil field fires in northern Iraq torched by IS, then add all the smoke from oil tankers, refineries, cars, trucks and industry. Then, add hundreds of square miles of dark roads and parking lots, the blackened earth from Israel’s annual fires in their planted pine forests, and then watch tire fires from protests in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen… Protesters burning tires to screen themselves from government drones and snipers that are targeting them has become a norm. I get why they do it but the soot plumes they create are changing the land’s albedo, increasing heat, increasing evaporation until farming without intensive irrigation and other expensive infrastructure becomes impossible.
As Middle East land gets darker, the Middle East gets hotter.
Smashed soil
In America’s Mojave Desert you can still see tank tracks General Patton’s army left when they practiced there in 1942. Driving vehicles, even small ones, in a desert leaves lasting evidence. It’s easy to see how Israeli troops blasting across the countryside in sixty-ton Merkava IV tanks and even heavier Made in America, armored D-9 Caterpillar bulldozers, ruin crops. Not so obvious is how crushing the earth compromises soil respiration, its ability to absorb and retain water and how compacted soil makes it hard or impossible for young roots to penetrate.
On the face of things it would seem the people could plow up the land and carry on but, in speaking with soils biologists, it appears that heavy vehicles can compress soil lying meters below the surface, in some conditions creating hardpan that will never be the same.
In 2008 Israel damaged or destroyed thousands of acres of Palestinian cropland in Gaza during the, ‘Cast Lead’ invasion. Humanitarian news and analysis NGO IRIN reported UN figures that the Israelis destroyed 929 hectares (2,299 acres) of orchards and 500 hectares (1,235 acres) of vegetables. Initial monetary loss was estimated at $268 million but loss of food security and land is harder to measure.
Six years later, in 2014 Israel damaged or destroyed 85 percent of Gaza’s agricultural lands during the ‘Protective Edge’ invasion. The United Nations FAO estimated 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of cropland “as well as much of its agricultural infrastructure, including greenhouses, irrigation systems, animal farms, fodder stocks and fishing boats.” Much of that was done intentionally by grinding track vehicles back and forth, back and forth, back and forth over Palestinian farmland. What’s less well-known, and flat stupid, is that on that same military enterprise the Israeli army caused $350 million in damage to agriculture on the Israeli side. They wrecked 10,000 hectares of Israeli farm land, killed Israeli livestock, and generally made a mess of the place just driving around to hit civilian Gaza villages from different directions. According to the USDA, “In addition to direct damage to [Israeli] crops caused by heavy Israeli Defense Force vehicles, there has also been indirect long-lasting damage caused by these vehicles to the soil structure. Experts believe this damage will take approximately 10 years to remediate, the cost of which could total between $800 to $14,000 per hectare.”
Pesticides and herbicides
Israel has the highest pesticide use of any member country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2012 the Central Bureau of Statistics issued a report, “Survey of Pesticides in Agriculture 2008-2010” that revealed Israeli farmers averaged a staggering 3.5 tons of pesticides per 1,000 cultivated dunhams, (247 acres). That’s more that twice as much as the next highest, Japan, which uses 1.55 tons. Sweden used the least pesticides of all countries at just 40 kg for the same size area. As a result of Israel’s dousing poisons on its crops, some Israeli water sources carry as many as twenty different pesticides. Israel still permits pesticides posing serious human health risks that are banned in the U.S. and Europe. As erosion blocks creeks and drainages it spreads agricultural pesticides all over the landscape.
In addition to deliberately contaminating its own crops and people, Israel routinely sprays massive amounts of herbicides on the Gaza side of the border to destroy Palestinian crops and ruin land for agriculture. An estimated 3,500 acres of Gaza cropland and 2,000 acres of pasture and irrigation ponds have been compromised since 2014. Red Cross analysis shows contamination from Israeli spraying is so extensive the stuff has leached into the soil more than 1.3 miles inside the Gaza segregation barrier. Haaretz journalist Amira Haas’ July 2018 article, “Farm Warfare: How Israel uses chemicals to kill crops in Gaza” reports that among the poisons are glysophate, oxyflourfen, and diuron. Spraying kills bees/secondary pollinators and “exceptional damage was caused to shepherds, many of whom are women for whom shepherding is their way to add to the family income.”
Haas notes that Israel doesn’t like to talk about this tactic and that an Israeli court judge upon being allowed to see the evidence in secret ruled that, “information about areas being sprayed should not be revealed.” One Israeli spokesman claimed Israel coordinates spraying with officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza. Red Cross officials denied that. Furthermore an ICRC spokesperson said, “We have clearly and repeatedly expressed our concerns to the Israeli authorities about the economical and environmental damage the spraying is causing, and the potential consequences for public health.”
In 2015 Israel messed up and sprayed a kibbutz near Gaza killing 12 acres of Jewish wheat and contaminating the land so badly that the kibbutz couldn’t plant the next crop rotation. The government paid the kibbutz $16,000 for damages. Israel doesn’t pay the Palestinians for damages. Instead, the Zionists turn more and more rich farmland—land Peter Graves called ‘prosperous tilth’ in the 1920’s—into a parched and blasted Mideast equivalent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Dead Marshes.
Cloud seeding
When it comes to diving headlong into big, expensive water projects we Americans are like black-out drunks at last call. We forget all the environmentally ruinous, dried-up, silted-up, pointless pork-barrel projects clogging this country’s rivers from sea to shining sea, and turn to some new technology the way a forlorn alcoholic looks around the bar for love.
Cloud seeding was one of those forlorn hopes. Cloud seeding is the practice of shooting some chemical compound, usually silver iodine, into clouds to make water crystals form around the compound and precipitate out as rain or snow. Israelis were big into that starting in the 1970’s. They were especially diligent about seeding clouds over Lake Kinneret so the rain (and chemicals) would fall into the water supply. The claim was that rain increased by an average 13 percent adding 60 million cubic meters of water to Israel’s water budget. Concerns that seeding clouds in one area would deprive other areas of rain seemed unfounded. Somehow rain in areas adjacent to cloud seeding areas also got more rain. With that kind of success other countries were soon inviting Mekorot workers to help them start cloud seeding programs, too. Then, in 2010, three Israeli scientists published a paper revealing that the initial studies in the 70’s had been done in years of higher rain due to offshore weather patterns in the eastern Mediterranean so it rained more whether clouds were seeded or not.
Drip Irrigation
“If rain occurs at long intervals, crops suffer unless they are planted in soil deep enough to store moisture.” Walter C. Lowdermilk: U.S. water consultant for Zionism, Palestine Land of Promise. 1944
“What we have found is that as a consequence of putting water on the crops more precisely—actual water consumption can go up.” Frank Ward, New Mexico State University, Department of Agriculture.
There’s a claim that the concept of precise irrigation with little water loss came about when an Israeli farmer noticed one day that a tree grew larger than its neighbors after receiving more water through a leak in the hose. If you think about it, a desert tree growing larger if it gets more water is hardly breaking news.
With drip irrigation water goes directly to the plants giving higher yields per acre. To non-farmers, or corporate farmers looking for short-term gain, it might seem like love at first sight but before getting carried away, its worth considering the advice of some of our own agriculture experts who are skeptical that drip irrigation is an agricultural savior. It may turn out that drip irrigation is a land based equivalent to desalination, or cloud seeding, where aspects that don’t fit the narrative are being swept under the rug until the consequences become so pronounced that denial is no longer an option. Some recognitions:
Traditional irrigation allows water to sink into the ground where, as Zionist consultant Lowdermilk pointed out, in good soil, the land traditionally could carry crops to harvest with no irrigation at all. The notion that water going into the ground is ‘wasted’ is an outdated one. Water going into the ground replenishes springs and aquifers. What farmer A calls wasted water can be vital to farmers B and C and to the land in ways people don’t understand, such as percolating through underground corridors to water centuries old trees on a desert oasis and thereby sustaining the last remnants of an ecosystem.
In addition, if you drip irrigate with waste water the soil still has to be flushed with fresh, clean water, otherwise whatever scuzz in the waste water that makes it undrinkable clogs the little drip holes in your hoses and/or will build up in the soil until it kills your plants. On a small level, homesteaders Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess who tried it say drip didn’t work for them because it’s expensive, is meant for rows rather than raised beds, the hoses have to be rotated with crops if you’re moving to another field, it uses a lot of plastic, and the whole thing has to be set up just right and maintained continuously or it can actually use more water than traditional irrigation.
Plants transpire (exhale moisture) less when the plant has some environmental stress from lower than optimal water. Without that stress the plant grows at its peak rate, the farmer has a higher yield, makes more money and is happy but uses more water to do it. And finally, there is the matter of scale. Everyone recognizes drip irrigation works in some venues but you could lose agriculture in some counties of American farm states.
Recognition 8: Desecrated Farm Land: Sources
05.03.2015 Israel’s iron lady unfiltered: 17 Golda Meir quotes on her 117th birthday Haaretz by Jud Yadid.
03.01.1850 Narrative of the United States expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, by W.F. Lynch, USN, Commander of the Expedition, 386 pp. Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia.
1922 Palestine, land of three faiths by Peter Graves George H. Doran Company, New York.
Soil
04.25. 2016 Nearly half of Israel’s farmland threatened by over processing, climate changeHaaretz by Zafrif Rinat.
12.27.2011 Testimony of Amnon Neumann YouTube 13:52 min (43,526 views as of October, 2018) An old man confesses atrocities he and other Jewish soldiers committed taking over Palestinian farms during the Nakba. Hebrew with English sub-titles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4OXOom_vk
08.25.2006 Seeking sustainability: Israel’s evolving water management strategy. Science Magazine. by Alon Tal.
10.11.2012 West Bank Settlers stealing tons of soil from West Bank Palestinian land HaaretzI by Chaim Levinson.
1.20.2016 Israeli farmers uprooting fruit trees as rains fail. Globes: Israel’s business arena. by Ilanit Hayut.
Trees
7.04.2000 Israeli tree planting group aghast after scandal unearthed Los Angeles Times by Tracy Wilkinson.
October 2013 800,000 Olive trees uprooted, 33 Central Parks—Visualizing Palestine visualizingpalestine.org
October 2012 Olive Harvest Factsheet United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs occupied Palestinian territory.
Size of the olive ghost tree forest is my estimate based upon the area it would take to plant those more than 800,000 dead olive trees the Israeli’s killed, spaced according to dry land farming of olive trees described in ‘Plants Per Acre’ by the Olive Oil Source website. (that 800 K figure is more than 5 years old. I haven’t found a more recent estimate but the number of dead trees is a lot higher now).
olives: from Israelis stealing Palestinian olive harvests, to killing trees, to uprooting whole groves there are too many stories to count. It happens all the time and tt’s been going on for decades. Look ’em up. Here are a few.
08.05.2018 Settlers destroy 2000+ Palestinian-owned trees and vines backed by Israeli authorities B’Tselem The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
9.25.18 Settlers uproot fruiting olive trees near Hebron International Middle East Media Center.
10.04.18 In video – settlers steal olive harvest in Nablus. Maan News
10.15.18 Settlers uproot olive trees in Bethlehem. Middle East Monitor
10.18.2015 Hundreds of trees destroyed in West Bank Palestinian villages, Israeli rights group reports Haaretz by Amira Haas. Move olive trees destroyed by Israeli terrorists.
05.18.2015 Fires sweep through Israel, West Bank amid heat wave Ma’an News Agency
07.24.2015 Massive forest fire rages in Jerusalem area Haartez by Nir Hasson.
1.25.2016 Haifa residents cleared to go back home after fires; 600-700 damaged Times of Israel, TOI staff. Over 60,000 residents evacuated from Haifa.
11.26.2016 Israeli leader calls for demolition of homes belonging to Palestinian ‘arsonists’ Maan News. Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, with nothing else to offer.
11.30.2016 Forest fires in Israel will only get worse in coming years, experts warn Haaretz by Nir Hasson.
12.05.2016 Why planting more trees in Israel is a bad idea right now Jewish Telegraph Service by Jay Shofet.
12.07.2016 Were the Israeli fires arson terror claims premature and exaggerated? The Jerusalem Post via JTA. “Instead of calming the [Israeli] population, which is the task of leaders, Israeli politicians did the reverse and claimed an ‘arson intifada.’ That’s just not wise, to put it very mildly.” Yoram Schweitzer, Israeli terrorism consultant.
01.22.2017 Despite Netanyahu’s claim, still no evidence of ‘Terrorist Arson’ in Israeli fires. Haaretz by Nir Hasson.
01.25.2017 What happened to claims of ‘Arson Terror Attacks’? YNet News by Roi Yanovsky. One of the fires this year was caused by an Israeli occupation trooper shooting a flare bomb at Arabs.
10.28.2017 Hundreds of acres burned in Jerusalem forest fire Jerusalem Post by Uri Shaham. 500 acres up in flames over a weekend.
06.15.2018 Hundreds of fires broke out in Israel due to burning kites from Gaza Haaretz by Jonathan Lis.
06.05.2018 Minister calls for targeted killing of kite bombers, Hamas leaders Times of Israel by TOI staff. Gilad Erdan again. This time calling for assassination of Palestinian kids flying burning kites towards Israel.
07.20.2018 Lieberman says Israel planning assault on Gaza bigger than 2014 invasion in which 2100 Palestinians killed International Middle East Media. Israel’s Defense Minister’s response to burning kites.
07.25.2018 Israel hit by record-breaking heatwave;fires rage throughout the country Times of Israel by TOI staff. “Several large fires broke out in the afternoon at the Horshim Forest in Central Israel, and the Ahihud Forest in the North, as well as at the Churchill Forest near Nazareth Illit.” Article notes that these were not started by incendiary kites or balloons from the Gaza protests.
06.26.2018 Israeli settlers burn 300 olive trees in Nablus Maan News
03.21.2017 Small farmers struggle worldwide but Palestinian farmers have it really rough Washington Post by Anne-Marie O’Conner.
05.14.2015 Burning Gold: Israel’s destruction of Jordan Valley harvests The New Arab by Alice Gray. from the article this vignette about the Israeli army setting Palestinian crops afire: “They came at six in the morning and told us to get out,” he told al-Araby al-Jadeed. “We couldn’t return to our home until six in the evening, and we couldn’t send our children to school. We spent the whole day on the mountain by al-Hadidiya, in the sun and the wind. When we returned, our neighbour’s land had been burned.”
The sounds of explosions and the rattle of gunfire can be heard throughout the area, while helicopters whir overhead and heavy lorries rattle by, delivering tanks to Israeli military bases. The Israeli army spokesperson says the families were evacuated for their own safety – and that the army has enlisted a special fire extinguishing squad to participate in the drill. Yet the hillsides around Herbaiet al-Homra are scorched black where both crops and scrub have burned.
“It’s not just the crops that are important,” says Rashed Sawaftah. “If the scrublands burn, the farmers will have nowhere to graze their animals.”
11.30.2016 Israel fire: police deny claims that fires were caused by ‘Terrorism’ Haaretz by Yaniv Kubovich and Gili Cohen. Describes government backing off on arson claims as Israelis line up for compensation of ‘terrrorism’.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center has a nice description of albedo in their ‘all about sea ice’ section. 1999 Fire effects on below ground sustainability: a review and synthesis Forest Ecology and Management vol 122 51-71. by Daniel Neary et al.
Smashed Soil
10.15.2009 Farmers struggle with damaged agricultural land IRIN Report on impacts to agriculture from 2008/9 Gaza invasion.
08.14.2014 Gaza: Damage to agriculture will have long-lasting effects United Naitons FAO
11.20.2014 Exporter Guide USDA Foreign Agricultural Service—GAIN Report. Prepared by Gilad Shachar, Approved by Orestes Vasquez, Sr. Agricultural Attaché’. “In addition to direct damage to crops caused by heavy Israeli Defense Force vehicles, there has also been indirect long-lasting damage caused by these vehicles to the soil structure…”etc https://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Exporter%20Guide_Tel%20Aviv_Israel_11-20-2014.pdf
Pesticides
11.01.2012 ‘Israel uses more pesticides than any OECD country’ The Jerusalem Post by Sharon Udasin 01.24.17 Israeli forces spray weed killers near Gaza, burn Palestinian crops Maan News. 03.19.2018 Israel is intensifying its war on Gazafarmers The New Arab by Ali Adam. Israeli crop dusters spraying poisons on Gaza crops. 07.09.2018 Farm Warfare: how Israel uses chemicals to kill crops in Gaza Haaretz by Amira Haas. cloud seeding 2009 Cloud seeding seen as blessed solution for Israel’s dry winter Aruz Sheva by Abraham Zuroff. 09.2010 Reassessment of rain enhancement experiments and operations in Israel including synoptic considerations Atmospheric Research vol 97 Issue 4, pg 513-525. by Zev Levin, Noam Halfon, Pinhas Alpert.
Drip Irrigation
(date?) disadvantages of drip irrigation,The Walden Effect Blog by Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton.
10.17.2018 ‘Efficient’ Irrigation tool may deplete more water Worldwatch Institute by Ben Block 09.23.2008 Water Conservation in Irrigation can increase water use Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Frank A. Ward and Manuel Pulido-Velazquez
Media outlets gave minimal attention to recent news that the U.S. Naval station in Virginia Beach spilled an estimated 94,000 gallons of jet fuel into a nearby waterway, less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. While the incident was by no means as catastrophic as some other pipeline spills, it underscores an important yet little-known fact – that the U.S. Department of Defense is both the nation’s and the world’s, largest polluter.
Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S. Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others.
In 2014, the former head of the Pentagon’s environmental program told Newsweek that her office has to contend with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres just in the U.S. alone.
U.S. military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world, as perchlorate and other components of jet and rocket fuel contaminate sources of drinking water, aquifers, and soil. Hundreds of military bases can be found on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of Superfund sites, which qualify for clean-up grants from the government.
Almost 900 of the nearly 1,200 Superfund sites in the U.S. are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs, not counting the military bases themselves.
“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” John D. Dingell, a retired Michigan congressman and war veteran, told Newsweek in 2014. Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina is one such base. Lejeune’s contamination became widespread and even deadly after its groundwater was polluted with a sizable amount of carcinogens from 1953 to 1987.
However, it was not until this February that the government allowed those exposed to chemicals at Lejeune to make official compensation claims. Numerous bases abroad have also contaminated local drinking water supplies, most famously the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa.
In addition, the U.S., which has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, is also responsible for the massive amount of radiation that continues to contaminate many islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, where the U.S. dropped more than sixty nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, are a particularly notable example. Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and nearby Guam continue to experience an exceedingly high rate of cancer.
The American Southwest was also the site of numerous nuclear weapons tests that contaminated large swaths of land. Navajo Indian reservations have been polluted by long-abandoned uranium mines where nuclear material was obtained by U.S. military contractors.
One of the most recent testaments to the U.S. military’s horrendous environmental record is Iraq. U.S. military action there has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country’s agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food. The U.S.’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq during the Gulf War also caused a massive environmental burden for Iraqis. In addition, the U.S. military’s policy of using open-air burn pits to dispose of waste from the 2003 invasion has caused a surge in cancer among U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians alike.
While the U.S. military’s past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the U.S. military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts. Last November, the U.S. Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental “stressors,” including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the U.S. Pacific Northwest over the course of this year.
The plan, laid out in the Navy’s Northwest Training and Testing Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), fails to mention that these “stressors” are described by the EPA as known hazards, many of which are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.
The 20,000 tons of “stressors” mentioned in the EIS do not account for the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of “metals with potential toxicity” that the Navy plans to release annually, from now on, into inland waters along the Puget Sound in Washington state.
In response to concerns about these plans, a Navy spokeswoman said that heavy metals and even depleted uranium are no more dangerous than any other metal, a statement that represents a clear rejection of scientific fact. It seems that the very U.S. military operations meant to “keep Americans safe” come at a higher cost than most people realize – a cost that will be felt for generations to come both within the United States and abroad.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
“… and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.” Kings 18.
Kishon: If Elijah was around today he might just tell the Israelites to kill the 450 Ba’al prophets by tossing them into the Kishon. Visualize a waterway where whatever swims or flies into it dies. The Kishon got so bad that not even bacteriacould survive. Who knew that was even possible? But, Dr. Yishayahu Bar-Or, a Deputy Director with Israel Environmental Protection Ministry, says that the river reached a point where it was, “absolutely dead–even bacteria were not able to live there because it was more acidic than coca cola.”
Seventy Israeli navy divers (or their widows) who contracted cancers, filed suit against multiple polluters who they maintain dumped the carcinogens into the Kishon and Haifa Bay where the men were forced to dive in training. The divers said the water burned their skin, smelled and tasted terrible, and sometimes a sadistic officer would make a sailor drink some of the water as a punishment. After thirteen years in court an Israeli judge rejected the lawsuits. Likewise, a group of fifty Israeli fishermen filed a lawsuit against the Haifa Chemicals and Fertilizers company, for illnesses they say were brought on by exposure to carcinogens released by the companies. Again, Israeli courts threw out the lawsuit.
Eventually Israel came to an agreement that it would help 92 former military divers who were compromised by training in the Kishon. A Canadian firm, EnGlobe, won the contract to dredge contaminated bottom muck. It’s no longer the most contaminated stream in Israel. Vegetation is returning to the banks and some vertebrates can be found in the water now. But it still flows past Israel’s noxious military industrial complex at Haifa which has serial toxic spills and parts of the stream bottom are still contaminated with heavy metals, petrochemicals from Israeli’s largest oil refinery, and effluent from military installations.
Yarkon: In 1997, at the opening ceremonies of the Maccabiah Games, a substandard foot bridge over the Yarkon stream in Tel Aviv collapsed sending sixty-seven Australian athletes into the water. One died from trauma, three of them died and thirty-five others became critically ill from being dunked in the river’s pollution. Israel had been diverting the springs feeding the Yarkon for agriculture which reduced flow to a point where it was impossible for the stream to flush out sewage, farm runoff, and chemical pollutants. Resulting anoxic bottom sludge, stirred up when the Australians fell in, was fatal. Instead of going after the problem aggressively, Israel increased diversions and by 2000, a whopping 99 percent of the Yarkon was being diverted.
It’s not a recent phenomenon. As early as 1956 Israel tapped into the Rosh haAyin springs to send water south for irrigation. Alon Tal wrote, “It took little time for Israelis to grow used to the new stench-filled and stagnant reality. It was just another annoyance of daily life.”
Good people are doing what they can to clean up Israel’s waterways but, as in our own country, they’re working against a combined government/corporate/military triumvirate that talks about a healthy environment but in practice is apathetic, hostile, shortsighted, and flat stupid. In 2016 thousands of endangered Yarkon fish were killed by runoff from a light rail construction company contaminating several kilometers of the river because it was convenient, or cheaper, or they were reckless. In 2017 there was the massive, deliberate sewage treatment plant spill mentioned in section 6 above.
Yarmouk: Yarmouk water is better quality than the Kishon or Yarkon but is still compromised by farm runoff, heavy metals, petroleum and sewage. As noted above, in 2009 the Jordanians confirmed that Israel was polluting the Yarmouk with oil and sewage. Israel agreed to compensate Jordan with water from Lake Kinneret.
Nahal Kidron: In 2015 Israeli news service Haaretz’s excellent environmental journalist Zafrir Rinat called the Kidron the most polluted river in today’s Israel and West Bank. This is the sewage stream from East Jerusalem where Israelis impound some of the liquid, treat it, then use the water for Israeli farm produce. This illustrates a problematic aspect of Israel’s water technology. Israel is so strapped for water that when they pull sewage from streams and clean it up, they tend to use it on crops which means the depleted stream the water came from has even less water. Plus the concentrated waste often ends up back in the stream.
Other streams 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.
Estuaries As rivers flow into the sea suspended sediments they carry settle out creating nutrient rich alluvial fans. Estuaries that form around river mouths efficiently trap and hold nutrients which is why estuaries are among the richest ecosystems on earth. They provide spawning and rearing habitat for marine life and a healthy estuary indicates a healthy watershed flowing into it.
When polluted rivers settle out into an estuary, suspended toxins, heavy metals, agricultural fertilizer, and whatever else doesn’t belong in water, also settles out. Haaretz reports that the Israeli Health Ministry recommends a ban on fishing at all ports and marinas and on some beaches and estuaries. The February, 2018 article also notes that a quarter of the fish sampled in Haifa Bay tested over the accepted limit for mercury.
Pumping it down: Withering nature reserves Savvy countries play the environmental card to tourists by designating “Nature Reserves.” Israel is the lone country on earth expanding its territory by designating indigenous private lands as nature reserves, seizing them, then giving them to colonists. Whether the land belonged to indigenous people or occupiers, Israeli nature reserves are being devastated by toxic spills and by Israeli wells drawing down the water table to the point that springs and streams have no water left. What can flee does so. What can’t dies.
Some examples of falling water tables on springs An Israeli Water Authority survey of northern spring flows between 1970 and 2011 found that output volume had dropped in 67 of 87 of the springs studied over that fifty years.
Nahal Betzet reserve is a small reserve in northern Israel about a mile from the Lebanese border. Hillel Glassman, a spokesperson for the Nature and Parks Authority, said, “There’s no more wildlife in the stream’s water at all…Plane trees hundreds of years old are dying amid a water shortage that began in 2000.’ The plane trees (sycamores are a type of plane tree) might all die because Nahal Betzet stream is fed by a spring which is dried up from Israelis pumping down the ground water.
Nahal Naaman is a spring fed stream where a Jewish National Fund website promoting the place claims springs produce 5,000 cubic meters of water per hour. The 2011 spring survey found the spring output “in steep decline” due to “increased pumping for irrigation and drinking water.”
Ein Gedi Nature Reserve is beside a Dead Sea kibbutz named for Ein Gedi spring. The kibbutz has built a 153 room hotel/guest house complex (gardens, lawns, spa with six pools, restaurant, freshwater pool, air conditioned rooms, cable TV, etc.). Bad reviews on Trip Advisor aside, you’ve got to wonder which small oasis has been parched for such a water extravagant operation to exist there, especially since they’ve built a water bottling factory to sell mineral water from the spring while the country is in extreme drought. This company has an estimated 17 % of the bottled water market in Israel. Some years ago the kibbutz made a deal with the reserve that they would take spring water and supply the reserve with water from another stream but that is falling through. The kibbutz still takes the water, and the reserve is compromised.
07.31.2012 The Yarkon disaster 17 years later. Aytzim, Ecological Judaism by Sarah Friedman. 07.08.2000 Lawsuit reveals depth of pollution in Israeli river Los Angeles Times by Tracy Wilkinson. Israeli divers suing the government and military for debilitating illnesses contracted by diving in the Kishon. 09.11.2012 Kishon River cleanup to begin 12 years after navy divers contracted cancer HaaretzI by Revital Hoval. 11.04.2013 Court rejects suit of 50 Kishon river Fishermen who blame their illnesses on Pollution Haaretz by Eli Ashkenazi. 02.09.2018 Despite some improvement, Israel’s estuaries remain seriously polluted Haaetz by Zafrir Rinat. 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.
07.16.2016 Thousands of endangered Yarkon river fish killed by construction. Ynet news. 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. 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] 05.19.2017 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.” 12.09.2014 Two-headed mutant salamander found in Haifa Israel 21c by Viva Sarah Press. Scientists not sure if it’s mutated because of radiation, pollution, or in-breeding from a depleted population. 06.05.2012 Sewer runs through river at heart of Israel’s most important Nature reserve. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. 09.22.2008 ‘Polluted West Bank streams pose threat to a third of Israel’s drinking water’ Jerusalem Post by Ehud Zion Waldoks. 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. 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 Israelmade 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. 08.28.2017 Report: a million Israelis take Ritalin-t type drugs Hamodia by Dror Halavy. 904.453 people give Ritalin prescriptions (or equivalents) in 2016. With half of those written in the Tel Aviv and Sharon areas. 07.16.2016 Thousands of endangered Yarkon river fish killed by construction. Ynet news. 05.19.2017 Israel launches criminal investigation into water treatment execs over sewage spill Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat 11.04.2013 Court rejects suit of 50 Kishon river Fishermen who blame their illnesses on Pollution Haaretz by Eli Ashkenazi. 02.28.2011 Sewage without borders Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat. 07.17.2013 Springs in Northern Israel Producing less water, some all dried up Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future
Lies are Unbekoming | April 1, 2026
On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics… intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”
The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.
That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.
I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 