Baseline of a Desecrated Land
How Israel’s water and agricultural technologies don’t even work for Israel
Israeli delusions of grandeur aside, Zionists there can’t feed or water themselves. Never could. Never will.
Worse yet, Israel today is a Superfund site contaminated from the River the the Sea (and far out into the sea) with toxic chemicals, sewage, and saline. Most of the arable land is eroded, exhausted, or paved over. Millions of tons of concrete walls stop migrations both human and animal. Nearly all of the best trees, large wild animal species, and fresh water sources were destroyed in a few decades under Zionist control.
Baseline in today’s Israel and occupied Palestine is a dying landscape run by people with no accountability who can’t look consequences in the face. Even reporting on state-caused contamination can bring 15 years in prison. Incredibly, these same politicians earn diplomacy points by offering to share (sell) Israeli environmental technology with the world.
At the end of the day, Israel’s value to America is as a cautionary tale. This is the fate of a military/industrial regime that desecrates Mother Earth.
Root cause of conflict in Palestine comes down to resources, not religion:
Israel is 1600 square miles smaller than Vermont and more than half of that is desert. Israel hangs on by massive imports of food and by extension, saving water through not having to grow their own food. This explains food and water inequities between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis have the highest water consumption in the region. Palestinians have the lowest. It’s also why ‘the Homeland of the Jewish People’ turned away Ukrainian Jews trying to flee the war with Russia. They don’t have food and water for them. [eventually, under pressure, they did allow some in but they extracted a promise from the Ukrainians that they’d leave forthwith and charged a 10,000 shekel security].
I’m dusting off this 2018 series during the Gaza genocide because of all the nonsense in the Western media about a one-state, or two-state solution. Zionist Israel is doomed not from Arabs, Anti-Semites, BDS, Iranian saffron pickers, Hamas, Nazis, Palestinians, college girls with blue hair and nose rings, the UN, or Amalek. Israel’s doomed because it has destroyed its environment so completely the place has no future.
Desecration of the Jewish State has grown worse by the year since 2018.
Executive Summary
Food
Israel depends on ever-increasing bulk food imports from countries thousands of miles away. To grow a ton of grain takes over a thousand tons of fresh water. Israel imports more than 5 million tons of grains per year, plus 75,000 tons of red meat, plus other food. When Zionists say their country needs about 2.5 billion cubic meters of water per year, they’re not counting billions of tons of water embedded in their imported food. Include that and water consumption quintuples. Most of Israel’s food comes from just a handful of countries. The day even one of them joins the boycott movement in support of Palestinian rights, Israel will be thrown into food panic.
Water Tides Salt
Israel’s desalination capacity is only about 600 million cubic meters of fresh water per year when everything’s working right. That’s not much water. An American river with an annual flow of 600 million cubic meters would be considered a small-to-medium waterway that is free and good for the land. Desalination, on the other hand, comes at enormous energy, infrastructure, and environmental expense.
Every year Jewish state desalination plants dump about 23.4 million tons of salt back in the sea. Since desalination plants began of Israel, many near shore invertebrate species, including reef building snails that protect to coast, have diminished or disappeared.
Desalination plants make Israel more vulnerable not less because Israel’s off shore currents run south to north. Gaza is south of Israel.
As Zionists deliberately, repeatedly destroy Gaza’s sewage infrastructure and won’t allow them to repair it, every day 11,000 tons of Gaza sewage runs up stream into Israeli waters where it crusts beaches and is sucked into desalination plants. The southernmost desalination plant has shut down numerous times because of Gaza sewage. Other closures have been necessary in the north because Israelis have a strange, recurrent habit of deliberately dumping their own sewage further up the coast.
Petroleum
Trying to be a world oil player, Israel built massive oil terminals at either side of the country with large bore pipelines in between. Iraqi oil, for example, is transported by huge (million plus barrel) tankers down the Mediterranean from Turkey to Ashkelon, Israel, then across the desert via pipeline to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba where it’s reloaded onto tankers and sent down the Gulf, then through the Red Sea to Asia.
You can see on a map that Ashkelon is at the very southern end of Israel’s west coast. The tank farm–with a 1.9 million cubic meter storage capacity–about 6 super tankers worth–is south of the city just six miles from the Gaza border. Look at the satellite view: super tankers unloading to a tank farm that weighs more than sky scrapers, built right on the beach on top of a dropping aquifer in a country sitting along an earthquake fault zone. An Exxon Valdez type oil spill from a tanker crash, or tank collapse due to human error, natural disaster, or missile strikes would be carried north and shut down every Israeli desalination plant in the Mediterranean.
In addition, off shore there’s the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits Israel has seized from Gaza. Israel has built near shore production platforms and miles of under water pipelines. One big burp could stop Israel’s desalination miracle on a dime.
Taking the region’s water supply
Israel’s water budget depends much more on taking Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian water than it does on desalination. About a third of the Jewish state’s water comes from the occupied West Bank. They’re also drilling 1,500 foot deep wells in the Golan Heights which, under international law, belongs to Syria. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times trying to secure that country’s Litani river which the Zionists tried to have granted to them as far back as the British Mandate in 1917.
Israel has taken over Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), the Jordan River valley, punched wells into Palestinian aquifers all over the West Bank, punched more wells along the Gaza border on the Israeli side, to intercept ground water that used to flow west replenishing the Coastal Aquifer under Gaza. Israel does not permit West Bank Palestinians to upgrade their water wells or dig new ones. Instead the Israeli national water company Mekorot sells Palestinians water, pumped from Palestinian lands, to Palestinians who are among the most water strapped people in the region.
All players, Palestinians and Israelis, are over-drafting all the aquifers with Israel extracting the most per capita. Over-drafting causes salt intrusions into the remaining ground water.
Lake Kinneret is Israel’s only large fresh water body. This lake may be gone as a fresh water source within two decades. Israeli officials blame the Kinneret’s decline on global climate change but the real culprit, according to Israeli scientists, is bad management both to the north and south of the lake. Zionists pumped down so far for so long it is contaminated by salt intrusions from saline pockets under the lake bed. Israel’s National Water Carrier pumps Kinneret water around the country for irrigation. As the water gets saltier the land becomes a sort of coffee filter, accreting salt until crops can’t grow there. Israel diverted the worst of the salt intrusions around the lake and into the lower Jordan River, sending the problem downstream. The lower Jordan is a regular on lists of the world’s most polluted rivers. Over half of the Jordan river valley’s biodiversity has disappeared since Zionism took over.
West Bank/Israeli streams and groundwater are over exploited and drying up so completely that centuries old trees in the nature reserves are dying of thirst.
Toxic Spills
Israel is the Flint, Michigan of the Middle East. With little to no environmental oversight, and criminal penalties of up to 15 years in prison for documenting toxic spills in and around the Ashkelon/Eilat oil pipelines or the Dimona nuclear weapons facility. The Jewish state has a history of spectacular toxic spills and dumped military/industrial carcinogens. Their military/industrial complex contaminated 600 million cubic meters of ground water under Tel Aviv with the rocket propellant perchorate and other poisons, necessitating putting the city on the national water supply instead of ground water until the ground water is pumped out and cleaned up—which is to say, forever. There are hundreds of contaminated wells, hundreds of millions of tons of contaminated ground water, millions of tons of oil stored right on the beach, massive unregulated hazardous waste sites built above aquifers, In July, 2017 a 200 foot tall earthen dam collapsed releasing a ‘toxic tsunami’ of acidic effluent laced with heavy metals, and who knows what else. The stuff demolished a nature reserve in the desert near Dimona nuclear reactor. Dimona, the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, built for making weapons, sits 18 miles from the Syria-African fault line—with 1,537 documented defects in its aluminum core.
Population
Israel is locked in an unwinnable competition with the faster growing Arab population. Even as the Jewish state claims a slight majority of Jews vs. Arabs, over a million Israelis have emigrated to the U.S. and most aren’t expected to move back. In addition, the Arabs are more fertile and a majority of Palestinian women are just entering their peak child bearing years as Israeli women are aging out. Median age of females in Israel is 30.6 years-old. Female median age in the Occupied West Bank is 21.3 years. Female median age in Gaza is 17.5 years. Here’s the thing, if you could snap your fingers and make everybody either Jewish or Palestinian, there still wouldn’t be enough food, water, or room for everybody.
Land
American and British observers in the 1800’s and early 1900’s wrote favorably of Palestinian land stewardship citing narrow terraced agriculture, olive production, fruit groves and successful grain harvests where whole villages turned out across wide plains. Today agricultural land under Zionism has been degraded to the point where half of it is at risk. Erosion is rampant. Pesticide use is highest of any country in the OECD with a staggering 3.5 tons of pesticides per 1,000 cultivated dunhams, (247 acres) reported. The next highest, Japan, uses less than half that and Sweden uses the least pesticides of all OECD countries at just 40 kg for the same size area.
In addition to poisoning its own lands, Israel routinely sprays massive amounts of defoliants 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.
Running 60 ton tanks and armored bulldozers over Palestinian (and sometimes Israeli) lands compacts and alters soil structure deep into the earth rendering the land unproductive and unable to retain water as it did traditionally.
Forestry
Before Zionism, ancient olive groves were the pride of Palestine and the people’s source of income, nutrition, and culture. Among the world’s oldest trees, olives resist drought and fire. Attempting to break Palestinian resistance, Zionists have destroyed so many olive trees that, had they been left standing, they would make up the largest forest in Israel.
Through the Jewish National Fund, Israel embarked on a massive forest planting effort. Trying to re-create Europe, they planted forests of mostly Aleppo pines. They planted the trees too close together. The trees don’t resist fire as well as olives and burn like gasoline in summer.
Israel has changed the albedo of Palestine. That is, they’ve made the region darker through thousands of explosions, burning infrastructure, burning oil tanks in countries around it, burning forests. Then their enemies respond in kind. More explosions, forest fires, and retaliations. Consider the 2018 Great March of Return protests when the Palestinians created massive smoke screens so Jewish snipers couldn’t shoot them effectively. All that soot doesn’t go away. It settles on the land. Burned, blackened landscapes absorbs heat as asphalt parking lots do. Ground temperatures as high as 150 degrees F. result in increased heat stress, erosion, and damage to soil structure.
American water engineers and money built Israel’s water carrier
Starting long before Israel was founded American water engineers, hired by the Zionists, produced plans for Israel’s National Water Carrier and developed schemes for diverting water from all over the region to the Jewish state. These Americans were a who’s who of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bureau of Reclamation. Back then these two agencies had made America the most prolific dam and aqueduct building country in the world. Pro-Zionist advocacy by such engineers gave Zionist plans legitimacy in Washington, D.C.
Back in those days the British administered Palestine and British water engineers called for more equitable water distribution between Arabs and Jews, and for keeping Jordan River water inside the Jordan Valley.
For decades in the mid-1900’s these American and British water engineers countered each other with plan after plan. Zionists constantly stalled British efforts at the same time they went out and laid pipe for their own American backed water plans regardless of international law. In October, 1953 when Israel kept digging a water diversion canal the United Nations had declared illegal, [and one week after Ariel Sharon led Zionists massacred the village of Quibya] President Eisenhower announced publicly that that the United States would cut off funds to Israel. Israel stopped digging at once.
Today we know the TVA and Bureau built obsessively in America at the expense of indigenous peoples, farmers, communities, and the environment. They had no problem stealing land while exaggerating a dam’s benefit and minimizing the damage and costs. Israelis learned a lot from them. Now those American engineers are mostly dead and by departing, have left the present and future generations to figure out how to mitigate and pay for: silted-up dams, salinity, destroyed fish runs and water shortages downstream.
Sustainable health
Israeli technology is to environment what anabolic steroids are to health. Both promote an epitome of strength and beauty, while on the inside testicles are shrinking and multiple organs are shutting down.
Israel today is the pee-wee hyper-military/industrial muscle man of the Middle East. Even as it launches attacks against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and postures at Iran, its aquifers are shrinking and life sustaining organs: ground water, streams, the Jordan River, Lake Kinneret, agricultural lands, soil, beaches, wetlands and nature reserves are all contaminated and shutting down. Every last dollar the US Congress can squeeze out of the long-suffering American taxpayer won’t change that trajectory.
Israel is a cautionary tale. They’ve done it to themselves. Our billions would be better spent on healing land, water, and each other as we cultivate a society our founders dreamed of and pass along to future generations a genuinely healthy culture where there are no others and no unsacred places.
https://www.dickcallahan.net/category/israel-and-palestine/baseline-of-a-desecrated-land/
