Only a few years ago, Israelis were concerned about the question of
how they could continue to grow their first world economy with a growing
population in a country where there simply wasn’t enough water. What
followed was a major investment in technology and enactment of sensible
policies about water use that led to this startling fact. As the Times
states, “More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households,
agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.” Though water is
expensive, the prospect that the country will run out is gone. In a
region that is in desperate need of Israel’s expertise, you would think
this development would lead to better relations with the Palestinians
and the Arab world. But what is missing from the Times’ story
is the fact that there is little sign of any interest in cooperation on
the part of Israel’s antagonists. As much as they ought to take
advantage of the Jewish state’s advances, such concerns are always
secondary to their main priority: fighting Israel.
The story of how Israel revolutionized its production and use of
water is another proud chapter in the country’s history. In the past
couple of decades as attacks on Israel’s legitimacy have multiplied, we
haven’t heard much about Jews making the desert bloom. That old line
about the rebirth of this old land under the care of a returned people
has been treated as an outdated cliché by biased journalists who
preferred story lines that reinforced the libels about Israel being an
apartheid state. That theme was also part of the narrative about water.
To the extent that water has been mentioned much in the news, it
generally served as another point of attack as Palestinian claims that
Israel was “stealing” their water in the West Bank was often reported as
fact rather than a political talking point. As even the Times notes in
its feature, Israel continues to supply the Palestinians with more water
than it is required to do under the Oslo Accords. Israel shares the
mountain aquifer that runs through the West Bank with the Palestinians.
But the Palestinians position is that they are entitled to all of it,
not just their share.
The underlying problem of that discussion has
always been the assumption that all of the territory is “Palestinian
land’ to which Israel has no legitimate claim. But even if you think
Israel ought to cede much of that territory if the Palestinians are ever
willing to make peace, the problem with this argument is that the Arabs
still don’t recognize Israeli rights to any water except the sea into
which they have been trying to push the Jews ever since they began
returning to their ancient homeland.
It might make sense for Israelis and Arabs to cooperate about water.
But if water remains an issue that exacerbates the conflict rather than
solving it, it’s not because the Israelis aren’t willing to share their
expertise or even some of the water they are desalinizing or treating
for further use. It’s because water, like economic development, has
always been beside the point to Palestinians and other Arabs and
Muslims.
As California thirsts, Israel beats its water crisis - permanently
When I was in the US two weeks ago, I was told that in California, it's forbidden to flush your toilet unless someone has had a bowel movement in it. Meanwhile, here in Israel, we have resolved a water crisis that threatened us with a perpetual drought.
A
hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption,
penalizing families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many
of Mr. Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their
seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid
climate. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Mr. Zvieli,
56, who has tended people’s yards for about 25 years.
Across
the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two
minutes. Washing cars with hoses was outlawed and those few wealthy
enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water
it only at night.
“We
were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a
tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri
Schor, the spokesman and public education director of the government’s
Water Authority.
But that was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel
is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers.
“The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to
planting flowers.
As California and other western areas of the United States grapple with
an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national
effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater
has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even
during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli
households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.
...
The
turnaround came with a seven-year drought, one of the most severe to
hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008
to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources — the Sea of Galilee
in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — were severely
depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of the
water quality.
Measures
to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen
by the Water Authority, a powerful interministerial agency established
in 2007.
Desalination
emerged as one focus of the government’s efforts, with four major
plants going into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be
ready to operate within months.
Together, they will produce a total of
more than 130 billion gallons of potable water a year, with a goal of
200 billion gallons by 2020.
Israel
has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing
wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic
wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of
the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel,
recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles
just 1 percent, according to Water Authority data.
The 'Palestinians' have decided that they would rather live in filth than use a sewage treatment plant that is paid for and owned by Israel in 'east' Jerusalem. Or at least the 'Palestinian Authority' has so decided. Under pressure from the 'Palestinians' and their own government, the Dutch engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV has withdrawn from the project.
“Royal HaskoningDHV has today advised the client it has decided to
terminate the contract for the Kidron waste water treatment plant
project,” the firm announced on its Web site. “The project is in the
early stages of the preliminary design phase.”
Royal HaskoningDHV
carries out its work with the highest regard for integrity and in
compliance with international laws and regulations,” the company said.
“In the course of the project, and after due consultation with various
stakeholders, the company came to understand that future involvement in
the project could be in violation of international law.”
“This has led to the decision of Royal HaskoningDHV to terminate its involvement in the project.”
The
move was applauded by the Palestinian Authority. Hanan Ashrawi, an
executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
hailed the Dutch firm’s decision. According to Ashrawi, the Dutch
government had pressured the company to withdraw from the project.
I hope they get Typhoid fever. Of course, if they did, we would probably help them to control it.
The 'Palestinians' are polluting the ground waters in Judea and Samaria with untreated sewage because their own sewage treatment is inadequate or non-existent, and they refuse to allow their towns to be hooked up to the same sewage lines as the Jewish towns in the area.
Almost 90 percent of sewage from Palestinian towns in the West Bank
flows into the environment untreated, contaminating the groundwater and
162 kilometers of streams, according to a report prepared by the Israel
Parks and Nature Authority. A lack of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation
has impeded solutions to this problem.
The
report, prepared for the Environmental Protection Ministry and the
Civil Administration in the West Bank, is based on water samples taken
from various locales in 2012. It found that some 50 million cubic meters
of sewage flow into the environment from Palestinian towns every year.
Only 5 million cubic meters go to treatment plants, some of which are
substandard. This affects Israel as well as the West Bank, since the
polluted streams flow into Israel.
The
city of Nablus exemplifies the problem. It has 126,000 residents, as
well as many olive presses that produce extremely toxic wastes. It has
no treatment plant (though one is now being built), so most of the
waste goes into the Nablus Stream. From there, about a third seeps into
the groundwater of the mountain aquifer, a major source of drinking
water for both Palestinians and Israelis. The rest flows into the
Alexander Stream in Israel.
Tul
Karm’s waste treatment plant broke down last week, as it does several
times a year, sending untreated sewage into the Te’enim Stream, and from
there to Israel.
“This is an area in which we invested great effort
cleaning up and repairing damage caused during the winter,” said Nissim
Almon, head of the Sharon Drainage Authority. “Now all that work is
gone.”
But
the worst problem, according to the report, is Hebron, which has nearly
170,000 inhabitants. Its waste includes toxic runoff from industries
including stonecutting and leatherworking. More than 80 of the city’s
100 stone-cutting plants send their waste into pirate drainage pools,
from which it flows into the Hebron Stream and then to Israel. Waste
from the Hebron area alone has contaminated around 43 kilometers of
streams.
I guess if you cut off your nose to spite your face, you can't smell the stench anyway.
But if the 'Palestinians' cannot cooperate on this, what makes anyone think they will cooperate on any kind of security arrangement that could make a 'two-state solution' workable?
A thesis titled ‘The politicization of the Oslo water agreement’
written by Lauro Burkart a Swiss graduate of the Institute of
International and Development studies in Geneva gives a more accurate
and impartial picture of the topic of the scarcity of water in the
Palestinian Authority.
Burkart interviewed many key players in the water conflict,
Palestinians and Israelis as well as representatives of NGOs and the
donor countries. He also examined many original documents such as the
minutes of the meetings of the joint Israeli Palestinian Water Committee
(JWC).
...
Here are some of the most important conclusions in Burkart’s thesis.
The goals of the Oslo 2 water agreement have been reached regarding
the quantities of water provided to the Palestinian population (178
mcm/year in 2006). The Oslo water agreement estimated that the needs
would eventually be 200 mcm a year. The Joint Water Committee
functioned well in the first years following signature of the agreement,
but since 2008 cooperation has come to a halt
The facts disseminated by the Palestinians, international
organizations and donors about the root causes of the water scarcity in
the West Bank are incorrect.
Burkart writes: ‘It is not the Israeli occupation policy but the
Palestinian political resistance against joint management and
cooperation that is responsible for the relatively slow development of
the Palestinian water sector and the deteriorating human rights
situation in the Palestinian Territories’ and ‘There is convincing
evidence of mismanagement within the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA).’
He cites the pro-Palestinian NGO AMAN who concluded that there is ‘no
clear legal separation between the political and executive levels
within the Palestinian water institutions. To date there is no real
functioning water law. Furthermore the National Water Council is not
meeting and not functioning well’.
Although the PWA embarked on an institutional reform process in
reaction to international critics such as the World Bank this did not
solve the issue of mismanagement within the institution. The head of the
Palestinian Hydrology Group called the reform a ‘fundraising
mechanism’. The PWA also did not manage to gain control over many
municipalities (where Israel has no control) due to the autocratic and
undemocratic manner in which they are managed. These power holders did
not want to lose control of the water systems since it was one of the
main services provided by the municipalities. As a result the water
supply is not centralized and illegal drilling is rampant.
The fact that the PA pays for most of the water bills of the
Palestinian population gives no incentive for saving and leads to an
unreasonable use of water in the domestic sphere as well as in the
agricultural sector.
Caesaria-based Emefcy Ltd., a wastewater treatment company, was named Early Stage Company of the Year and selected to the Global Cleantech 100 list for the second year in a row at the Global Cleantech 100 Summit and Gala held in Washington, DC, on Monday and Tuesday.
Founded in 2008, Emefcy develops different technologies that treat wastewater, with the goal of being as economically efficient and energy-efficient as possible, the company said. Two of its major technologies, the Electrogenic Bio- Reactor and the Spiral Aerobic Bio-Reactor, allow the wastewater treatment mechanism to simultaneously generate renewable energy that can be funneled into national grids.
“Being given the Early Stage Company of the Year Award is a vote of confidence in Emefcy’s vision of changing the economics of wastewater treatment,” said its co-founder and CEO, Eytan Levy, in the statement.
“We are also excited by the recognition Emefcy has gained among corporate community and regulators to be named as one of the Global Cleantech 100.”
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
