You Can't Drink Mud and Salt: Hydropolitics and the Invasion of Lebanon

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You Can't Drink Mud and Salt: Hydropolitics and the Invasion of Lebanon
Reported by Marie Therese - August 7, 2006 - 69 comments

ب در کوزه و ما تشنه لبان میگردیم.
"There is water in the jug, and we're going around thirsty." - Persian proverb

אל תסתכל בקנקן, אלא במה שבתוכו
"Don't look at the jar, but at what's inside it." - Hebrew proverb

"The one who tells the stories rules the world." - Hopi proverb

NEWS HOUNDS EDITORIAL

Three weeks ago I woke up.

It was a painful experience because I had always thought of myself as an educated person, well aware of what was going on politically, even in the Middle East.

I was very, very wrong.

"There is water in the jug, and we're going around thirsty."

On July 17th, I googled the words "Israel Lebanon Water".

When the results came back, my world shifted 180 degrees. There, on my computer screen, appeared a mountain of data consisting of geological surveys, erudite articles, aquifer tables and power point presentations. Numerous other searches verifed the inescapable facts. No matter whether the studies were done by European consortiums, Palestinian experts, American think tanks or Israeli university professors, the resulting scientific conclusions were the same.

Forget all the overblown tabloid rhetoric about "terrorists", "right to defend borders", "holy war against the infidels", "oil" and "the axis of evil".

Doesn't mean a thing.

That's just pure verbal drama created by the various factions in the Middle East to avoid talking about the 5,000 pound gorilla in the room.

Water.

The Middle East is in an ecological death spiral. Period.

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http://www.newshounds.us/2006/08/07/you_cant_drink_mud_and_salt_hydropolitics_and_the_invasion_of_lebanon.php

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1. LAT: Old Feud Over Lebanese River Takes New Turn

WARFARE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Old Feud Over Lebanese River Takes New Turn

Israel's airstrikes on canals renew enduring suspicions that it covets water from the Litani. The Jewish state denies having any such designs.

By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
August 10, 2006


QASMIYA, Lebanon — Israeli bombing has knocked out irrigation canals supplying Litani River water to more than 10,000 acres of farmland and 23 villages in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, prompting accusations here that Israel is using its war against Hezbollah to lay claim to Lebanon's prime watersheds.

Heavy fighting and a series of targeted strikes on open water channels and underground water diversion pipes have suspended much of Lebanon's agricultural use of the Litani River along the coastal plain and in parts of the Bekaa Valley near Qaraoun Dam, said water engineers who have surveyed the south.

The damaged or broken facilities include a pumping station on the Wazzani River, whose inauguration by Lebanon in 2002 prompted Israel to threaten military action because it diverted water a few hundred yards from the Israeli border, in a watershed that feeds the Jordan River, Lebanese officials said. At the time, Hezbollah promised to defend the facility.

The strikes went largely unnoticed by the outside world in the nearly monthlong air assault targeting Hezbollah guerrilla strongholds in southern Lebanon. But Lebanese point to the extensive damage to their irrigation and drinking water system as evidence that border security and water issues remain intertwined in a region short on both.

"Whenever Israel throughout history has thought of its northern border, they don't talk, for example, of the mountains as a border. They always think of the valley of the Litani," said Mohammed Shaya, dean of the college of social sciences at Lebanese University in Beirut.


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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-litani10aug10,1,3878441.story?coll=la-news-a_section