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May 28, 2010
A shameful parting with the truth
Responding to National Geographic’s inaccurate article on water rights and use in Israel.
URI GOLDFLAM
I have fond memories of National Geographic magazine. As a child, I would wait with growing anticipation for the arrival of the beige envelope containing the yellow magazine. I loved to lose myself in the pages of wonderful stories and amazing photos.
It is because I hold NG to be of superb quality that I was so shocked by an article in the April 2010 issue, called “Parting the Waters.” The inaccuracies and downright lies in the article are many, and even more disturbing is the choice of pictures in the adjoining photo gallery. A truly astonishing editorial choice.
Let’s start with an excerpt from the article in question:
Upstream, at the Sea of Galilee, the river’s fresh waters are diverted via Israel’s national water carrier to the cities and farms of Israel, while dams built by Jordan and Syria claim a share of the river’s tributaries, mostly for agriculture. So today the lower Jordan is practically devoid of clean water, bearing instead a toxic brew of saline water and liquid waste that ranges from raw sewage to agricultural runoff, fed into the river’s vein like some murky infusion of tainted blood.
Israel takes all the water from the Jordan River leaving Jordan and Syria with scraps. Right? Wrong. (But what a great literary description.)
Israel’s national water carrier draws water from the Sea of Galilee itself (not from the river), from within Israel’s pre-1967 borders at the Sapir site. It was completed in 1964, so you can’t really blame the occupation on this one. It uses on average 500 million cubic metres of water per year.
Jordan draws water from the Yarmouk – 470 million cubic metres, the second largest river in the region and the Jordan River’s fourth tributary. Jordan also receives 50 million cubic metres of water annually from Israel from the Sea of Galille as part of the peace treaty signed in 1994.
Do these numbers paint a different picture? A view from the Jordanian side of the Jordan River Valley will show a flourishing breadbasket, 100 kilometres long and three kilometres wide. You’ll see the latest agricultural technologies, irrigation systems (technology transferred from Israel to Jordan, beginning in the 1970s) and cooperation between neighboring countries, including Israeli farmers tending to their orchards on Jordanian sovereign territory. But why report the good news.
Next:
One day last April, [Gideon] Bromberg [Israeli co-director of Friends of the Earth Middle East] led me to the natural spring that provides water to Auja, a Palestinian village of 4,500 people that climbs the barren hills a few miles west of the Jordan River near Jericho. Fed by winter rains, the spring was flowing from a small, boulder-strewn oasis.... “Auja is totally dependent on this water for agriculture,” Bromberg said. “As soon as this spring dries up, there’ll be no more water for farming.”... As Bromberg and I followed the Auja spring east, we passed a complex of pumps and pipes behind a barbed-wire fence – a Mekorot well, drilled 2,000 feet deep to tap the aquifer. “Blue and white pipes,” Bromberg said. “This is what water theft looks like in this part of the world.”
This is a neat trick. Half-truths and a stretch, a twist and a big lie. To drive the message home – a picture of the dried up, sunburnt village, a deserted greenhouse and a line about the swimming pools at the Jewish settlements. Nice work NG.
Indeed, Auja does dry up every summer. However, a 2,000-foot-deep well doesn’t affect top-water, but what is really happening does. The blue and white sign reads: “Jerusalem Water Undertaking, Ramallah and Al-Bireh District. Well No. 3/Ein Samia.” The water of Ein Samia is captured and transferred – to Ramallah. Ein Samia is the source of the Auja stream that feeds the village Auja. If you guessed that the well is Palestinian – you guessed right.
The Olso accords allowed Israel and the Palestinian Authority to drill water wells based on an agreed formula. (Yes, the average Israeli uses much more water than the average Palestinian as a function of standard of living.) When the Oslo process collapsed, the water regime remained, as did the temporary administrative division of the West Bank, but the cooperation ceased. In short, it’s the Palestinians who are responsible for drying Auja.
Right next to the well is a flourishing greenhouse that grows spices and olive trees. It’s a successful Palestinian enterprise, but why spoil the image of desolation and poverty.
Surrounding the spring are findings of a Roman-Byzantine city with dams, aqueducts and flour mills. Very, very cool. It is also one of the suggested locations of Joshua’s battle at the Ai when the Israelites entered Canaan. For future reference NG, you can find it at these coordinates: 23166/654998.
Moving on:
To meet these costs [to buy water from the horrible, thieving Israeli water company] he [an elderly farmer named Muhammad Salama] is selling off his livestock, and his sons have taken jobs at an Israeli settlement, tending the tomatoes, melons and other crops irrigated from the aquifer that is off-limits to Palestinian farmers.
More hogwash.
We already determined above that the reason Auja is drying up is because of Palestinian water drilling, not Israeli.
The Israeli settlements grow mostly tomatoes, grapes, dates and spices. (Melons actually grow further south.) They use water captured from flash floods at the Tirza water reservoir, instead of flowing to the Dead Sea. Water use is optimized via reclaimed water, advanced irrigation and growing technology. Israel leads the world in reclaiming sewage water for agriculture; 75 percent of water flushed down Israeli toilets, dishwashers and shower drains is recycled and used in agriculture.
And, finally, the aquifer is not off limits to Palestinians. This is a bold lie. Indeed, Palestinians drill and use water from the aquifer routinely, yet it is not controlled or regulated.
In the adjoining picture gallery, a photo of an Israeli couple by the shores of the Sea of Galilee is captioned: “Israelis relax by the Sea of Galilee, which is fed by the Jordan River and supplies a third of Israel’s fresh water. Since 1967, Israel has blocked Syria’s access to the lake’s shoreline.”
Cheap demagoguery. Would NG publish a photo of Georgians sitting by the Black Sea with the caption: Georgia has blocked Russia’s access to the sea’s shoreline since 1992.
The sentence is, in essence, true. Left unchecked, the Syrians would undoubtedly approach the lake and pump its waters to a drying and thirsty Syria. Thing is, they have no business being there, and I’d expect NG to know a little bit more about the borders of the modern Middle East. Fact is, the international border is not on or in the lake. The lake was never part of Syria, and the international border runs high on the cliffs above. Between 1948 and 1967, Syria encroached to the water line and this is why they demand to return to the June 4, 1967, lines, and not the international border.
There is much, much more. The article is filled with shoddy research and poor journalism. But what bothers me the most is that there are real problems that need to be addressed. To claim that the Palestinians receive their fair share of water is untrue. They don’t. But publishing this kind of one-sided, ludicrous depiction of reality, once again absolving the Palestinian Authority from any and all responsibility, is simply absurd. It does not promote peace or understanding, only animosity.
Shame on you National Geographic.
What can you do? Write to the National Geographic editors (ngm.nationalgeographic.com/contact-us). Tell them what you think. If enough voices are heard, we can hope that NG will become better at fact-checking, so that our children can also have great memories of the yellow mag one day.
Uri Goldflam has been working in the field of Israel education, leadership training, and educational tourism for the past 17 years in various positions in Israel and abroad. He wrote this piece for Canada-Israel Committee’s blog, CIC Scene.
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