Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL – 30 JULY 2021
Prince Charles – now there’s an opening to this Letter for you – in an interview with Sky News in November 2015, suggested that the Syrian Civil War, was caused by a long drought that caused huge numbers of people to leave the land and move to the cities. The kindest reaction at the time was scepticism; but then, in the UK, the readership is small of the Washington DC journal of the great Smithsonian Institution.
The circulation of The Smithsonian magazine is some two million and it is widely revered – more so possibly than the Prince of Wales – as reliably authoritative. In its June 2013 issue, Joshua Hammer reviewed the history of wars for water and continued, “In Syria, a devastating drought beginning in 2006 forced many farmers to abandon their fields and migrate to urban centers. There’s some evidence that the migration fuelled the civil war there”.
What has that history got to do with this week’s news?
Not only is Syria, after a decade of drought-driven civil war, a failed state, that shares a frontier with Israel, but now we read that the water has all but gone from Lebanon, another neighbour. According to Al Jazeera last Friday, “UNICEF estimates that most water pumping will gradually cease across the country in the next four to six weeks”.
Following Lebanon’s own civil war from 1975 to 1990, from which it never recovered, it suffered first the dead hand of Syria as from 1976 and, then, from 2005, the even more toxic influence of Iran, through its proxy army, Hezbollah. This leech, adhered to the Lebanese neck, has drained the life-blood out of a once-energetic country and its stylish capital, Beirut, year after lugubrious year.
Last year’s devastating explosion in the port of Beirut destroyed the little that was left of political consensus, and local governance has evaporated with the water. Lebanon is the second of Israel’s neighbours to achieve failed state status. The denial of water – a breach of, surely, the most fundamental of all human rights – is the poisoned icing on the cake of rotten carcasses that is all that remains of a once proud and admired people. Now anarchy beckons, and no assistance from the malign and nihilistic Iranians entrenched there can be expected.
Israel’s longest border is shared with Jordan. How are things there, water-wise? Well, just fine, thanks to Israel. We have been supplying the Jordanians with ten million cubic meters annually since 1994. Jordan, struggling with critical water shortages, sought an additional eight million cubic meters from the Netanyahu government and received only three.
Last week, however, Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, visited Jordan and agreed to supply a further 50 million cubic meters of the indispensable nectar in 2021. That sort of beneficence is available to all who desist from threatening Israel and resolve to live alongside it in peace. (The greatest enemy of the Palestinian people, their leadership, should take note.)
But was not Israel castigated for years as the greatest threat to world peace because its alleged avarice for water would cause it to go to war repeatedly to secure its sources? True, but that calumny was peddled before Israel learned to conserve, reuse and sprinkle its precious mayim – and before its massive investment in the desalinisation of sea water. Now Israel is a net exporter, not only of gas and oil, but of water too.
And that is not the only silver lining in this parched region. Most severely affected by drought and the collapse of the water supply system is Iran. Israelis are rather fond of the Iranians, who wish to reciprocate. It has been only the animus and the nihilism of the Iranian leadership that has prevented the mutual affection from burgeoning. So it is only in the hope that the Mullocracy may be toppled that we experience schadenfreude at Iranian aqua-misery.
Iran’s leaders blame their water crisis on rainfall having been reduced by 50% in the past year alone. According to Iranian exiles, however, Iran is “water bankrupt” because of years of neglect and mismanagement. With the country’s rivers, reservoirs and damns now running dry, protests are frequent and widespread.
The hope must be an implosion of the regime in Tehran and the democracy that the majority of the Iranian people long for.
The favourable effects of that for Israel are for another day.
Shabbat shalom.
© July 2021 – Howard Epstein
