Parting With the Truth: A Response to National Geographic

Uri Goldflam
CIC Scene
13 May '10

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 Goebbels-like choice of pictures in the adjoining photo gallery. A truly astonishing editorial choice.

Lets start:

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 meters of water per year.

Jordan draws the 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.

(Read full article)

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