National Geographic, Israel and Water: The Facts

Alex Safian, PHD
CAMERA
Media Analysis
16 June '10

National Geographic Magazine has an unfortunate habit of regularly publishing inaccurate and intemperate articles about Israel, which have falsely blamed Israel for expelling Palestinians, for being responsible for declines in the Arab Christian population (which has actually increased in Israel), for discriminating against Israeli Arabs, and for oppressing Bethlehem. To this list of false accusations the magazine has now added stealing Palestinian and Syrian water, as alleged in Parting the Waters, part of the magazine's April 2010 Water Issue.

The article, by Don Belt (who wrote the earlier report on the decline of Christian Arabs), is notable for a dubious achievement – there is a deception even before the text of the article actually begins.

The opening picture spread, showing an Israeli couple on the beach of the Sea of Galilee, has a caption that charges "since 1967 Israel has blocked Syria's access to the lake's shoreline."

Technically true, but at the same time extremely deceptive. What Belt doesn't tell his readers is that Syrian control of the eastern shoreline before 1967 was a violation of both the international border between Israel and Syria, and the 1949 Armistice Agreement between the countries.

According to that international border, set in 1923, the Sea of Galilee was entirely within the Palestine Mandate, and therefore within Israel as the successor to the Mandate. To quote from an article by Frederic Hof (appearing on the very pro-Palestinian Jerusalem Fund site):

The boundary itself was a product of the post-World War I Anglo-French partition of Ottoman Syria. It was demarcated so that all of Lake Tiberias, including a ten-meter wide strip of beach along its northeastern shore, would stay inside Palestine.

Lake Tiberias is another name for the Sea of Galilee, and the border was set in this way because the territory of the Syrian Mandate already had an excellent water supply, including the massive Euphrates River. The Palestine Mandate was not similarly blessed, thus the decision to place in its sovereign territory all of the Galilee and the Jordan River.

(Read full analysis)

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