Wash. Post Invokes Jesus and John the Baptist to Flog Israel

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
30 July '10

Discerning Washington Post readers have come to expect a regular menu of Israel-bashing articles from Jerusalem correspondent Janine Zacharia. Not a week goes by without a major Zacharia feature about Israeli shortcomings and blemishes, however spurious, however questionable. And especially questionable in the context of total silence about any failings by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, of which many very serious ones still await Post coverage.

The latest Zacharia effort to extend her string of anti-Israel pieces, however, deserves special mention because it's a stretch beyond a stretch. She's obviously beginning to run out of saleable material, as attested by a July 30 story that, along with two photos and a map, takes up half a page, with a headline reading: "A Sacred but sullied spot? -- Activists say pollution makes baptism site unsafe."

The lead paragraph explains the headline: "Environmentalists claim that the hallowed spot along the Jordan River where Christians believe John the Baptist baptized Jesus Christ has become too filthy for human use."

She then goes to quote a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Middle East as saying that "unlimited sewages continues to flow both directly and indirectly into the river." And so this group wants Israel to prevent thousands of Christian pilgrims from immersing themselves in that spot of the river.

Having scored her usual hit against Israel, Zacharia only then proceeds to report Israel's denial that the river is actually quite safe and, in any case, Israel is working to make it even safer.

So how unsafe really is the Jordan for Christian pilgrims?

According to Zacharia, a water test last October found bacteria within levels deemed safe by Israeli standards. And Israel has an enviable public health record. But that doesn't satisfy Zacharia. "The result," she adds "would not have met the standard set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is 10 times as stringent."

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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.

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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.

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Report: Unusually Low Rainfall Last Winter Left Kinneret, Aquifers Thirsty

Zafrir Rinat
Haaretz
31 July

Last winter Lake Kinneret only received about 56 percent of the water it receives in an average rainy season, the Water Authority said in a report released this week.

Precipitation was slightly greater than the winter before, but cumulatively speaking it is the fifth year in a row of less-than-average rainfall.

The Kinneret has dropped more than two meters in the past two years. In addition, the water has become increasingly more saline for the fifth year running, because less low-saline water (rainwater) is coming into the lake. Since the water is used for irrigation, this endangers crops sensitive to high salt concentrations.

The Water Authority said the southern part of the lake is below the dam keeping the water from flowing south into the Jordan River and on to the Dead Sea. Even if the dam were opened, no water would flow southward. The level of the Dead Sea has been dropping at the rate of about 90 centimeters a year.

The heavy rains in February increased last winter's overall precipitation, with some areas experiencing rainfall amounts that are seen only once every fifty years. However, in January Jerusalem had its lowest rainfall since 1895, and in the Kinneret region the rainfall was the lowest since the 1920s.

The Water Authority has minimized the amount of water being pumped from the Kinneret, which means it is forced to make up the difference by pumping from the coastal and mountain aquifers.

The mountain aquifer, where the water is considered to be of high quality, dropped sharply toward the red line, below which this source faces the risk of leakage of saline water. In the central aquifer (a well in the Petah Tikva area) the water level is only 10 centimeters above the red line, Water Authority measurements show. North of that point, at the present rate of pumping, the water level in the mountain aquifer will dip below the red line in a few months.
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