The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) - Highest October levels in six years

Sharon Udasin..
Environment & Technology/JPost.com..
10 October '12..

As rain begins to dampen the streets of central and northern Israel this fall, experts find the water level of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) to be encouraging – but with no correlation to the recent bouts of early seasonal rainfall.

On Tuesday morning, the Kinneret water level stood at 212.345 meters below sea level, the highest that it has been at this time of year since 2006, when it stood at 211.990 meters below sea level on October 10 of that year, according to Water Authority data. The water level is significantly above the feared “black line” – the historical minimum of the lake, 214.87 meters below sea level – and it is also above the bottom red line, which stands at 213 meters below sea level.

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)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

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)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Miflas HaKinneret

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
01 February '10

Among the many important things about Israel you'll never learn by following the media is the matter of the surface level of the Sea of Galilee. About a third of Israel's water is stored in the lake, but since the rest is in underwater aquifers they can't be seen; the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret) is right out there where we all see it. And boy do we watch: Nachum Barnea, the country's top journalist, once remarked that being an Israeli means getting up each morning and checking how high (or low) the surface level of the Kinneret is.

So much so, that the Hebrew word miflas (surface level) has been loaned to other existential worries: miflas ha-harada, for example, means the level of national dread - a term which doesn't even exist in any other language I'm aware of. (That miflas is actually rather low these days: defeating the 2nd Intifada, building the barrier, hitting Hamas in Gaza so hard that it stopped rocketing; all these things for which much of the world detests us have made life much less stressful, at least for the time being).

(Read full post)
.