Saturday, May 25, 2013

What's Problematic for America Could Be A Washout for Israel

The requirement that Judea and Samaria be retained by Israel is not only based on the historical record, as the world acknowledged in April 1920 at the Sam Remo Conference that was followed by the internationally legal corroboration of the League of Nations decision in July 1922 and confirmed by archaeology, or on the religious/cultural tradition or the security needs of Israel but also on the matter of water.


An aquifer is

a body of saturated rock through which water can easily move. Aquifers must be both permeable and porous and include such rock types as sandstone, conglomerate, fractured limestone and unconsolidated sand and gravel. Fractured volcanic rocks such as columnar basalts also make good aquifers. The rubble zones between volcanic flows are generally both porous and permeable and make excellent aquifers

The matter of water is crucial for Israel.
 
Haim Gvirtzman deals with the issue.

And, as succinctly presented:-

Judging from past experience, Israel can not afford to allow her already stretched water supply to be put under the control of the Arabs - not if she expects to survive and thrive.

Here is the aquifer system in Israel:



If you have any doubts as to the importance of the aquifer system, read on from this article on the High Plains Aquifer in the United States which informs us that the entire western half of the U.S. is drying up.


And if the United States with all its rain and rivers and wet seasons is in trouble, Israel needs to carefully consider its future.


From the situation in the US:-

What is life going to look like as our precious water resources become increasingly strained and the western half of the United States becomes bone dry?...Cities all over the Southwest continue to grow even as the Colorado River, Lake Mead and the High Plains Aquifer system run dry.  So what are we going to do when there isn’t enough water to irrigate our crops or run through our water systems?  Already we are seeing some ominous signs that Dust Bowl conditions are starting to return to the region.  In the past couple of years we have seen giant dust storms known as “haboobs” roll through Phoenix, and 6 of the 10 worst years for wildfires ever recorded in the United States have all come since the year 2000.  In fact, according to the Los Angeles Times, “the average number of fires larger than 1,000 acres in a year has nearly quadrupled in Arizona and Idaho and has doubled in every other Western state” since the 1970s.  But scientists are warning that they expect the western United States to become much drier than it is now.  What will the western half of the country look like once that happens?

A recent National Geographic article contained the following chilling statement…

    The wet 20th century, the wettest of the past millennium, the century when Americans built an incredible civilization in the desert, is over.
 

...we are putting a tremendous burden on our fresh water resources.  In particular, the Colorado River is becoming increasingly strained.  Without the Colorado River, many of our largest cities simply would not be able to function...Further east, the major problem is the drying up of our underground water resources.

In the state of Kansas today, many farmers that used to be able to pump plenty of water to irrigate their crops are discovering that the water underneath their land is now gone.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times…Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers...


If water worries Americans, it should worry Israeli.


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