The Dry Facts of My German Radio Interview on Our Water Problem

Last Friday, I was recorded for an interview on the water problems out here in Samaria and specifically Shiloh.

It aired three days ago here.

I learned the German for "settler" is siedler.

Me at our neighborhood emergency water supply

EG wrote to me that

I think that they distorted what you said. After you stated that the water infrastructure goes back to the Brit mandatory days, it seems to me that the female narrator translated your words or conveyed your words in a very distorted manner, or she [or the ARD staff] did not intend to translate what you said correctly or incorrectly.

In a five minute clip, with an interview with two other persons, both by the way, pro-Arab, it is difficult to feel that all you said or the gist of what you intended to get across does get to be heard.

This snippet (via Google Translate) is an example:

The Palestinians should stop being so ideological to argue and help to solve the practical problems.

What I had also told the reporter in that section is that the Arabs refuse to cooperate with environmental issues of pollution, sewage treatment and updating the water pipe infrastructure because no matter what the political resolution, the water has to be preserved and the land has to be protected.

Why don't the Arabs cooperate?  Wouldn't coexistence improve chances for peace or at least a lessening of the hostility that exists? 

There's also a bit in there previously on how fast we get help.  The water exists, even if there are temporary shortages.  So, who is at fault, Israel or the slow-responding or non-responding Palestinian Authority? Or their steadfast refusal to work together on a common problem?  Non-recognition doesn't help them.

Unfortunately, that message of mine didn't air.

Oh, and by the way, we've been requested to severely restrict water use since last night.

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This Stinks

Haaretz reports:

Nearly one-third of sewage treatment facilities in the West Bank settlements are either not up to code or not in operation, according to a state report. As a result, a third of the settlements’ sewage is continuing to pollute the environment and to endanger groundwater sources, it warns.

And what is the situation in the Arab-controlled areas of that same area?

Well, two years ago:

Palestinian sewage polluting Israel's environment

Industrial plants in Palestinian Authority controlled areas streaming massive amounts of heavy industrial waste into Israel • Wastewater seeps below ground level polluting ground water and springs, harming the quantity and quality of drinking water.

"The Palestinian Authority has methodically committed a disgusting offense against us over a long period of time," a senior engineer at Israel's Water and Sewage Authority said Tuesday. "Not only have they hindered the building of sewage treatment plants, but they've intentionally streamed massive flows of waste into Israel's streams and rivers."

The engineer said that for many years now industrial plants in Palestinian Authority territory have streamed massive quantities of heavy industrial waste into Israel. Stone and marble quarries in Hebron are particularly to blame. The waste has caused serious damage to Israeli sewage treatment plants and rivers in the Negev region.

"The lives of thousands of residents of Beer Sheva and surrounding towns have become insufferable due to the sewage that gushes out to the wadis and creates stagnant pools of water which turn into breeding grounds for particularly aggressive species of mosquitoes," said Mark Lautman, a spokesman for the Neve Noy neighborhood, which is located near the Beer Sheva Stream.

Tests carried out by Israel's Water Authority, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and other environmental organizations reveal that many streams in Judea and Samaria have turned into channels for crude industrial waste characterized by a high concentration of pollutants.

And three months late we read:

...Israel continues to supply the Palestinians with freshwater every year, 80 percent above what was required of the country in the Oslo Accords, and if the Palestinians would recycle their sewage water as Israel does with most of its own, the Palestinian water supply would be even greater, according to the minister.

“We told Palestinians we are willing to give them all the knowledge, but they insist on using fresh water and sending us sewage,” [then Minister of the Environment Gilad] Erdan told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Wednesday. “We are giving them fresh water and getting back sewage.”

The minister was particularly worried that along with the building of the new Palestinian city of Rawabi, there will be no solutions for the household waste and sewage created in the process, and he said he has received no answers from the authorities there.

“I’ve been trying around the world to get help from places like the United Nations and the World Bank to pressure the Palestinians to cooperate because they are here to stay and we need to cooperate on basic needs – electricity, water,” the minister said. “They can have an infrastructure.”

An academic study. 

So, what's the percentage in the PA?

This Haaretz story stinks.

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Holy Sh*t

You'll remember that 2012 story of Israel flooding Gaza with sewage:-

A Palestinian environmentalist says the Israeli regime is engaged in systematically destroying the environment in the Gaza Strip by dumping sewage into the Gaza Valley and its surrounding areas, Press TV reports.

Something similar occurred in 2007 and Israel, though not at all to blame, was somehow dragged in to the cesspool of anti-Semitic accusations about it even two years earlier:-

Before leaving Gaza in 2005, it is alleged that Israeli settlements diverted sewage water and also industrial and chemical waste into the underground water resources. These sources are managed and operated by the Coastal Water Municipality facility funded by the European Union and other donors.

And then there was the 2008 Hari story (thanks to HR), when he wrote about:

  a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit.

and claimed he wrote that after a sewage overrun in Gaza. I countered him later.



Well, what wasn't true then is true now, but Israel isn't involved:-

Egypt Flushes Out Gaza Tunnel Diggers With Sewage! | February 26th, 2013

Besides the really terrible new factor, the consequences for the environment are as equally yuck: the Egyptian army is looking to stall and stop Gazan smugglers from digging tunnels from the Gaza Strip to Egypt’s Sinai have found a new and dirty way to flush out smugglers: they are pouring raw sewage into the underground tunnels. Leaders in Gaza are trying to figure out how this tactic bodes for future relations with the Islamic leaders in Egypt.

So much crap.

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