August 7, 2008 10:43

Making the Deserts Bloom Once More

A West Bank mayor at his town's dry well

One of the founding myths of Zionism was that Israel's pioneering generation had made "the deserts bloom," that they had taken a "land without a people" and made it fit for habitation. In reality, the region has been cultivated for thousands of years, long before Jews or Arabs even existed. (Farming was invented in the Jordan valley, where human beings first cultivated wild wheat.) Rather than making the deserts bloom, what the early Zionists did was bring farming into dry, marginal lands and revolutionize a traditional industry for the needs of a proto-nation state.

The early Zionists were acting out of a western, 20th century attitude towards the natural world, which -- according to their view -- needed to be subjugated to human control, said Gidon Bromberg, the founder of Friends of the Earth Middle East -- a joint Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian organization. "As if deserts don't have an intrinsic value in of themselves," he said on Monday, while taking me on a tour of the Jordan River valley. With the perfect vision that comes with hindsight, we can now see the damage those modern attitudes wrought on this ancient land, and the Jordan valley is one of the best places to do so.

Crossing the river Jordan is one of the great disappointments of a trip to the Middle East. Instead of a mighty torrent “deep and wide” as the gospel songs proclaim, the Jordan River for much of its run is a thin rivulet of brown slime largely obscured by reeds. “That’s it?” is a refrain I've often heard from American pilgrims when crossing the Jordan river at Allenby Bridge, the border checkpoint separating the Kingdom of Jordan on the river’s east bank and Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories on the west bank. The Mighty Mississippi it ain’t.

But as Gidon pointed out, the health of the Jordan River is even worse than it appears. Almost all of the water that used to flow into the river is now diverted for human use. In the 1960’s, the Israeli government blocked off the Jordan river just a few kilometers after it leaves the Sea of Galilee, and later, the Jordanian government dammed the Jordan River’s other main source of water, the Yarmouk River. What now flows in between the Jordan’s banks is almost entirely human sewage, most of it untreated. The river where John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, a river so sacred it doesn’t need a priest’s blessing to be considered holy water, is now, for all intents and purposes, full of crap.

The decline of the Jordan River has had profound social and environmental consequences for the Jordan Valley. It has reduced habit for the millions of birds migrating each year from Europe to Africa for whom the Jordan is the last chance to fatten up before crossing the Sahara Desert. It is killing the Dead Sea, which, without replenishment from the Jordan, is dropping about a meter a year. And it is helping to decimate Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank – home to some of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities – which are slowly dying of thirst without access to the river and without the authority to dig their own wells.

But the plight of the Jordan valley is galvanizing a new generation of environmental activists in the region. For Palestinians, reviving the Jordan River is a necessary part of a national water system for a future Palestinian state. For many idealistic secular Israelis, learning to live with their dry country’s fragile ecosystem is helping them redefine Zionism. And for all the communities that live along the Jordan, sharing its blessings is an opportunity to nurture the region’s fragile peace.

The trick is to convince the national governments that use the Jordan’s water that it they would be better off returning the river to its natural course. For Bromberg, the future of water conservation in the Middle East lies in transforming rural economies. Right now the Israeli and Jordanian governments give precious water at subsidized prices to their agriculture industries – which consumes a majority of their water (about 50 percent in Israel and 70 percent in Jordan) but which contributes just a fraction of their GDP (two percent in Israel and three percent in Jordan.) Because they don’t pay the full price of their resources, farmers in the region grow water-hungry crops such as garden vegetables, fruits and flowers, most of which are shipped to Europe. “We are exporting our water,” said Bromberg. “Bananas are a tropical fruit. Why are we growing them in the desert?” While Israel needed its own farmers to feed the country in its early days, Israel can now import its food for less of an environmental and economic price than it is currently paying.

Both rural environments and communities would be better off if they developed as destinations for eco-tourism and outdoor activities. In particular, a healthy Jordan River – much of which is currently a restricted military zone on the Israeli side – could be a much bigger draw for pilgrims visiting holy sites. Friends of the Earth Middle East and architects from Yale University have developed a showcase eco-tourism project: a Peace Park on an island in the middle of the river, where Jordanians and Israelis could meet without passports or visas. The Peace Park would also be a concrete way of fighting the mistrust that push countries to grab as much water as they can. “War will not generate water,” said Nader Al-Khateeb, the Palestinian director of FoEME. “But peace can generate millions of cubic meters of water.”

--Andrew Lee Butters/Jordan Valley

August 3, 2008 9:58

Readying for Revenge

For a long time when I travelled in the Middle East, I'd often pack my flak jacket, even when not going to a conflict area, as a kind of Murphy's law guarantee that a war wouldn't break out while my pants were down. But my bags started to get a little heavy, and I got a little lazy, and the airlines started charging for extra weight, so here I am covering the Jerusalem bureau while Tim's on vacation with nothing more protective than a summer sweater, and in the back of my mind I'm thinking it'll be just my luck if all hell breaks loose.

Because in the Middle East, anything is possible. Case in point: someone just assassinated a Syrian general thought to be Syrian President Bashar al Assad's liaison to Hizballah, according to reports (which should be talken with a grain of salt) in the Arab press. I say "someone", but if the assassination did in fact take place, the conclusion that nearly everyone will rush to is that it was the work of the Mossad. Earlier this year, "someone" also killed Imad Mugniyah, Hizballah's operations chief (whom Western espionage experts called "a terrorist mastermind") and afterwards Israeli officials gave a non-denial denial and a Cheshire Cat-like smile. Anyone capable of killing the shadowiest of shadow warriors in the middle of Damascus, could probably also have taken care of a Syrian general.

But could and should are two different things. Israel is at war with Syria and a general is a military target, so if Israeli intelligence did kill him, it's all perfectly kosher according to international law. But still, the timing is awkward. Syria and Israel have been engaged in indirect peace talks, which is one of the most positive recent developments in the region. One man's death probably won't derail that process, but it's not as if there aren't enough obstacles to peace already.

Of greater concern is that Israel -- by commission or by reputation -- is building up a set of scores that sooner or later are going to be settled. Last fall, Israeli jets bombed a site in eastern Syria that American officials claim was a nascent nuclear weapons development facility. Naturally Syria denied this, and has claimed the right to retaliate against Israel at a time and in a manner of its choosing. Adding to the tension, Hizballah is still seething at the loss of Mugniyah, who is also said to have been Hizballah's liaison to the Iranian military. A poster I saw in Beirut earlier this summer spelled out the feeling pretty clearly: a portrait of Mugniyah, and a missile firing (presumably towards Israel) with the caption "the account is still open and has not been settled." Another assassination would make a revenge operation that much more likely.

The danger now is that there is nothing in place between Israel and its enemies to prevent tit-for-tat retributions from turning into large scale regional conflicts. After the Israeli withdrawal from most of Lebanon in 2000, the two sides had a kind of unspoken agreement to skirmish just in a particular confined space -- Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms. That de facto arrangement held with a few exceptions until 2006, when Hizballah captured two Israeli soldiers and Israel retaliated by bombing and invading large parts of Lebanon. A UN Security Council cease fire resolution brought an end to the fighting; but that resolution is now on its last legs. Both sides violate its terms -- the disarmament of Hizballah and the end to Israeli military overflights of Lebanon -- with impunity. Hizballah has rearmed in spades since the war, and the Israeli military violates Lebanese airspace almost daily.

The death knell for the UN cease fire resolution came on Friday with a statement by the Lebanese government that gives Hizballah the right to reclaim Lebanese land occupied by Israel -- meaning Shebaa farms -- by force. This agreement is a victory for Hizballah, which has been wrangling with Lebanon's American-supported government for almost two years over its status as an armed state-within-the-state, a struggle that culminated in May with the brief Hizballah take-over of West Beirut. With this new agreement, Hizballah is technically no longer a state-within-the-Lebanese-state, but a sanctified arm of Lebanese defense policy.

This could backfire against Lebanon, and not just because the country is probably now violating international law. Despite all the destruction wreaked upon Lebanon by Israel in the 2006 war (around 1,200 dead, over a million displaced persons and untold billions of dollars worth of damage ) the Jewish state was relatively restrained in the sense that it mostly targeted Hizballah strongholds in south Lebanon and south Beirut. In the event of another war, all bets could be off.

But even a total war in Lebanon could just be a sideshow. Israel's main security concern isn't Hizballah's rockets, but Iran's nuclear development program. After Barak Obama returned to the US from his visit to Israel last month, he reportedly told members of Congress that he had the feeling that if negotiations with Iran don't solve the nuclear problem, the Israeli military would take matters into its own hands. So is Israeli security preparing for just such an operation by protecting its flank from a possible Hizballah retaliation by killing off the agents that coordinated between Hizballah and Syria and Iran? At this point, it's a pretty wild-eyed guess. But just contemplating an Israeli air strike against Iran, and Iran's far reaching retaliation, is enough to make me think about my travel plans -- with or without flak jacket -- more carefully. Switzerland anyone?

---Andrew Lee Butters/Jerusalem

July 29, 2008 1:10

Trouble in Tel Aviv

It's probably not a good idea, when newly arrived in a foreign country, uncertain of one's bearings and the exchange rate, to go racing off to a bachelor party. But there I was on Saturday, just a night after arriving in Israel from Lebanon, with more than a dozen guys in a Georgian-Russian bistrot in Tel Aviv, eating beef and goose dumplings, doing shots of chilled vodka, and mooching cigarettes from pretty girls. And that was the healthy part of the evening.

It's hard to resist the seedy charms of Tel Aviv. It's called the White City, for the row upon row of bleached Bauhaus-style villas that stretch behind the beachfront high rise hotels. But to me its more like the Off-White City, indeed, the Off-Color City. People there really don't give a damn. They've got all the Olympian attractiveness of the Mediterranean species, but having grown up in a post-collectivist society with a stint or two in the army, they've had the subtlety and vanity beaten out of them. When someone in a crowded bar climbs up on a table in Tel Aviv, it's not to vogue a la Libannaise. It's because they actually want to dance.

The problem with partying in Tel Aviv is that is that it comes at a cost. Tel Aviv is safe thanks to the Israeli Defense Force, and the Separation Barrier, and the fact that the Israeli government has refused to let those Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 return. For me, this night on the town in Tel Aviv was a particularly guilty pleasure. I'd spent almost a month earlier this year working on a story about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and I've seen the squalid, concrete purgatories where they live. But here I was having a grand old time in an Israeli restaurant with painted blatt tiles, soaring ceilings and arched doorways, that was clearly once an Arab home.

It may be unfair to single out the inhabitants of one particular city or country or region, when many of us live unsustainable lives built on sacrifices or injustices that are as easy to ignore as greenhouse gases. And indeed, the beautiful people of Beirut don't let the fact that Palestinian refugees have lived in their country for 60 years without civil rights keep them from table dancing on Saturday night. So why keep harping on Israel and the Middle East? Because the mess and the metaphors are so vivid.

In fact, driving back up into the Jerusalem hills the next morning, I could think of no better place than than to ask the question: how to live a just and righteous life, when normal life is anything but? Looking for an answer may not have helped me with my wicked hangover or find my mobile phone lost at some point during the evening's silliness. But it may help salvage some of my dignity.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Jerusalem

July 26, 2008 3:13

The Mideast: A Troll-free Zone

Sorry for absenting myself from the blog for a few days, but the Obama circus blew into town and I was busy chasing around the senator/rock star. It was a fairly pointless exercise; everything was carefully choreographed for the Washington press corps accompanying him, and we local hacks were left in the dust. Dogs bark, and the caravan passes, as they say. We were left barking.

I’d like to thank all the commentators, the regular ones, especially, for weighing in on whether we should exert some kind of moderation (a far gentler word than censorship!) on the Middle East blog.

Judging by your comments, the majority of you think that moderation is a bad idea. Actually, I’m relieved. It doesn’t seem right that I, or a time.com editor sitting in his New York cubicle, should have to weed through the comments, uprooting slurs and insults in the garden of free speech. There’s enough censorship going on in this region without us having to follow suit. But at the same time, most of you agreed that some measure of self-discipline should be practiced. I welcome your opinions, and certainly don’t expect you to agree with me or Andrew or Scott. (Yes, Jacob Blue, even you, whose waspish comments started this all!) That would be too boring. And yes, NK, we certainly welcome humor in this levity-deprived region. Bring on the jokes and irreverence!

But if this is to be a genuine conversation, how about we lay down a few ground rules? And here I turn to Nathan W. who writes:

“ This blog attracts many opinionated people who love to debate topics about the Middle East. I have no problem with debates devolving into a discussion on the greater region. However, I do have a problem with those who simply post inflaming, intolerant, racist diatribes about Muslims/Jews/Christians/whatever without offering anything constructive.
Trolls should be deleted. Flames should be deleted. Racist and insulting comments should be deleted. But if you start trying to keep people on topic, you'll never be able to delete the posts fast enough.”
That sounds good enough for me, with a few more suggestions: Let’s stick to English, and please let’s not have the post be a dumping ground for other people’s blogs (yes, Eileen, this means you!) and off-topic diatribes.
Some of you seem to think that what appears in a Time blog is the same as a Time magazine article, fulsomely reported and judiciously balanced. It’s not. These are our ideas and impressions of the Middle East, for better or worse, and our blogs (if you haven’t noticed) are written in a far more personal style than the Time-ese you find in the magazine, or in a news feature on the website. They’re opinionated, ornery and slightly whacky.

That’s the fun of writing a blog, and hopefully, it gives you a more off-beat look at events behind the news or what daily life is like in the Middle East. I’d also welcome you writing about your own personal experiences, if it has bearing on the topic. Yoni, you wrote about your girlfriend’s encounter with the first bulldozer maniac in Jerusalem. What happened? Is she OK? (If my wife had been five minutes longer in the dentist’s chair, she would have found herself in the path of the second bulldozer.) I think that we bloggers are just as fascinated by what forms your opinions as the comments themselves, as long as it stays on topic. That mantra again.

When you read through the posts, you’ll notice it’s a small, fairly exclusive club of readers who bother to comment on the Middle East. We don’t have to like each other, and we certainly don’t have to agree, but since we all know each other pretty well by now, let’s try to keep it civil --and entertaining. Ok? This can be a good thing.
I’m off on vacation for several weeks in the States. Maybe I’ll run into commentator Joe riding his motorcycle on his back roads trip across the U.S.A. who asks that we not burn the place down while he’s away. Same goes for me.

By Tim McGirk/Frankfurt airport

July 23, 2008 5:17

Two Lebanons

On Thursday when I returned to Lebanon, I caught the tail end of the celebrations for the prisoner exchange between Hizballah and Israel, rushing down to the coastal highway to watch marching bands welcome coffins containing the remains of martyred Arab fighters carried by tractor trailers bedecked with plastic flowers. The triumphalist tone of the celebrations (which I wrote about here and which shocked Israelis) is best understood in the context of Hizballah's effort to consolidate date power inside Lebanon in the aftermath of the 2006 war with Israel, and to protect its status as an armed group. Just weeks after Hizballah's brief takeover of Beirut and the Doha agreement, the prisoner exchange was a coming out party for the new Hizballah-dominated political order. From now on it's not entirely accurate to call the militia a state-within-a-state. It's going to become increasingly difficult to tell where the Resistance ends and Lebanon begins.

Not that you can see that yet. Three days after the prisoner exchange I went up into the Chouf mountains to attend the Beiteddine Music Festival to hear Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil and to dance samba in an 18th century Ottoman palace. Lebanon's summer festivals and the international acts that perform here are one of the most visible of the many ties to the wider cultural world. In between sets, Gil reminded the audience of Lebanon's special relationship with Brazil: apparently there are more Lebanese living in the South American country than there are in Lebanon. (At least that's what I think he said: he was speaking in French.)

Lebanon is a battlefield, the front line of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the western arc of the Rejectionist Crescent. And yet it is the cosmopolation, Levantine, entrepot Middle Eastern mid point of everything. These contraditions are entirely unsustainable -- as the 2006 war showed. The next war could end that illusion for good. And yet, Lebanon lives on.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut