Blood, water and wine

Qana, as British MP George Galloway reminded his listeners (the show doesn’t appear to be archived, but he was accused of being an Israeli Mossad agent on Sunday), some say is where Jesus turned water into wine. And since the roads of this town run with the blood of so many children, it is the water rather than the Chateau Musar that analysts are directing their attention to.

Many have wondered how one of the most powerful American taxpayer-subsidized armies in the world could not defeat a guerrilla army that has apparently spent most of its money on social services in South Lebanon instead of in rockets.

And why is Israel willing to face such international shame to free two soldiers that Hezbollah captured to catalyze a prisoner swap in a type of deal made many times before? Israel has even alienated some friends on Capitol Hill. He has managed to get bad publicity for his cause on US networks, which are usually uniform in bias.

Israel apparently wants a complete evacuation of southern Lebanon so that international forces can protect the area around the Litani River and ensure that water flows into Israel. While Israel has managed to steal part of the 580 million cubic meters of water a year, the Lebanese have a dam in Qarun.

“The entire basin of the Litani River lies within the borders of Lebanon. The river originates in the north central part of the Biqa’a Valley, a short distance west of Baalbek and flows between the Lebanon Mountain to the west and the mountains to the east, running south and southwest at its own pace. The river enters a gorge at Qarun, runs through it for about 30 kilometers and, near Nabatiya and Beaufort Castle, turns sharply to the right (towards west) to traverse the ridge to the right, and continues to flow through the mountainous terrain of the al-Amal region. North of Tire, it empties into the Mediterranean. ”

(from the Conflict and Environment Inventory).

Israel gets more than a third of its water supply from the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it needs more.

When Israel finally lost its twenty-year war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel asked the United States for greater contributions from American taxpayers to pay for larger desalination plants. It appears that some of the money was rejected by the Bush administration.

According to a United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Israel was using water from the Lebanese Litani River, through an 11-mile tunnel it had drilled, as well as from Lebanon’s Wazzani springs (source: UPI). Note that no journalist can reach the area to confirm information about the water siphon and, in fact, such claims are contested (Aaron Wolf, in a UN post, says there is no way Israel would dream of robbing the Litani).

But even as President Clinton and the Israeli government refused to negotiate the right of return for Palestinian refugees, Israel imported more than 100,000 Jews into the occupied West Bank. Those 100,000 use roughly the same amount of water as a million Palestinians (something to do with swimming pools, partisan analysts say). As the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says:

“Israel’s water economy is on the brink of a crisis.”

So what is a country supposed to do? While this White House is willing to send over $ 10 billion worth of weapons, won’t it send money to get the salt out of the Mediterranean? An orderly buffer zone would guarantee at least illegal supplies from the Latani.

But will China, Russia and France agree to all this? And why doesn’t the UN Secretary General raise the hidden agenda? And why are hundreds of Lebanese Muslim, Druze and Christian civilians paying the price for this American-Israeli plan? Secretary Rice’s performance has been deemed absurd by the international community. Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” was just that. He “traveled” between Syria, Egypt, Moscow, Jordan and Israel, circling the hapless Egyptian and Soviet politicians. Rice seems to think he is reinventing the strategy of that scion of the American right … by “traveling” between his laptop and Ehud Olmert’s living room. No wonder the Lebanese prime minister told him to go home.