I do not know that I am overly enthusiastic about Sharon's peace
plan. In the Middle East, the question is usually about water, not
about land. There is plenty of barren desert for everyone. That
said, look at topographical and rainfall maps of the Middle East.
What you find is that Gaza gets its water from underground
rivers-- aquifers-- which come down from the heights of the
Israeli Negev, Edom, and Judea. These aquifers are not very rich.
In their natural state, they approach the ground surface only as
the ground surface comes down to sea level. By putting in drains
in the right way, Israel could divert this water to farms on the
shores of the Dead Sea, about a thousand feet below
sea level. And then Gaza would die of thirst, its wells
infiltrated by salt water from the Mediterranean.
Jewish settlers in the West Bank have become notorious for
water-poaching. On their own land, they drill deeper wells than
their Arab neighbors are allowed to drill. By so doing, they
lower the water table. The Arab neighbor's well no longer
works; and his land dries up and blows away. It thus becomes
vacant land, and liable to government seizure. I anticipate that
this process will continue.
The most modern form of well drilling is slant drilling. The drill
bit can be electronically steered in any desired direction, up,
down, or sideways. Slant drilling was developed to extract oil
from worn-out formations in the United States, but of course, once
developed, it has also been used in the Middle East to reduce
costs. One of the causes of the 1991 gulf war was that Kuwait was
using slant drilling to tap into oilfields in Iraq. A
technological form of milking the neighbor's cow through the
fence. Slant drilling is about to drop down to the consumer scale,
in much the same way that other technological goods such as
computers, VCR's, etc. have. In the United States, small-scale
slant drilling would be primarily a cheaper way to convert
houses to geothermal heating and cooling. In the desert, however,
small-scale slant drilling would lend itself to water
piracy.
Let us consider a scenario. Imagine, if you will, a Jewish
settlement on a ridge line, two hundred feet above and
between two valleys with arab villages. This ridge line will
have been historically unpopulated, on account of the difficulty
of irrigation. Suppose that the settlers drill a series of
four hundred foot wells along the ridge, and then use slant
drilling to connect them up at the bottom. This gives them a
modernized version of what in the Middle East is called a Quanat,
a type of aquaduct. The settlers also send horizontal branches out
towards the Arab villages. They pump some water to the surface for
their own use. But mostly, they run their underground pipeline
towards the point of their ridge, say, two miles away. At
this point, the valleys have sloped down another two hundred feet,
so that the ground is at the same level as the bottoms of the
wells up on the ridge. The valleys give out onto a larger valley,
in which there is a larger and more established Jewish settlement,
with farms. Here, the ridge line settlers sell the water coming
out of their network. No questions are asked about where the water
comes from.
(4/29/2004)
About a million Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union
to Israel during the 1990's. This fueled Jewish settlement in
the West Bank, and ultimately, large numbers of land seizures.
As Soviet Jewry was very assimilationist, there are huge
numbers of part-Jews in the Former Soviet Union. Estimates run
as high as twenty million with at least one Jewish
grandparent. As the successor states are mostly in a
self-perpetuating economic meltdown, the former Soviet Jews
all want to get out. We are talking about a latter-day
Volkswanderung. There will always be more Jewish settlers-- if
anything, the rate will increase because the first batch of
settlers serve as "guides" for their cousins. This means that
any deal struck with the Palestinians is always provisional.
As more Soviet Jews arrive, settle on the West Bank, and start
voting, Israeli politics will grow steadily more intransigent.
[E. Simon claimed that he rabbis would not allow all these
Pseudo-Jews in.]
(05/01/2004 03:20 PM)
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. For one
thing, emigrating to Israel is one of several choices a Russian
Jew faces. He can try to go to America or Germany, stay put, or
go to Israel. Naturally, a Russian Jew would prefer
to go to America, because if he went to Israel, he would have to
do military service. The American economy went into a
high-tech boom in the 1990's, and for people with proper
qualifications, H-1B temporary visas were comparatively easy to
come by. Interestingly, it seems that the educational level of
immigrants to Israel dropped, because of course, they were the
residue, who could not get H-1B visas. But with the
downturn, H-1B's have been cut back, and as existing
one expire, their holder will have to leave. Many of them may
choose to go to Israel instead of going back to Russia. Others,
back in Russia, are more discontented than they were previously,
and more inclined to go to Israel, military service or not. I
imagine the situation is roughly similar with respect to
Germany.
That is something that has been noted about
immigration-- it is not all in one direction, but involves a lot
of back-and-forth motion. Here's an example: a friend of my
family, a South African Jew, came to America in the late
sixties, went to school in the midwest, and went to Israel
when he couldn't find an academic job in the United States,
stayed there for a couple of years, and then came back to
America and settled in California.
On the other side, immigration to Israel
obviously depends on whether the required military service is
imminently likely to be peacetime service or wartime
service. That means that if things quiet down, the immigration
rate should rise. No doubt the Israeli Rabbinate will be able to
make stipulations about religious education, and prospective
immigrants will conform, since they are already willing to sign
up for military service.
Addendum, February 9 2024.
Twenty years have gone by since I wrote the above. We are now
confronted by a situation in which Israel, after decades of
trying to stunt Gaza's economic development, is now setting
forth on a policy of total physical obliteration.
Consulting Apple Maps on my iPhone, I find that there are now a
great many green circles on the land above and upstream from
Gaza. These are center-pivot irrigation rigs. There was a time
when Israel led the world in "drip" irrigation, the use of
numerous small tubes to deliver waterdirectly to the roots of
plants, with the leeast possible waste. Center pivot irrigation,
on the other hand , is an American invention. It is economical
to install, and economical to operate, provided you don't have
to pay very much for your water. But it wastes water, because
the water ispayed in the air, and much of it evaporates. The
policy has become one of wasting water because the only people
injured by the waste are pap\lestinians.
---------
Joseph Ataman, Nic Robertson and Kocha Olarn, "Israel’s farms need
foreign labourers. The Hamas attacks triggered an exodus" CNN,
Updated 9:42 PM EST, Sun November 26, 2023
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/26/middleeast/israel-farms-foreign-workers-crisis-intl-cmd/index.html
make the claim that these farms are spiritually necessary to
Israel, while evading the reality of foreign and palestinian
workers.
Yitzhak Shenehar, in his short story “On Galilean Shores,” (In
James A. Michener’s collection, _First Fruits_(*)) deals with
Jewish farmers in Israel, who while not actually kibbutzniks, are
in substantially the same economic and political situation. One of
them, a former German university student, takes on the task of
herding a pedigree cow, one too valuable to just be sent out with
the village herd, and its Arab herdsman. This becomes his
novitiate in agriculture. The Jewish villagers refer to him, in
affectionate mockery, as “O’ Shepherd Of Israel.” A local girl,
the young man’s eventual wife, leaves the farm, and heads for
Jerusalem, where she learns from experience that the city streets
are not paved with gold, as she does not have a secondary
education, and is not qualified for office work. So she returns
home, and the story ends with the young couple considering the
possibility of joining the neighboring kibbutz.
(*) Firstfruits: A Harvest of 25 Years of Israeli Writing,
1973,
https://a.co/d/h1VudBo
This sort of mentality is very central to the ideology of Zionism,
of course, which is why Israel subsidizes Kibbutzes, as a means of
assimilating the more backwards Jewish immigrants.
However, this dream has become false. The production of most crops
has become so highly mechanized that the critical inputs are land,
water, and energy. In none of these is Israel particularly well
situated. Israel has, perforce, moved into “high-value”
agriculture, the production of foodstuffs which require a lot of
hand labor, and consequently, very low wages. The role for the
Israeli is that of the white man on a white horse with a whip. It
does not differ fundamentally from the Nazi German concept of
“Lebensraum,” the idea that the ordinary Germen could become a
Junker somewhere east and south of Moskow, owning large numbers of
Slavic serfs.
In the American Southern states of Georgia and Alabama, the
Republican Party state, seeking to woo the white working class, by
Nativism, put together strict anti-illegal-immigrant measures. The
underlying idea was that native-born urban blacks should be made
to go out into the country, and do field labor. It was a
right-wing fantasy— the white man on a white horse, riding around
with a whip to use on the toiling black slaves. The blacks
retorted that they were American Citizens too, and they thought
not.
Very often, the end result was that the crops rotted in the
fields, and the farmers were bankrupted. One of the funnier
episodes involved a white farmer, in a state of deranged
desperation, the state of mind in which men sometimes commit
suicide— or homicide— attempting to physically force a white
Republican state legislator to actually work in the fields
himself. The legislator was of course very lucky that the farmer
did not favor the “12 gauge“ solution.
The authentically Jewish thing to do would be to use the
well-known Jewish scientific talent to solve the biochemistry and
molecular genetics of, say, milk, to the point that it could be
produced in a vat, instead of coming from a cow; not to lord it
over “racially inferior” peons like Simon Legree.
Further Addendum, April
1, 2024 (and this is not a joke!):
Israel has failed in the basic minimum requirements of an
occupying power.
Joe Biden is of course to be congratulated for ordering American
participation in air-drops of food. Beyond that, of course, one
has to recognize that the Israelis have destroyed, or are in the
process of destroying, so much housing and infrastructure that
Gaza is simply not inhabitable for anything like two million
people.
Israel cannot flood the tunnels, but it can simply destroy
everything without any particular difficulty.
In a densely populated urban area, the most practical means of
building tunnels would probably be to connect up basements. That
said, the flood-able area might be on the order of millions of
square feet. Add to this that the local rock is mostly sandstone—
porous aquifer rock— and that the ground is generally a hundred
feet or more above the water table. It seems likely that the water
would drain into the ground faster than the Israelis could pump it
in.It seems that the tunnels are above sea level by a comfortable
margin, and the water table a hundred feet below them. A lot of
wells in Gaza have gone dry or salty because the Israelis have
intercepted the water from the aquifer, five or ten miles
upstream. My rough guess is that if the Israelis tried to flood
the tunnels, the water would probably drain away into the rock,
probably by way of the basements. The depth of water in a tunnel
would decrease with the distance from the entrance into which the
Israelis were pouring sea water. The Israelis would probably
succeed in poisoning all the wells before they flushed Hamas out
of the tunnels. Further note: during the Vietnam War, the United
States Army attempted to set forest fires, in tracts of jungle
believed to contain Viet Cong headquarters. However, as hard as
they tried, the jungle in the “double monsoon” region of Southeast
Asia, proved to be self-extinguishing. Too much water stored in
plants, that kind of thing.
However, Israel will presumably provide itself with suitable
equipment for destroying buildings economically, in areas where
there is litle active resistance. For example, they can take a
tank, make it remote-controlled, and fit it with a boom a hundred
feet long, capable of jack-hammering its way into the center of
buildings. This boom will point itself downwards, to get into the
basement if there is one, or else it will at least stay on the
ground floor. The boom will contain a pipe through which a couple
of tons of explosive slurry will be pumped in, followed by a
detonating grenade. The explosive slurry will probably be ANFO,
the same stuff that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City
bombing. It is easily made from fuel and fertilizer, atricles of
common consumption. McVeigh was not actually able to get his bomb
underneath the target, so he _only_ managed to kill 160+ people.
The tank will of course be equipped to use tanker trailers, and it
will reliably collapse buildings into their basements, blocking
tunnel routes in the process. It will able to do this with great
speed, perhaps a hundred apartment buildings a day. A fleet of a
hundred such tanks could therefore obliterate 10,000 buildings per
day, permanently de housing perhaps 500,000 people. Presumably
Hamas would defend the buildings until there was just time to
escape, then make their exit via tunnels. The Israelis would use
ground-penetrating radar to detect undrground cavities which might
be tunnels, or might be sewers.They would then use small driling
rigs to penetrate these cavities from above, and pump in tons of
ANFO. The resulting explosions would of course travel along the
tunnels-- or sewers-- ripping open the pavement, and collapsing
remaining buildings. Remote-controlled bulldozers would then be
brought in to clear everything down to bare sand, pushing the
debris into local depressions, such as basements or watercourses,
though a considerable amount of debris might eventually wind up
being trucked down to the sea and dumped in the water..
To those who would regard the above as fantasy, I would reply that
this is merely the normal fashion in which mining, especially coal
mining, is carried out. The tactical retreat of Hamas
is likely be like that of the Viet Minh in the Street Without Joy
operation, during the first Indochina War. Hamas will then go
wherever the Gaza Palestinians wind up. Famous quotation of Mao
Tse Zung: “The people are the sea in which the guerrilla swims.”
See: Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in
Indochina (Stackpole Military History Series)
https://a.co/d/24PgPQ6
Whether we like it or not, we may have to do a new Dunkirk
operation.
The vague Israeli proposals for sanctuary areas for the escapees
from Rafah would seem to involve a series of camps along the
Mediterranean beaches, in an area five miles wide, and a mile
deep, between Rafah and Khayan Yunis, in the locality of Al
Mawasi. Refugees from the north are supposed to come down Al
Rasheed Street, adjoining the beach. Predictably, pockets of them
will get caught en route.This zone excludes the locality of
Swedish Village (*), which abuts on the Egyptian border, leaving a
gap of a mile or so between the camps and Egypt. The neighborhood
of the camps would have to be where the main port would go
in. The population density would be, at least, on the order of
300,000 people per square mile, or, at most, about seventy-five
square feet per person. And this degree of crowding would be
permanent, at least as long as the refugees remained in Gaza.
It is not clear just how close to the water the camps would be.
The obvious open spaces would appear to be sand dunes, rather like
the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. It might be possible for the
United States Navy to deliver supplies directly into the camps via
its assortment of amphibious ships and boats, bloodlessly brushing
aside whatever Israelis were in the way. I _assume_ that the IDF
would be reluctant to actually fire on the U. S. Navy,
notwithstanding the USS Liberty incident in 1967, and this would
sidestep the problem of Israeli militants enforcing a blockade on
the movement of supplies through Israel.
It is desirable, from a logistic standpoint, to set up
new refugee camps actually on the beach, and to practice "combat
loading," in which everything comes off the ship in the order is
wanted. One does not set up elaborate warehouses on the
embattled shore if one can avoid it. A million or more refugees,
possibly as much as three quarters of the population of
Gaza, are camped out in makeshift tents, in and around
Rafah, , because that was the border-crossing point into Egypt,
where the chances of obtaining food were best, and where the
main roads ran, coming down from Gaza City and Khayan Yunis.
Rafah is only about four miles inland, and over that distance,
helicopters can work efficiently. However one might
have supplementary ports up and down the coast, wherever there
are still Gazans hunkered down in the ruins. One does not
necessarily want one big floating port-- one wants a series of
landing points, every mile or so, along the coast.
(*) A small town originally built by Swedish peacekeeping
troops.
Enticing the refugees down to the beachheads should not be
a major difficulty, as they have so little left in the way of
permanent possessions. The mere assurance that the United States
was providing unlimited food at the beach, and would not allow
the Israelis to interfere, ought to do it. This would eliminate
the problem of transporting supplies inland. In terms of sheer
weight of hauling capacity, trucks do not compete with ships
(**). Railroads sometime compete with ships, but as there are no
longer any functioning railroads in Gaza, that is rather
irrelevant.
(** By which I mean real ships, not the tiny coasting vessels
chartered by the various private charities. The U.S. Navy's
amphibious ships range from 10,000 tons up to 40,000 tons, and
they are small by commercial standards.)
The beach camps would be built on land which is
unconsolidated sand, several feet above sea level. it is
generally not feasible to dig tunnels in such terrain. Hamas
might follow the Gazan people down to the beach, and seek to
mingle among them on the surface, or it might choose to make
its last stand in Rafah, or it might jump the border into
Egypt. Of course, Hamas members could alternatively surrender
to the Americans for internment, in the confidence that our
laws would prohibit punishment merely for being Hamas, rather
than for specific offenses against the rules of war.
Actually, we should go a step further- offer safe-conduct
to Syria, or "Hezbollah-Land'
in southern Lebanon to anyone who wants it, no questions
asked. The traditional standard of internment was based around
what a neutral nation had to do to avoid becoming a
belligerent However, it is rather a matter of indifference to
us if Israel should declare war on the United States.
During the Normandy Landings in WW2, British were big on
artificial harbors, causeways, etc. The American approach, by
contrast, was to mass-produce LST's and landing craft. Since
then, there has been a major investment in other types of
assault ships, notably Landing Ship Docks, Helicopter Carriers
(and helicopters), and hovercraft. In practice, this has proved
more adaptable, if less strictly efficient, than the British
approach.
Issues of crowd control are best addressed by distributing
supplies in highly dispersed fashion, that is, parcels of at
most twenty pounds, dropped by helicopter over the
landscape, in a belt several miles long, and several hundred
yards wide. One can use remote controlled drones for this
purpose. I find that an agricultural drone, gasoline powered and
capable of carrying a hundred pounds, costs several thousand
dollars. Such drones are commonly used for crop dusting, but
they offer a risk-free method of distributing supplies in a
contested situation. Parcels would be dropped from so low an
altitude that it would not particularly matter if they landed on
someone;s tent. The person who finds a parcel in this “Easter
Egg Hunt” will probably be a little boy, who more or less
laboriously drags it home to his mother. It will be very
difficult for any party, whether Hamas or ordinary criminals, to
commandeer or monopolize the parcels.
Manned helicopters could be used to evacuate the most gravely
ill patients from the hospitals, Someone who could not stand
being transported by road, or even being forced to walk, can be
gotten to a hospital ship within perhaps five minutes. The
helicopters could land on the hospital roofs to unload supplies
and pick up evacuees, and a few marines could be sent along to
secure the rooftops. This is something that the Israelis could
have done quite easily, except that their Neo-Nazi racialist
ideas prevented them from even thinking about "polluting" their
own hospitals with Palestinian patients. They allow only limited
evacuations, by road, to Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank.
Every Israeli corporal has the chance to interfere, and
block a transfer. The Israelis exert pressure to
have the patients sent back as soon as possible, even though
there is really no longer any place for them to go. Some few
patients, horrendous cases like children with amputated legs,
who will need years of therapy, have been evacuated to Qatar,
more or less permanently. Well, obviously, an American
Marine sergeant isn't going to stand for that sort of nonsense.
He will just fill up the outgoing helicopters with whoever seems
to be in most urgent need, and let the hospital ship sort it
out. Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft can land on the hospital ship,
and take cases to an air base somewhere, where they can be
loaded into jet transports, and taken all over the world, if
necessary. No doubt, the State Department will be kept fairly
busy, negotiating a few dozen or a few hundred cases in this
country or that country. Once these people are outside of the
Israeli government's reach, there is no sensible reason to send
them back, ever. On the contrary, and this may be a stickier
point, you want to do family reunification in the host country.
Response
to"Bitcoin Morfeo," Twiter, May 15, 2024
https://x.com/bitcoinmorfeo/status/1790323418451120393?s=43&t=Q2ZgMkIJpRJLdXkxvFU-CA
I think Hamas has figured by this point that
Netanyahu _wants_ the hostages dead, and that they are
therefore useless as human shields. I further think that Hamas
will do what it did before— use its tunnels to escape, and
regroup wherever the Gazan people wind up. It is axiomatic
that “the people are the sea in which the guerrilla swims.”
They have had abundant warning, so it seems
quite possible that the hostages are no longer in Gaza. They
may have first been smuggled under the border into Egypt, via
tunnels, and then, with the aid of sympathetic elements in the
Egyptian army, moved to Iran, or at least to “Houthi-land.”
There, they are reasonably safe, and can eventually be traded
back to Israel.
Probably, the senior leadership of Hamas are now
in Egypt, but the mass of Hamas will be moving to the camps
along the beach. Just enough men will stay behind in Rafah to
act as snipers, and compel the Israelis to completely demolish
the city. The rest will have taken their weapons with them to
the beach, concealed in donkey carts.
Of course Israel will then start carpet-bombing
the camps along the beach, and one can expect hundreds of
thousands killed. The thing is, the Israelis are trying to do
counterinsurgency on the cheap, without committing the sheer
manpower required to search every cart, and every tent, and to
have an Israeli soldier stand on every street corner. We
Americans learned in Vietnam that this does not work.
In the end, the only way Israel, following its
present policy, can defeat Hamas, is to kill all four million
Palestinians, and then to start in on the Israeli Arabs. At
that point, Israel will be a pariah state, and will not be
able to trade with any other country. This means that Israel’s
economy will collapse.
Israel cannot even feed itself. It has a
population density upwards of a thousand people per square
mile (and upwards of four thousand people per square mile of
agricultural land , essentially urban density. The kibbutzniks
are all city people playing at being farmers.Israel is very
vulnerable to a blockade of whatever articles it blockades
from Gaza. Strict reciprocity, and all that.
A
short piece, rejected by American Historical Association
Communities, apparently because it was "wrong-think," that is,
disagreement with the"party line" that opposition to he
Netanyahu government constitutes antisemitism.
May 9, 2024
In the first place, a good many of the anti-Israel protesters
are in fact Jewish. One rabbi, the novelist Michael Chabon’s
wife, was in fact arrested by the Israelis while attempting to
deliver food to Gaza.
On the scale of fears defined by what happened to Hind Rajab,
the supposed fearfulness of American Jews is ludicrous. A group
of people, waving Palestinian flags, and singing “from the river
to the sea,” but not in possession of firearms, do not represent
a serious threat.
To state the obvious, opposition to the Netanyahu regime in
Israel is not anti-semitism. For that matter, anti-Zionism is
not anti-semitism. Zionism is in fact an alien graft from
nineteenth-century Central European Blut-und-Boden nationalism.
It has been pointed out, by Peter Loewenberg (Decoding the Past:
The Psychohistorical Approach, 1983), that Theodore Hertzl had a
tendency to adulate the Junker class, that is, the class of
agrarian landlords living on the surplus value of unfree
peasants. He used phrases such as “pants-peddling boys,” to
refer to the European Jews of his own time, as an indication of
his contempt. As my own great-grandfather was a Jewish tailor
from Riga, who came to America, I reply that no one was forced
to get their clothes from Jakob Vav [Ellis Island— Woolf].
When I was a young man, one day, I was mending a pair of
trousers, and not thinking about it particularly. I had come
from a New England prep school, and those places are like the
army— you do whatever needs doing, as a matter of course.
Anyway, my mother and grandmother came into the room, saw what I
was doing, and delightedly started to tell me about my
great-grandfather.
(may 16, 2024)
I have to point out that greater part of the population of Gaza
has been concentrated, or is being concentrated, into dense and
highly flammable tent encampments along the coast. And of
course, a number of armed Hamas members will be dispersed among
them. From a military perspective, they represent an immensely
attractive target for fire-bombing on the scale of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, or Hamburg.
You might want to have a look at Martin Caidin, _A Torch To The
Enemy_. You should understand what a firestorm is.
After the fire bombings many thoughtful American and British Air
Force officers came to the conclusion in 1945-46 that they had
forfeited their right to judge the Nazi war criminals.
“In the Bowels of Christ,” to use Oliver Cromwell’s expression,
I beg you to consider what you are doing.
Diverting
the Litani River.
The Litani River. flows out of the Bekka
valley through a canyon, bordered on the north by a
mountain, at Dibbin, Lebanon. The river, down in the
bottom of the canyon, is at 228 meters above sea
level. The village of Dibbin, up on the south rim of
the canyon, rim, is at 650 meters above sea
level.
From the
river, it is approximately 6 miles to Kiryat Shmona,
Israel at 150 meters above sea level, and about
another five miles to
the plain adjoining the upper Jordan
at at 70 meters above sea level. This works
out to a 0.8%
downward grade. It is only about two miles from
Dibbin to the Israeli border, and, once across
their border, the Israelis can sink access
tunnels every mile or two for ease of
construction. In sort, as tunnelling
proects go, this is not an exceptionally
difficult one.
Elevations per Wikipedia, google
earth:
Distance approximately 25 miles to:
Sea of Galilee—- -210
meters
Net grade, 240 meters in 30
miles
——————————————