What’s wrong with the home front

Ari Shavit put it succinctly in Friday’s Haaretz:

A spirit of absolute folly – Haaretz – Israel News

Instead of being constructive elites, in the past generation the Israeli elites have become dismantling elites. Each in its own area, each by its own method, dealt with the deconstruction of the Zionism enterprise. Step by step, the top 1000th percentiles abandoned the existential national effort. They stopped doing reserve duty, they stopped sending their sons to the fighting units. They mocked those officers who warned about unilateral withdrawals. They mocked those officers who warned that the emergency warehouses were emptying out and the enemies were becoming stronger. And they deceived themselves and those around them that Tel Aviv is in fact Manhattan. Money is in fact everything. And thus they bequeathed to young Israelis a legacy of values that makes it very difficult for them to attack even when the attack is fully justified. Because a country that lacks equality, that lacks justice and that lacks faith in the rightness of its path, is a country for which it is very difficult to go on the attack. It is a country for which not many are willing to kill and be killed.

Well, not so succinctly, perhaps, but spot on.

And in the meantime, we are here burying our sons. I know I’ve grown up now that I’m reading the names of the dead soldiers for sons of my friends, and not my friends…

Yesterday, speaking with S., a reservist home on furlough to visit his father, and my son (7 and 1/2) sitting there, speaks up “Abba, what if someone from Israel goes into Lebanon to save the innocent, and gets them out, but then dies in their place. Could that happen? Do people die doing things like that?” S. and I raised our eyebrows. “It’s confusing, this war business, to a child,” said S.

“It’s confusing to all of us.” I said.

This morning’s news was mixed: 24 soldiers dead. IDF forces on the banks of the Litani.

What does my friend Alex like to say? “A Jewish state is, by definition an unsustainable proposition – you need an A-bomb to keep it together.”

So war causes tremendous environmental damage, but what should we do, just lie down and let the extremists slaughter us?

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Technorati Tags: lebanon, israel, war

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Bad news for us Desert dwellers

Desert Cities Are Living on Borrowed Time, UN Warns

Desert Cities Are Living on Borrowed Time, UN Warns
By John Vidal
The Guardian UK

Monday 05 June 2006

Climate change threatens conditions for 500 million. But report points to huge solar energy potential.

The 500 million people who live in the world’s desert regions can expect to find life increasingly unbearable as already high temperatures soar and the available water is used up or turns salty, according to the United Nations.

Desert cities in the US and Middle East, such as Phoenix and Riyadh, may be living on borrowed time as water tables drop and supplies become undrinkable, says a report coinciding with today’s world environment day.

Twentieth-century modernist dreams of greening deserts by diverting rivers and mining underground water are wholly unrealistic, it warns.

But the report also proposes that deserts become the powerhouses of the next century, capturing the world’s solar energy and potentially exporting electricity across continents. For instance, a 310-square mile area of the Sahara could, with today’s technology, generate enough electricity for the whole world.

The problem now facing many communities on the fringes of deserts, says the UN environment programme report, is not the physical growth of deserts but that rising water tables beneath irrigated soils are leading to more salinisation – a phenomenon already taking place across large tracts of China, India, Pakistan and Australia. The Tarm river basin in China, it says, has lost more than 5,000 square miles of farmland to salinisation in a period of 30 years.

The report suggests that Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia have used water from the desert very unwisely. Rather than growing staple crops such as wheat or tomatoes, it suggests that precious water should be used only for high value crops such as dates and fish farming.

The mining “fossil” water, laid down many millions of years ago, was once believed to have the potential to green deserts, but is now not thought to be a solution – except in Libya, where opinion is divided as to whether supplies may last 100 or 500 years.

But the greatest threat to people and wildlife living anywhere near deserts is climate change, which is already having a greater impact on desert regions than elsewhere. The Dashti Kbir desert in Iran has seen a 16% drop in rainfall in the past 25 years, the Kalahari a 12% decline and Chile’s Atacama desert an 8% drop.

Most deserts, says the report, will see temperatures rise by 5-7C by the end of the century and rainfall drop 10-20%. This will greatly increase evaporation and dust storms, and will move deserts closer to communities living on their edges.

The problems of more heat and lower rainfall are being compounded by the melting of glaciers in mountainous regions. These waters sustain life in deserts but would be perilously close to drying up if global warming continued as expected.

The glaciers in the mountains of south Asia are expected to decline by 40% to 80% in the next century with profound effects on large populations in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and China.

Much of the water used for farming the south-west US, central Asia and around the Andes is drawn from rivers that originate in snow-covered mountains, says the report.

Development in the next 100 years is largely contingent on what happens to the climate. However, the report envisages that deserts will become more popular tourist destinations and that some of the plants that grow there could be “crops of the future”.

“Deserts are threatened as never before by climate change, overexploitation of water and salinisation,” said Professor Andrew Warren of University College London, one of the report’s authors.

“We risk losing not only astounding landscapes and ancient cultures but also wild species that may hold keys to our survival.”

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We’re making headlines – or at least waves – maybe at least a ripple

The Dartmouth Green Magazine � Green Shalom: The New Kibbutz Movement

There is a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, which means the perfecting or the healing of the world. Translated into action, this Jewish concept is essential to the environmentalist cause; as human beings continually evolve, the earth turns on its axis and resonates with conscious energy.

Thanks for the promo, Lil! Now let’s get all the students hitting the website and clicking on the Arava program link, and we’ll be all set! C’mon kids, sign up now, you’ll have a great year!

More Tu BiShvat

I know, I know, Wednesday is Rosh Hodesh Adar, and Purim is just around the corner. But as far as I am concerned, you can’t have too much Tu BiShvat. Since Ellen Bernstein’s amazing Tu Bishvat Seder in one of the Boathouses on Philadelphia’s Lincoln Drive in 1988, was it? I have had a love affair with this holiday. A little late for this year, I discovered that my friend Bill Slott, from Kibbutz Ketura wrote a moving piece about Tu Bishvat on Jewish Family.com:JewishFamily.com || Jewish Celebrations

Last year, I was guiding a three-generation American family around the country on Tu B’Svhat, and we stopped to plant trees in the Upper Galilee. Tromping through the mud with our saplings in a light but persistent drizzle, I wondered whether this little exercise was worth it. The grandfather leaned over to help his grandson plant the tree, while the father took pictures and the mother beamed. The 11-year-old looked up and asked me if I could come back and take pictures of the tree every year and send them to him. Not wanting to deceive him, I gently explained that there are simply too many trees in the forest for me to reliably keep track. “Oh well,” he sighed. “It’s not about the tree anyway, it’s about the planting.” No childhood confusion for him. I knew then that the planting was worth it. Every time.

Here in the desert, the spring really begins at Tu BiShvat and by Purim we are out and about in T shirts (there’s always, but always, a sandstorm on Purim). This year was no exception. But our seder at Lotan was weak. That’s because we do it together with dinner.

Really, as we learned from our teacher Yossele Bar Tziyon, the roots of the seder are in the Sabbatean tradition, and it would be held late at night, so that the fourth cup of wine would be drunk at midnite exactly.

Its all about sweets, about dessert. Strawberries dipped in chocolate. Dates stuffed with marzipan. That kind of thing.

Perhaps next year, I’ll run another seder, after dinner. In the meantime, I need to swot up on my Megilla reading. Purim, here we come…

I missed a flood

There was a fantastic flood in Eilat this morning.
Click for Pictures
here.

The floods have lifted up, Hashem, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring. Above the voices of many waters, the mighty breakers of the sea, Hashem on high is mighty.

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