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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 20th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

The desalination revolution

How Israel beat the drought

This country was on the brink of water catastrophe, reduced to running relentless ad campaigns urging Israelis to conserve water even as it raised prices and cut supplies to agriculture. Now, remarkably, the crisis is over.

By February 26, 2013,
A Christian pilgrim submerged in the Jordan River during a ceremony at the baptismal site known as Qasr el-Yahud near Jericho. (Photo credit: Abir Sultan/Flash 90)

Until a couple of years ago, Israeli radio and TV regularly featured commercials warning that the country was “drying out.”

In one of the most powerful TV ad campaigns, celebrities including singer Ninet Tayeb, model Bar Refaeli and actor Moshe Ivgy highlighted the “years of drought” and the “falling level of the Kinneret.”

As they spoke plaintively to camera, their features started to crack and peel — like the country — for lack of moisture.

Ninet Tayeb in the no-longer-broadcast 'Israel is drying out' commercial (photo credit: YouTube screenshot)

So compelling was this ad, so resonant its impact, I hadn’t actually realized it was no longer on the air. Alexander Kushnir put me straight. “We decided it simply wasn’t justified to alarm Israelis in this way any longer,” said Kushnir, who heads Israel’s Water Authority.

How so? Israelis don’t need to watch their water use any more? Isn’t this region one of the world’s most parched? Haven’t we been warned for years that the next Middle East war will be fought over water?

Kushnir’s answers: Yes, Israelis must still be wise with their water use. Yes, emphatically, this is a desert region, desperately short of natural water. And yes, we have indeed been worried for years about the possibility of water shortages provoking conflict.

But for Israel, for the foreseeable future, Kushnir says, the water crisis is over. And not because this happens to have been one of the wettest winters in years. Rather, he says, an insistent refusal to let the country be constrained by insufficient natural water sources — a refusal that dates back to David Ben-Gurion’s decision to build the National Water Carrier in the 1950s, the most significant infrastructure investment of Israel’s early years — led Israel first into large-scale water recycling, and over the past decade into major desalination projects. The result, as of early 2013, is that the Water Authority feels it can say with confidence that Israel has beaten the drought.

Alexander Kushnir, head of the Water Authority (photo credit: Courtesy)

Alexander Kushnir, head of the Water Authority      (photo credit: Courtesy)

Speaking to The Times of Israel from the authority’s offices in Tel Aviv, Kushnir identifies that refusal to “rely on fate” as the key to a genuine strategic achievement — a rare, highly positive change in an age and a region where most of Israel’s challenges appear to be worsening, not receding, much less disappearing.

“How did we beat the water shortage? Because we said we would. We decided we would,” says Kushnir, a big man with a warm smile and a robust Russian accent. “And once you’ve made that decision, you build the tools to reduce your dependence. We’re on the edge of the desert in an area where water has always been short. The quantity of natural water per capita in Israel is the lowest for the whole region. But we decided early on that we were developing a modern state. So we were required to supply water for agriculture, and water for industry, and then water for hi-tech, and water to sustain an appropriate quality of life.”

The National Water Carrier — which takes water from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) south through the whole country to Beersheba and beyond — exemplified Israel’s ambition. Contemplated even before the modern state was founded, its planning and initial construction were “a dominant feature of the first Ben-Gurion government — an unprecedented investment,” Kushnir notes. “It stressed our desire to achieve a different reality.”

Carrying almost 2 million cubic meters a day nationwide, that supply line, together with water from underground aquifers, kept Israel watered through the 70s. By the 1980s, though “we had a bigger population, bigger needs and the natural resources were overstretched. So we experimented with a small desalination plant in Eilat. And we began recycling purified sewage, and bringing industry into purifying water.”

“Use any superlatives you like,” urges Kushnir, to describe the fact that, today, “over 80% of our purified sewage goes back into agricultural use. The next best in the OECD is Spain with 17-18%. It’s so justified energy-wise, and environmentally as well.”

But even these innovations weren’t enough to meet the needs of an ever-growing population through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the more so when the rains failed. Average rainfall in Israel is about 1.2 billion cubic meters. But in relatively dry years, it can sink to 900 million.

As the gulf between available water resources and needs widened, Israeli agriculture moved away from water-intensive crops and pioneered enormously improved efficiency, with trailblazing drip irrigation techniques. Israel also increased the use of brackish water in agriculture. And all that still wasn’t good enough. “We knew we had to be careful not to hurt our natural resources,” says Kushnir. “Ultimately, we had no choice but to reduce the supply of natural water to agriculture, and to increase prices, which hurt our agricultural sector.”

Plainly, this was no long-term solution. Elsewhere in the region, poorly managed countries were over-drilling, over-using, and risking major damage to natural sources. “In Syria, for instance, they drilled wells everywhere and destroyed aquifers,” he says. “They had irrational, erratic water management and a lack of government policy.” Even before two years of civil war began, Syrians turned on their taps and got nothing most days of the week.

‘We didn’t want to switch off the water to a population in Israel which has enough problems to deal with’

“By 2000 our balance was really strained,” says Kushnir. “We would have had to cut back drastically in agriculture or industry or home use and we weren’t prepared to do that. We didn’t want to switch off the water to a population in Israel which has enough problems to deal with.”

The solution was desalination, on a major scale — the third phase in a water revolution that had begun with the water carrier and continued with recycling. The first large desalination plant came on line in Ashkelon in 2005, followed by Palmahim and Hadera. By the end of this year, when the Soreq and Ashdod plants are working, there’ll be five plants — built privately at a cost of NIS 6-7 billion (about $2 billion).

Israel's desalination plant on the Mediterranean Sea at Ashkelon (Photo credit: Edi Israel /Flash90)

Israel uses 2 billion cubic meters of water per year — which is actually a little less than a decade ago, as efficiencies have been introduced in agriculture (which uses 700 million), and water-saving awareness has permeated. Of that two billion, half will be “artificially” manufactured by year’s end — 600 million cubic meters from those desalination plants, and 400 from purified sewage and brackish water.

“We’re not the world’s biggest desalinators,” notes Kushnir, “but no one has made the shift so fast to a situation where half of its water needs are filled from ‘artificial’ sources. And it means we are now ready for the next decade, without dramatic dependence on rainfall fluctuations.”

Kushnir regards this as a remarkable achievement — “a lesson for the rest of the world,” he says, “or at least those many parts of the world that are grappling with variants of the difficulties Israel has overcome.”

The panicked warnings are over. But that doesn’t mean Israelis should now wash their cars with sloshing abandon, shower for hours, or hose their lawns (if they’re lucky enough to have one) day and night

So the “Israel’s drying out” ads have gone off the air, and the panicked warnings are over. But that doesn’t mean Israelis should now wash their cars with sloshing abandon, shower for hours, or hose their lawns (if they’re lucky enough to have one) day and night.

“In our region, you always have to save water,” Kushnir stresses. “There has to be intelligent water use. But I’m not going to scream at people anymore.”

The campaigns were demonstrably effective; they reduced water use by at least 10 percent, Kushnir says. “In 2000, it was 100 cubic meters per person per year. Nowadays it’s 90. That saved us a desalination plant.”

But Israel can afford to relax, at least a little. “Our job is to ensure that when you turn on the tap, water comes out,” says Kushnir. “Well, we’ve done that. People have to continue to be smart. This isn’t London or Washington, DC. You have to use water as appropriate to our region. There has to be awareness that water is a precious resource, and we have to manufacture much of it, and that costs money. The manufacture also creates carbon dioxide and that affects the environment. So, I’m not trying to scare the public. You want water, here’s water. Use it. Use it as you want, but use it wisely.”

Where does Kushnir stand on global warming? Does he see it impacting annual rainfall? “There are dramatic changes in water fall,” he responds. “We need to be prepared for graver, longer droughts. If we see global warming having more of an effect, we’ll have to increase the desalination factor. If not, we’ll stay at the current fifty-fifty.

“Personally,” he goes on, “I’m a bit skeptical that global warming is a consequence of human activity. There is partial proof that human activity has exacerbated it. [But] it might be normal fluctuations. Remember,” he adds, “I’m supposed to be skeptical when I decide where to spend our billions.”

For all the announced success, should we be concerned that it might have come too late — that desalination should have been implemented earlier, reducing the heavy pumping from the Kinneret and the aquifers?

Shuli Chen, who works for the National Water Authority, stands in the Sea of Galilee to take a measurement of the water level, March 2007. (Photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)

“Yes, we could have started desalination earlier. The damage to our natural resources would have been lighter,” Kushnir agrees. “We came very close to the black lines in the aquifers and the Kinneret which could have caused multi-year damage. Did we do harm? I hope not. But we’re moving away from the black lines now, even from the warning red lines. The immediate refilling and rehabilitation of the Sea of Galilee looks nice, but the aquifers are the key and we’re still 1 billion cubic meters to the optimal levels. Yet we’re legitimately optimistic.” (As of late February, the Sea of Galilee was at 210.24 meters below sea level, its highest level in seven years, which is a healthy 2.65 meters above the “lower red line” and 1.56 meters below the “upper red line” — the point at which the lake is considered full.)

At the same time as desalination has supplemented natural sources, he adds, Israel has also become more efficient in the collection of rainfall. “As we improve, our aquifers will refill. Our springs will fill up. Then we’ll really have done our bit.”

What about the rest of the immediate neighborhood, those who work with Israel, and those who are hostile to Israel?

Kushnir says Israel supplies an annual 100 million cubic meters in total to the Palestinian Authority (30 million) and to Jordan (70 million), in line with formal agreements. He says the PA has failed to develop all the infrastructure necessary to maximize available water, and would reach “reasonable, appropriate levels” if it did so. “They can take quite a lot from the eastern aquifer. There are natural sources they didn’t develop. It’s detailed in the interim agreements.” He also says that among Jewish settlers in the West Bank, water use is similar to that inside sovereign Israel.

Kushnir says he meets with the head of the PA’s water authority, Dr. Shaddad Attili. “We speak to them all the time and we tell them how we managed, including by purifying sewage.”

Attili, for his part, last October accused Israel of charging “extortionate” prices for the water it supplies, and the PA has claimed that Israel’s refusal to let it drill in various locations above aquifers, as well as disappointing results from the developments it has introduced, force it to continue to depend upon those Israeli supplies.

“Our water market is no longer subsidized by the state,” Kushnir responds, “not since 2007.”

As for Jordan, Kushnir says the two countries work together effectively. Ever since the Israel-Jordan border demarcation was adjusted under the 1994 peace accord, Jordan has allowed Israel to maintain its drilling facilities inside what became Jordanian territory in the south, “and we help them in the north.”

It was King Abdullah’s father Hussein who would warn about water shortages prompting the next Middle East war. As far as Kushnir is concerned, the Israeli-Jordanian working relationship where water is concerned assuages any such worry. “There is such good mutual respect and interest,” he says. “We help each other. [Relatively speaking,] they have water; their challenge is how to deliver it. There’s the Red-Dead project where we can argue about the specifics. They’re thinking of desalination in Aqaba. They have a plan for use of brackish water. They can solve their problems overall, and we’ll be happy to help.
The Israeli-Jordanian water agreement is an example of a deal where both sides benefit.”

A Palestinian man fills a tank with clean water to be trucked to families who don't have safe drinking water at their homes in Gaza City, in 2010 (photo credit: Wissam Nassar/Flash90)

Beyond Jordan, though, has the fear of drought-stoked conflict disappeared? Israel, Syria and Lebanon have long contested water rights, and intermittently accused each other of abuses. Gaza faces acute water shortages.

“We know that geostrategic changes in the region can endanger our water sources,” Kushnir allows. “We certainly can’t afford to give up our natural resources.”

Treading delicately, Kushnir notes that, despite the new successes, the Dead Sea, for instance, is “missing billions of cubic meters.” One day, he muses, “Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel could potentially redirect the waters of the Litani River,” in Lebanon, to begin to address that challenge. “Of course, he adds, with magnificent understatement, “we would have to be in a situation of constructive dialogue.”

For all that Israel’s new water health is legitimately hailed as a remarkable achievement, that utopian vision — of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel engaged in “constructive dialogue” — would seem beyond the foreseeable ambitions of even the most skilled and optimistic of rainmakers.

###

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 19th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

Op-Ed Columnist

 

Without Water, Revolution.

 

Ed Kashi/VII

 

 

 

TEL ABYAD, Syria — I just spent a day in this northeast Syrian town. It was terrifying — much more so than I anticipated — but not because we were threatened in any way by the Free Syrian Army soldiers who took us around or by the Islamist Jabhet al-Nusra fighters who stayed hidden in the shadows. It was the local school that shook me up.

 

  Thomas L. Friedman by Josh Haner/The New York Times

As we were driving back to the Turkish border, I noticed a school and asked the driver to turn around so I could explore it. It was empty — of students. But war refugees had occupied the classrooms and little kids’ shirts and pants were drying on a line strung across the playground. The basketball backboard was rusted, and a local parent volunteered to give me a tour of the bathrooms, which he described as disgusting. Classes had not been held in two years. And that is what terrified me. Men with guns I’m used to. But kids without books, teachers or classes for a long time — that’s trouble. Big trouble.

They grow up to be teenagers with too many guns and too much free time, and I saw a lot of them in Tel Abyad. They are the law of the land here now, but no two of them wear the same uniform, and many are just in jeans. These boys bravely joined the adults of their town to liberate it from the murderous tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, but now the war has ground to a stalemate, so here, as in so many towns across Syria, life is frozen in a no-man’s land between order and chaos. There is just enough patched-up order for people to live — some families have even rigged up bootleg stills that refine crude oil into gasoline to keep cars running — but not enough order to really rebuild, to send kids to school or to start businesses.

So Syria as a whole is slowly bleeding to death of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You can’t help but ask whether it will ever be a unified country again and what kind of human disaster will play out here if a whole generation grows up without school.

“Syria is becoming Somalia,” said Zakaria Zakaria, a 28-year-old Syrian who graduated from college with a major in English and who acted as our guide. “Students have now lost two years of school, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if this goes on for two more years it will be like Somalia, a failed country. But Somalia is off somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Syria is the heart of the Middle East. I don’t want this to happen to my country. But the more it goes on, the worse it will be.”

This is the agony of Syria today. You can’t imagine the war here continuing for another year, let alone five. But when you feel the depth of the rage against the Assad government and contemplate the sporadic but barbaric sect-on-sect violence, you can’t imagine any peace deal happening or holding — not without international peacekeepers on the ground to enforce it. Eventually, we will all have to have that conversation, because this is no ordinary war.

THIS Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers — Iran and Hezbollah on one side, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar on the other, each of which have an extreme interest in its Syrian allies’ defeating the other’s allies — all at a time when America, in its post-Iraq/Afghanistan phase, is extremely wary of getting involved.

I came here to write my column and work on a film for the Showtime series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” about the “Jafaf,” or drought, one of the key drivers of the Syrian war. In an age of climate change, we’re likely to see many more such conflicts.

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.

Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.

  Associated Press

Rebels in Tel Abyad, in northeast Syria, in 2012. Life in the town has ground to a halt, with children not in school, and no solution in sight.

Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”

Young people and farmers starved for jobs — and land starved for water — were a prescription for revolution. Just ask those who were here, starting with Faten, whom I met in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, 38, a Sunni, fled there with her son Mohammed, 19, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who was badly wounded in a firefight a few months ago. Raised in the northeastern Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her last name, told me her story.

She and her husband “used to own farmland,” said Faten. “We tended annual crops. We had wheat, barley and everyday food — vegetables, cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market. Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And then suddenly, the drought happened.”

What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said. “The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.

Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”

So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop. It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.” The drought was particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no longer afford either, she added. Families married off daughters at earlier ages because they couldn’t support them.

Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her. So when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “Since the first cry of ‘Allahu akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the drought? “Of course,” she said, “the drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution.”

ZAKARIA ZAKARIA was a teenager in nearby Hasakah Province when the drought hit and he recalled the way it turned proud farmers, masters of their own little plots of land, into humiliated day laborers, working for meager wages in the towns “just to get some money to eat.” What was most galling to many, said Zakaria, was that if you wanted a steady government job you had to bribe a bureaucrat or know someone in the state intelligence agency.

The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry. The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for people who come from outside.”

Only in the spring of 2011, after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, did the Assad government start to worry about the drought refugees, said Zakaria, because on March 11 — a few days before the Syrian uprising would start in Dara’a — Assad visited Hasakah, a very rare event. “So I posted on my Facebook page, ‘Let him see how people are living,’ ” recalled Zakaria. “My friends said I should delete it right away, because it was dangerous. I wouldn’t. They didn’t care how people lived.”

 

Abu Khalil, 48, is one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his 16 children after the drought wiped out their farm, he is now the Free Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian Army checkpoint. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin …”

Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no surprise.

“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.”

Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed were anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”

As part of our film we’ve been following a Syrian woman who is a political activist, Farah Nasif, a 27-year-old Damascus University graduate from Deir-az-Zour, whose family’s farm was also wiped out in the drought.

Nasif typifies the secular, connected, newly urbanized young people who spearheaded the democracy uprisings here and in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia. They all have two things in common: they no longer fear their governments or their parents, and they want to live like citizens, with equal rights — not as sects with equal fears.

If this new generation had a motto, noted Aita, the Syrian economist, it would actually be the same one Syrians used in their 1925 war of independence from France: “Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”

But Nasif is torn right now. She wants Assad gone and all political prisoners released, but she knows that more war “will only destroy the rest of the country.” And her gut tells her that even once Assad is gone, there is no agreement on who or what should come next. So every option worries her — more war, a cease-fire, the present and the future. This is the agony of Syria today — and why the closer you get to it, the less certain you are how to fix it.

###

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 18th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 

Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Stone Age

adam-keller2.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/the-stone-age.html

 

A few weeks ago a military judge, Major Amir Dahan, acquitted four Palestinians of the charge of “attempted murder by throwing stones at vehicles”. He stated that “throwing stones can, under some circumstances, have the character of a lethal offence, carrying the near certainty of a danger to human life – but under other circumstances it might be no more than a prank without the potential of serious damage, by a young person who had barely crossed into the age of criminal responsibility”.This verdict angered Housing Minister Uri Ariel of the Jewish Home party, who said in the beginning of last week: “This is no way to render judgment in  Israel. It is about such things that we daily utter the prayer “O restore our judges, as of old”. We should not tolerate even one stone. We must not forgive even one stone . A stone kills”.Later this week, the head of the party joined Ariel. The well known Naftali Bennett, Minister of Economy, made a public call to change the rules of engagement so as to allow soldiers a much lighter trigger finger when facing Palestinians, since “travelling the roads of Judea and Samaria has turned into hell.”The press tycoon Shlomo Ben-Zvi, who a few months ago bought the failing “Ma’ariv” paper, also joined the fray. Already for several days the Ma’ariv headlines are mainly concerned with the stone age which had descended on the West Bank. Ma’ariv devotes pages upon pages to the cry of the settlers, stridently demanding that soldiers finally start shooting and killing  stone throwers. The paper’s reporters gathered the shocking testimonies of soldiers asserting that their hands are tied behind their backs by the military orders. “The best guys, the best fighters, salt of the earth”, reporter Chen Kutas- Bar called them.

Also columnist Adi Arbel of the Institute for Zionist Strategies added his own account of a terrible event he had witnessed. Last week, at noon of the  celebrated Jerusalem Day, several VIPs of the Israeli right wing camp went to the settler enclave at the heart of Silwan Village, to get there the Moskowitz Prize from the multi-millionaire Irving Moskowitz – the well known settler patron who for this occasion left for two days his flourishing gambling business in California. It happened that on their way to this event, the settlers and their friends went through the Palestinian neighborhood of A-Tur on Mount Olive, where a boy of about 18 threw a stone at their bus. And alas, laments the Zionist strategist, nothing happened to this boy , no policeman and no soldier thought of pulling a weapon and opening fire on him. Adi Arbel’s sad conclusion: even after 46 years, East Jerusalem is not under Israeli sovereignty. Well, with that I am not going to dispute.

And what about when settlers gather alongside the highway and throw stones at each passing Palestinian car? What happens when they aim a whole  barrage of stones at a school bus full of Palestinian girl pupils and wound some of them? Should that, too, be treated as a case where even one stone could not be tolerated or forgiven, because “a stone kills”? Is that also the kind of situation where the rules of engagement should be changed and soldiers’ fingers become more loose on the trigger? Or perhaps this is exactly the case where stone-throwing is indeed no more than a prank without the potential of serious damage? Well, it’s no use to pose too many questions to the honorable minister Uri Ariel and to the honorable minister Naftali Bennett and to Ma’ariv publisher Shlomo Ben-Zvi and his well-trained reporters.

By coincidence or not, it was just this week that a military court was hearing the case of a soldier who did not feel that his hands were tied and who had no  particular problem to tighten his finger on the trigger. On 12 January this year – just in the midst of the Israeli elections campaign in which hardly anyone mentioned the Palestinians – this soldier (whose name is not published) was stationed in South Hebron Hills at a point where Palestinians are habitually trying to cross into Israel and find work. Many of them do succeed in their attempt. Unfortunately for the 21-year old Uday Darwish of the town of Dura, this particular soldier did open fire and he was hit and died a few hours later in the hospital, his funeral attended by thousands.

occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/israeli-forces-shoot-kill-21-year-old-worker-uday-kamil-muhammad-darwish-south-of-hebron/

This particular soldier did not assert that army regulations had bound his hands. “This is the first time I encountered a shooting event, it never happened to me before. I never before got to such a situation of standing in front of 30 people I don’t know. Earlier we had been on the border of Egypt where a lot of Sudanese were passing we were always warned that in any group of Sudanese who come to Israel there is the hazard that one would be wielding a stabbing knife or wearing an explosive belt or something like that. ” (As a matter of fact, among  tens of thousands of Sudanese who arrived in Israel until now there had never been any such case…)

The Prosecution wants to treat this case severely, and therefore impose a full  nine months’ imprisonment and also demote the soldier one notch, from Staff  Sergeant to an ordinary Sergeant. However, the soldier’s attorney, Yechiel Lamesh, asked the court to content itself with a term of three months, since “We should send a message to the fighters who risk their lives for us. We should understand and make it clear to them that to err is human and that an error, even a severe one, need not draw upon them the full severity of the law .” The defense attorney also asked that his client not be demoted, so as not to hurt the honor and dignity of this fighter of the Israel Defense Forces.

www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/1.2019449

So, what the appropriate punishment for a soldier who shot and killed (not on purpose) a Palestinian worker who was going to sustain his family? Three months,  or nine months, or something in between? Will he be demoted by one notch, or would the court take care not to hurt his honor and dignity? The Court is to convene again at the end of the month and make clear if they take up the prosecution’s case or that of the defense.

But what about one who did not shoot and did not kill anyone and who in the first place refused to join the army of occupation and wear its uniform and swear allegiance to it? One who altogether refused to get himself into a situation where he would stand armed in front of thirty people whom he has never seen before and have their lives and deaths at the mercy of his finger on the trigger? What is the proper punishment for such a crime of refusal? Half a year? A year? Two years? That is not yet clear.

Half a year has already passed since Natan Blanc arrived at the IDF Recruitment Center on his call-up date, November 19, 2012, and provided the recruitment officer with a detailed and reasoned letter setting out the reasons  for his refusal to enlist. Half a year in which he is going in and out of Military Prison 6, in and out, in and out, in and out and in again.

The army chose not to bring him to a military court, whose proceedings are held in public and where the defendant can have a defense attorney and set out legal arguments and also express from the dock a conscientious and principled position. Instead, Natan Blanc is being repeatedly brought before a military officer who had been authorized to serve as a Judging Officer. A trial by a Judging Officer is a much simpler and easier affair – without the presence of any public, without lawyers and without witnesses and without any complicated legal procedures. Court is held in the normal office of the Judging Officer, with nobody present except the judge and the defendant, and usually lasts all of three to five minutes. In exceptional cases it can drag on up to ten minutes. Natan Blanc has already passed through very many such mini-trials, being sent to jail sometimes for two weeks, sometimes three weeks,  sometimes a month. Each time he gets out of jail and is given another order to enlist and returns again to the office of the Judging Officer. So far he already accumulated 150 days behind bars, which is definitely not the end.

Yesterday, Friday, May 17, 2013, Natan Blanc celebrated his twentieth birthday behind bars at Military Prison 6 in Atlit. The activists of the Yesh Gvul movement came in the afternoon to celebrate with him on the mountain opposite the prison, whose summit was seen from the prison yard by several generations of refusers since the first Lebanon War in 1982. “Let’s celebrate! Come with your friends, bring refreshments and party accessories, especially those which can be seen or heard from very far: balloons, ribbons, signs, noise makers, whistles etc. ” was written in the invitation.  On Tuesday there will be another demonstration, held in front of the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, and the case of Blanc also gets increasing international attention.

Blanc told the military officers and judges that, once released from the army (and jail) he is going to do civilian service at the Magen David Adom medical rescue service. But when is that going to happen? The office of the IDF spokesman was not very forthcoming “A person liable for military service, whose application for exemption on grounds of conscience is denied, must perform a term of military service as set out in the Defense Service Act. One who refuses to do would be treated in accordance with the regular procedures.” Period.

It may very well that the soldier who killed Uday Darwish will be set free earlier.

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BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FOLLOWING:

Ministers blast violence at ultra-Orthodox rally

Deputy finance minister calls protesters’ actions at demonstration against draft law ‘shameful’ and a crossing of ‘all the red lines’ – 10 policemen injured by these draft-refuseniks from the ranks of those claiming the Jewish religion. Are their stones any different?

May 17, 2013,

.Israeli police officers confront ultra-Orthodox demonstrators during in front of the recruiting office in Jerusalem, May 16, 2013 (photo credit: Flash90)

Israeli police officers confront ultra-Orthodox demonstrators during in front of the recruiting office in Jerusalem, May 16, 2013
(photo credit: Flash90)

 

 

Deputy Finance Minister Mickey Levy on Friday slammed ultra-Orthodox demonstrators who took part in violence at a Jerusalem rally Thursday protesting the universal draft law, claiming that their behavior “crossed all the red lines.”

Levy posted on his Facebook page that the injuring of 10 policemen by the protesters was shameful and unacceptable. He further stressed that the government would continue to promote equality in the burden of army service, and would work against extremists who want to “preserve poverty and discrimination.”

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 13th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

Iran will assume the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament on May 27 and hold it over four weeks, until June 23, 2013.

The conference chair helps organize the work of the conference and assists in setting the agenda.

The conference was established in 1979 after a special U.N. General Assembly session, and is made up of 65 countries. In the past, the conference and its predecessors negotiated major multilateral arms limitation and disarmament agreements. In recent years it has become paralyzed, with member states often divided even on setting the agenda.

The Conference of Disarmament reports to the UN General Assembly and is billed by the UN as “the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community.”

Iran is astate that illegally supplies rockets to Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, potentially aiding and abetting mass murder and terrorism. To make this rogue regime head of world arms control is an outrage. Abusers of international norms should not be the public face of the UN.


“This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the Geneva based non-governmental organization, which announced it will hold protest events outside the UN hall, featuring Iranian dissidents.

The UN is not shocked, its officials say Iran’s post is merely the result of an automatic rotation.

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The US and others speak up:

Statement by Erin Pelton, Spokesperson, U.S. Mission to the United Nations, on Iran’s Rotation as President of the Conference on Disarmament, May 13, 2013
Erin Pelton
Spokesperson 
U.S. Mission to the United Nations 
New York, NY
May 13, 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Iran’s upcoming rotation as President of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) is unfortunate and highly inappropriate. The United States continues to believe that countries that are under Chapter VII sanctions for weapons proliferation or massive human-rights abuses should be barred from any formal or ceremonial positions in UN bodies.

While the presidency of the CD is largely ceremonial and involves no substantive responsibilities, allowing Iran–a country that is in flagrant violation of its obligations under multiple UN Security Council Resolutions and to the IAEA Board of Governors–to hold such a position runs counter to the goals and objectives of the Conference on Disarmament itself. As a result, the United States will not be represented at the ambassadorial level during any meeting presided over by Iran.

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another e-mail we got:


This isn’t the first time that the Conference on Disarmament has faced similar controversy. In July 2011it was North Korea’s turn to take the helm. Not surprisingly, North Korea took the appointment as a sign of approval. Its representative announced that the country was “very much committed to the Conference” and that “he would do everything in his capacity to move the Conference on Disarmament forward.”

So fast forward. We find an ever more aggressive North Korea sharing nuclear know-how with like-minded belligerents, such as Iran and Syria.

When North Korea took the helm, Iran’s representative told the Conference: “I would like to congratulate the distinguished ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the assumption of the presidency and assuring him of my delegation’s full support and cooperation.” You can be sure that the North Korean rep will deliver an equally flowery welcome when Iran dons the crown.

This also isn’t the first time that the UN has appointed Iran to a position of authority wildly at odds with its reprehensible record. In 2010 Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women – the UN’s top women’s rights body. Iranian laws that permit women to be stoned for alleged adultery? Irrelevant.

The saddest part of this charade is that these countries and their despotic leaders take sustenance from acquiring such formal trappings and basking in the accompanying diplomatic niceties. The United States is a member of the Conference on Disarmament. We don’t need another administration speech that the “door is still open” but “the window is closing.” With an Iranian poised to preside, we need to leave.

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UN rights chief finally thinks Egypt’s human rights trajectory a problem

UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay is getting worried somebody might figure out she was on the wrong side of history in Egypt. Her latest press statement is entitled: “Egypt risks drifting away from human rights ideals.” D’ya think? So Pillay now has this to say about the legal moves currently unfolding under the human rights tutelage of the Muslim Brotherhood: “I am very concerned that the new law, if adopted in its current form, may leave them in a worse situation than they were prior to the fall of the Mubarak Government in 2011.”

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Then see also:

Saudi Arabia heads UN counter-terror efforts

Leading terror exporter Saudi Arabia heads UN’s Counter-Terrorism Centre

Saudi Arabia is the Chair of the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Centre Advisory Board. Well, it does know a lot about terrorism – as a major player in the realm of training, financing and indoctrinating terrorists. Saudi Arabia has also ratified the terrorism treaty of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which defines terrorism to exempt hitting Jewish or American or any other target while engaged in “armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism, and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination.” So how did Saudi Arabia come to Chair the UN “counter-terrorism” group? The UN website unabashedly informs us that they bought it: “In 2011, through a voluntary contribution of the Government of Saudi Arabia, the United Nations Secretariat was able to launch the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT).” The Obama administration responded by joining their Advisory Board.

====================================================

The State Department’s recent release of its human rights report on Saudi Arabia contains the following statement under the heading “anti-Semitism:” “There were no known Jewish citizens.” Judenrein Arab states?

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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

UN chief says Israel should calm down about Hezbollah-bound Syrian weapons

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has swung into action on Syria – to criticize Israel for destroying Hezbollah-bound weapons on Syrian territory. The threat to international peace and security, and specifically to Israel, from weaponry switching hands and moving across borders from Syria grows more dire day-by-day. The UN chief thought the right response was to ask “all sides” (ie Israel) to “exercise maximum calm and restraint” – and respect Syrian “national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Since when was murdering 70,000 + and arming organizations committed to attacking a neighboring state, an internal sovereign affair?

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Richard Falk addresses AUB audience

UN’s Falk welcomed in Beirut after his obscene remarks on Boston

Terrorist sympathizer and UN Human Rights Council expert Richard Falk had a busy week in the Hezbollah stronghold of Beirut, following his obscene remarks on the Boston terror attacks. On Thursday of last week he delivered the annual Constantine Zurayk Lecture at the American University of Beirut. He entitled his speech “Rethinking the Future of Palestine: Beyond the Two State Consensus,” and argued against the two-state solution for ending the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict because at this moment in time it is “obsolete.” Iranian TV has now posted a video about Falk’s performance. Similar to the justifications he made for “resistance” at the time of the Boston terror attacks, Press TV reports that Falk “praised the resistance of the Palestinian people, considering it as the only means to address their suffering….Dr. Falk argued that…the only way to address the ordeal of the Israeli occupation is through global mobilization of support for the resistance….” In addition to direct support for terrorism – aka “resistance” – Falk told the reporter: “Israel can’t live in peace and security with its neighbors…It is a pariah state endangering the Middle East…and the U.S. is an accomplice.” Zurayk was a well-known Arab nationalist who spent his career arguing how the battle against Israel can be won and giving directions for “the road to final and complete victory.” He is heralded for coining the term “al-nakba” – the now entrenched reference to the creation of the state of Israel as a “catastrophe.” Some call him the grand-daddy of the insidious political plan of “catastrophology.” It is clear why Falk would be the recipient of the Zurayk honor.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 12th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

The following is by by Daniel Pipes, May 11, 2013
www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/05/support-the-syrian-rebels

that also includes “Arabs condemn attacks on Syria” on Sun News Network of Canada’s The Arena with Michael Coren, May 6.  (To watch, click here.)   www.danielpipes.org/12833/arabs-c… which in turn has a reader’s comment:

 

Submitted by Phil Greend (Canada), May 11, 2013 at 16:34

Now and only now the Muslims speak out on the subject of Syrian Muslims being killed.

There has been over 70,000 Muslims murdered, by other Muslims in Syria. Many of these people non-soldiers.

Where is the outrage from the Muslims over this evil?

——————-

So far as Bashar el Assad – he wanted to be an ophthalmologist, but his father conscripted him into the family business of running Syria after the death by accident of his brother. Clearly secular, Bashar could have made Syria into a modern western State, but was not allowed by his father’s military to do any good and gave in to them.
He is better then the Islamic alternative, but he also went to bed with Iran and he Hezbollah – so here you have it – there is nobody likable in Syria – and the people pay for this with their lives.

———————————————————————

A Washington Post article today, “Assad forces gaining ground in Syria” by Liz Sly, argues that recent events suggest that the Assad regime is not just surviving but has gone on the offensive. Drawing on local analysts, she finds that in the civil war, “there is little doubt that the pendulum is now swinging in favor of Assad … bolstered by a new strategy, the support of Iran and Russia and the assistance of fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.”

If this in fact be the case, then, Western governments should respond by helping the rebels to prevent Assad from crushing them.

This advice is consistent with my argument (in an article titled “Support Assad” published just a month ago, when Assad appeared to be going down) that the West should prevent either side in the civil war from emerging victorious by “helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their conflict.”

This policy recommendation of “helping whichever side is losing” sounds odd, I admit, but it is strategic. (May 11, 2013)

Related Topics:  Syria, US policy The original says: This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 11th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

Green Prophet Headlines – Oman’s Sustainable GU Tech Campus Scoops Coveted Construction Prize


Oman’s Sustainable GU Tech Campus Scoops Coveted Construction Prize

Posted: 10 May 2013 02:14 PM PDT

Oman is a small nation {with large territory} bordering Abu Dhabi on the Arabian peninsula; it has a long coastline and one of the largest populations of endangered Loggerhead turtles on earth.

It also subsidizes energy and water, essentially arresting any kind of sustainable development.
There’s no incentive to conserve something that comes for free.

But there’s a new architectural firm in town and they are laying the groundwork for a more responsible future and it starts now with the new GU Tech in Halban. The first German university on the peninsula, the new campus recently scooped Commercial Project of the Year at Oman’s 2013 Construction Week Awards.

Although Oman is not really equipped to incorporate renewable energy into the national grid and has focused very little attention on ecological urban planning, the US and German-educated team are deeply concerned about the nation’s future.
After all, one day fossil fuel resources will run out, and future generations will be left to deal with it.

It hasn’t always been this way. As Al Salmy explains to The Times of Oman, Omanis were well versed in sustainable design about 600-700 years ago – as evidenced in various villages carefully constructed to make optimum use of prevailing winds and water resources. {You know – we call this the course of having plenty of fossil fuels for this, in history, fleeting moment.}

 

GU Tech comprises the best of ancient Islamic design and contemporary materials to deliver an attractive, energy-efficient space with a decent amount of green space.

A state of the art air-conditioning system redirects cool air to an inner courtyard area, which is chilled a further five degrees by a curious system of sails – perhaps inspired by dhows, and grey water is purified and then used to irrigate the vegetation.

The facade resembles a mashrabiya screen which further mitigates solar gain, and energy efficient lighting conserves energy as well.

 

In all of their projects Al Salmy Hoehler & Partner LLC strives to make buildings “solar-ready” so that when Oman does implement a national grid that can handle renewable energy generation, these projects can simply plug and go without requiring a major retrofit.

“The nine jurors emphasized in particular the pioneering role of the project in the Sultanate in terms of overtopping the usual local standards with a modern, sustainable and state-of-the-art equipment and design,”  according to the German Emirati Joint Council for Industry & Commerce (AHK).

“They highlighted as well the exemplary implementation of a modern architecture in a design which conveys successfully between traditional Omani architecture and a modern, clear and functional architecture.”

A fine design indeed. More please.

Images via Hoehler & Partner Facebook Page

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Ernst Hoehler and Muhammad Al Salmy are the progressive brains behind Hoehler & Partner LLC in Oman’s capital Muscat. A team of committed architects, planners and engineers, the firm came to being in 2008 largely as a result of winning the award to design the GU Tech Campus.

 

Green Attitude

by Sarah MacDonald


Click on Image for Slideshow
Muhammad is the “Partner” in Hoehler & Partner LLC Architects and Engineers, a German-Omani joint venture, founded in 2008 and based in Muscat. Though the company is young, it is already gaining recognition as one of the most innovative architecture firms in Oman. At the 2013 Construction Week Awards Oman they received the award for “Best Commercial Project” for the new GUtech campus in Halban, while Richard Lisker, from the company and project, won the prize for “Best Project Manager.”Muhammad, the owner and chief architect received highest recommendation as Engineer of the Year and Construction Executive of the Year. What set the company apart was their emphasis on going above and beyond usual standards with modern, sustainable designs that bridge traditional Omani architecture with contemporary, functional, architecture, ideas that are very important to Muhammad. “It’s a sustainable building, and it’s the new architecture of Oman,” he says, sitting in his office in Shatti Qurum. Architecture runs in Muhammad’s blood. His father was also an architect, and since he was a child, Muhammad, now in his early 30s, has been fascinated by designing buildings. “I used to go to his office when I was a kid. I loved it. I was already designing before I went to school. When I was in high school I would help my uncles design their houses,” he recalls, a big smile brightening his face. His father actually discouraged him from pursuing a career in architecture, telling him it wasn’t appreciated enough, but Muhammad wasn’t deterred. Without his family’s knowledge, he majored in architecture at the University of Oklahoma in the USA. He loved his studies and continued on to get a Master’s degree.After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, a job opportunity took him to Germany, a country where sustainability and concern for the environment is widespread. While living in Germany from 2004 until 2008, he enrolled in Aachen University, from which he’s now finishing a PhD in Urban Conservation. It was also there that he and some German architects decided to collaborate and submit a design for the new GUtech campus. Part of their proposal included setting up a base in Muscat. When they were awarded the contract, Hoehler & Partner was born.

GUtech is much more than classrooms, Muhammad says. It’s a pioneering design for sustainable architecture. It has an air conditioning system that reuses the cool air, and redirects it to cool the main common area, which is an outdoor courtyard type of space within the main building. The doors and windows are airtight to hold the cool air. There are sensors to turn off lights when no one is there. It reuses its own dirty water to water the green spaces. It was built according to the direction that would maximise wind flow for natural cooling. The campus also reflects the environment around it.

“The whole concept has Omani elements. It has Omani architecture, like the open space in the middle, like you have in Nizwa Fort, for example. That centre has to have life. It’s a place where students can stay in the summer, and we cooled it by five degrees with the sails above to create shade and air flow with their direction, and with the water fountain below,” Muhammad explains.

Since the GUtech project, the company has been growing rapidly. Some of its currently projects include the Museum of History of Islamic Science, the Porsche showroom renovations, and the new University of Buraimi campus. They also have some small projects, including villas for environmentally-conscious Omanis, and they are doing project management for a project in Ghazni, Afghanistan, which is the Cultural City for Islam for 2013.

At the centre of all these projects and others, are the concepts that made GUtech a winner. They feature designs that save energy and are more eco-friendly than most. The Museum of History of Islamic Science, which is about to be built on the GUtech campus, includes designs that combine Islamic art with sustainable architecture. The museum will have a shell around it made of geometric Islamic patterns that will also keep the building cool, for example. The expansion to the Porsche showroom will have more insulation in its façade to make it more energy efficient. Some of their clients even want solar panels added to the buildings so they can use renewable energy. Oman may not use renewable energy yet or have a smart grid for it, but Muhammad says most of their clients don’t care.

They are willing to invest their own money to be sustainable, including solar panels or using material that helps preserve energy. In hopes that one day there will be renewable energy throughout the Sultanate, Muhammad and his team make some of their designs future-ready, so they can be hooked up to a national renewable energy grid at the flip of a switch. He says it would make sense for buildings with renewable energy systems, like solar energy, to be hooked up to the grid already, since they would contribute free energy back to it. Compared to German and other top international standards Hoehler & Partner’s designs aren’t up to par for sustainability, but here in Oman they are leading the way.  “We do what we can within the constraints,” Muhammad says. “We push people to go for LED lights which last longer and use less electricity, for example, or to go for double-pane windows which conserve energy. If you think about it in the long-term, the return on investment is less than 10 years.” It’s worth spending a bit more money for better-made products which last longer and save money in the long run, he insists. The government should provide incentives for people who go green. If they use solar-powered water heaters, or reduce their consumption, they should be rewarded, he suggests.

He realises that many people don’t worry about the environment because it doesn’t affect them financially. With huge electricity, water and gas subsidies, people aren’t aware of the true costs. He says he was shocked at the energy prices in Germany, and learned the importance of reducing his consumption to save money, as well as protect the environment. When the subsidies here can no longer be maintained, the prices will rise, so to keep the costs down, Muhammad says renewable energy is the way to go. He says people will go green if it saves them money. But in the meantime, he hopes the government will use its energy profits to invest in renewable energy projects. “Yes, now we have the oil, we have the gas, but what about the future generations? Why don’t we sell the oil and gas and finance the future?” he asks. One of the ways to change people’s mindsets is education and leading by example, Muhammad says.

He and his company are considering introducing a “Habitat for Humanity” type of home-building charity to Oman, in which low-income families, together with volunteers, work together to build homes for themselves. Hoehler & Partner would be able to teach the families and volunteers about sustainable building techniques, and the resulting homes would also be energy-saving, which would in turn save the families much needed money, he explains.

“We want to involve all the public and students. They’ll learn what can be done in their homes,” he says. “Companies have to play a better role in education. We want to do that.” Muhammad says people only need to look as far as at the ancient falaj systems of irrigation or some of the old towns to see that Oman has a history of environmentalism. Water in a falaj was carefully maintained, recycled and went from one farm to another. “People are wasting a huge amount of water in Oman. Why don’t you make a car wash out of recycled water? All of these things have to be implemented,” Muhammad explains.

Villages like Izki and Manah were sustainable because they were built with a lot of consideration to the wind direction, sources of water, and sunshine. The buildings were clustered together to save space, and the mosques and market squares were ideally located. Muhammad and his team at Hoehler & Partner look at these old Omani designs for inspiration and translate them into their modern, state-of-the-art buildings. “They had good urban planning 600, 700 years ago. Why can’t we now? We want to prove that we can go to a green building concept. It really works. It’s for the long-term,” Muhammad concludes.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 10th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

This website argued for years that Turkey could have enhanced its world position by allowing enough slack to its own Kurds establishing itself as a bi-National State – Turkish-Kurdish and absorb the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Iran, Syria, as well. They did not – and now Erdogan tries to go for what he thinks is within his reach.

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PKK Challenges Barzani
In Iraqi Kurdistan.

Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters talk to each other as they stand guard at the Kandil mountains near the Iraq-Turkish border in Sulaimaniya, 330 km (205 miles) northeast of Baghdad March 24, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Azad Lashkari)

While Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) pursues the cease-fire plan with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the PKK is also involved in a subtle power struggle across Turkey’s borders. This struggle is being played out by the PKK’s efforts to check the influence of Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, over leadership of the Kurds. By engaging in the Kurdistan Region’s messy pre-election politics and supporting the opposition Change Movement (Goran), the PKK is attempting to stifle a third mandate for Barzani, while stirring local criticism of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). These PKK interventions are unlikely to alter the status quo in the region — at least for the forthcoming elections — however; they are fueling political fragmentation and creating additional challenges to regional stability.

 

Indeed, rivalries between the PKK and Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) are nothing new. During the Iraqi Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, the PKK and KDP engaged in armed conflict against each other, as well as the KDP against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

The Ocalan-Barzani competition re-emerged after the Syrian civil war broke out, and as different Syrian Kurdish groups backed by the PKK and its affiliate, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) vied for power with the KDP-supported Kurdish National Council. This rivalry continues with Barzani tied to Turkey and attempting to court Syrian Kurdish youth groups and independents away from PYD influence.

Still, Barzani and Ocalan reached a tacit agreement after Ocalan’s imprisonment in 1999, which allowed the PKK to relocate in the Kandil Mountains in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The KRG also tolerates the presence of thousands of PKK supporters in the Makhmour Camp, where they have been residing since 1994 as political refugees. Moreover, despite the rapprochement between Erbil and Ankara, Barzani has affirmed that “the period of Kurds killing Kurds is over” and that the KRG Peshmerga would not engage militarily against the PKK or any other Kurdish group. These efforts have led to a mutually peaceful coexistence between the KDP and PKK, despite the distinctly different ideologies and regional relationships each has developed, particularly with Ankara.

The last six months, however, have seen a shift in PKK tactics inside the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Whereas the PKK leader in Kandil, Murat Karaliyan, had previously indicated his willingness to work with Barzani in 2009, he now opposes electing him to a third term as president. The PKK is using its networks and social media to incite local opposition against Barzani and the Iraqi Kurdish parties. For instance, it is encouraging local populations in the Iraqi Kurdish-Iranian border town of Halabja to criticize the KRG and Barzani for lack of services. One of the PKK websites has inflammatory photos and remarks about Barzani’s leadership, as well as other KRG political party leaders.

This shift reflects a reaction to Barzani’s growing power — including his close ties to Erdogan — and his claims or ambitions to become a leader of all the Kurds, expressed in Kurdish as “president of Kurdistan,” which the PKK rejects.

More specifically, the PKK shift coincides with the illness of Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq and leader of the PUK, which has further weakened the PUK and limited any serious competition for the KDP and Barzani’s power. In fact, the rump of the PUK — known as the “Gang of Four” — may have called for a separate list in the planned September elections to reflect its differences and attempts to challenge the KDP. Yet the PUK leadership continues to support and depend upon Barzani as president, particularly as a financial patron.

This is why the PKK is now calling for a “Kurdistan supported by Goran.” Goran remains the only secular Kurdish nationalist party that seeks to remove Barzani from office while pressing for a parliamentary and not presidential system for the region. Goran also has indicated its support for the PKK and affirmed the PYD as the representative of the Kurds in Syria, posing another direct challenge to Barzani and the KDP. The PKK-Goran alliance also is based on shared concerns about Turkey’s regional power and the need to check Erdogan’s influence over Iraqi Kurds and in Syria.

It is unlikely that the PKK will weaken the deeply rooted patronage networks inside the Kurdistan Region that will assure Barzani power and KDP and PUK influence for years to come. Many people, particularly the youth, may support the PKK as true Kurdish nationalists and back Goran; however, they also have been co-opted by the increasingly generous handouts and comfortable lifestyles made available to them by the KRG in recent years. Many others are disinterested in politics altogether or unwilling to pay the consequences of being linked to the opposition.

Still, PKK engagement in Iraqi Kurdish politics matters because it reveals the growing complexity of the trans-border Kurdish problem and the PKK’s political agenda to change the status quo. This challenge will not only be about advancing Kurdish nationalist rights in different states, but clarifying who will represent Kurdish interests and what form these nationalist interests should take. Whatever the outcome, these struggles will likely create a wide opening for more deal-making between Kurdish groups and regional states, keeping the Kurdish nationalist movement fragmented from within and across borders.

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Denise Natali holds the Minerva Chair at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), National Defense University where she specializes in Iraq, regional energy issues and the Kurdish problem. The views expressed are her own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the US government.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 10th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 

A parched Syria turned to war, scholar says, and Egypt may be next.

Prof. Arnon Sofer sets out the link between drought, Assad’s civil war, and the wider strains in the Middle East; Jordan and Gaza are also in deep trouble, he warns.

May 9, 2013, The Times of Israel

One quarter of the 3000 km.-long Euphrates River runs through Syria but Turkey, situated upriver, has drastically reduced the flow of water (Photo credit: CC BY Verity Cridland, Flickr)

 

Some look at the upheaval in Syria through a religious lens. The Sunni and Shia factions, battling for supremacy in the Middle East, have locked horns in the heart of the Levant, where the Shia-affiliated Alawite sect has ruled a majority Sunni nation for decades.

Some see it through a social prism. As they did in Tunis with Muhammad Bouazizi — an honest man who couldn’t make an honest living in this corruption-ridden part of the world — the social protests that sparked the war in Syria started in the poor and disenfranchised parts of the country.

Others look at the eroding boundaries of state in Syria and other parts of the Middle East as a direct result of the sins of Western hubris and Colonialism.

Professor Arnon Sofer has no qualms with any of these claims and interpretations. But the upheaval in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, he says, cannot be fully understood without also taking two environmental truths into account: soaring birthrates and dwindling water supply.

Over the past 60 years, the population in the Middle East has twice doubled itself, said Sofer, the head of the Chaikin geo-strategy group and a longtime lecturer at the IDF’s top defense college, where today he heads the National Defense College Research Center. “There is no example of this anywhere else on earth,” he said of the population increase. Couple that with Syria’s water scarcity, he said, “and as a geographer it was clear to me that a conflict would erupt.”

The Pentagon cautiously agrees with this thesis. In February the Department of Defense released a “climate-change adaptation roadmap.” While the effects of climate change alone do not cause conflict, the report states, “they may act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world.” Predominantly the paper is concerned with the effects of rising seas and melting arctic permafrost on US military installations. The Middle East is not mentioned by name.

But Sofer and Anton Berkovsky, who together compiled the research work of students at the National Defense College and released a geo-strategic paper on Syria earlier in the year, believe that water scarcity played a significant role in the onset of the Syrian civil war and the Arab Spring, and that it may help re-shape the strategic bonds and interests of the region as regimes teeter and borders blur. Sofer also believes that a “Pax Climactica” is within reach if regional leaders would only, for a short while, forsake their natural inclinations to wake up in the morning and seek to do harm.

Syria is 85 percent desert or semi-arid country. But it has several significant waterways. The Euphrates runs in a south-easterly direction through the center of the country to Iraq. The Tigris runs southeast, tracing a short part along Syria’s border with Turkey before flowing into Iraq. And, aside from several lesser rivers that flow southwest through Lebanon to the Mediterranean, Syria has an estimated four to five billion cubic meters of water in its underground aquifers.

From 2007-2008, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and some 250,000 farmers relocated to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities. The capital, like many of its peer cities in the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.

For these reasons the heart of the country was once an oasis. For 5,000 years, Damascus was famous for its agriculture and its dried fruit. Since 1950, however, the population has increased sevenfold in Syria, to 22 million, and Turkey, in an age of scarcity, has seized much of the water that once flowed south into Syria.

“They’ve been choking them,” Sofer said, noting that Turkey annually takes half of the available 30 billion cubic meters of water in the Euphrates. This limits Syria’s water supply and hinders its ability to generate hydroelectricity.

In 2007, after years of population growth and institutional economic stagnation, several dry years descended on Syria. Farmers began to leave their villages and head toward the capital. From 2007-2008, Sofer said, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and some 250,000 farmers – Sofer calls them “climate refugees” – relocated to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities.

The capital, like many of its peer cities in the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.

This, along with over one million refugees from the Iraq war and, among other challenges, borders that contain a dizzying array of religions and ethnicities, set the stage for the civil war.

Tellingly, it broke out in the regions most parched — “in Daraa [in the south] and in Kamishli in the northeast,” Sofer said. “Those are two of the driest places in the country.”

Professor Eyal Zisser, one of Israel’s top scholars of Syria, agreed that the drought played a significant role in the onset of the war. “Without doubt it is part of the issue,” he said. Zisser did not believe that water was the central issue that inflamed Syria but rather “the match that set the field of thorns on fire.”

Rebel troops transporting two women to safety along the Orontes River, which has shrunk in recent years and grown increasingly saline (Photo credit: CC BY FreedomHouse)

Rebel troops transporting two women to safety along the Orontes River, which has shrunk in recent years and grown increasingly saline (Photo credit: CC BY FreedomHouse)

Since that fire began to rage in March 2011, the course of the battles has been partially dictated by a different sort of logic, not environmental in nature. “Assad is butchering his way west,” Sofer said. He believes the president will eventually have to retreat from the capital and therefore has focused his efforts on Homs and other cities and towns that lie between Damascus and the Alawite regions near the coast, cutting himself an escape route.

Sofer and Berkovsky envision several scenarios for Syria. Among them: Assad puts down the rebellion and remains in power; Assad abdicates and a Sunni majority seizes control; Assad abdicates and no central power is able to assert control. The most likely scenario, Sofer said, was that the Syrian dictator would eventually flee to Tehran. But he preferred to avoid that sort of micro-conjecture and to focus on the regional effects of population growth and water scarcity and the manner in which that ominous mix might shape the future of the region.

Writing in the New York Times from Yemen on Thursday, Thomas Friedman embraced a similar thesis, noting that the heart of the al-Qaeda activity in the region corresponded with the areas most stricken by drought. Sofer published a paper in July where he laid out the grim environmental reality of the region and argued that, as in Syria, the conflicts bedeviling the region were not about climate issues but were deeply influenced by them.

Egypt, Sofer wrote, faces severe repercussions from climate change. Even a slight rise in the level of the sea – just half a meter – would salinize the Nile Delta aquifers and force three million people out of the city of Alexandria. In the more distant future, as the North Sea melts, the Suez Canal could decline in importance. More immediately, and of greater significance to Israel, he wrote that Egypt, faced with a water shortage, would likely grow more militant over the coming years. But he felt the militancy would be directed south, toward South Sudan and Ethiopia and other nations competing for the waters of the Nile, and not north toward the Levant.

The NIle River, the lifeblood of Egypt's 82 million people (Photo credit: CC BY Simona Scolari, Flickr)

The Nile River, the lifeblood of Egypt’s 82 million people (Photo credit: CC BY Simona Scolari, Flickr)

As proof that this pivot has already begun, Sofer pointed to Abu-Simbel, near the border with Sudan. There the state has converted a civilian airport into a military one. “The conclusion to be drawn from this is simple and unequivocal,” he wrote. “Egypt today represents a military threat to the southern nations of the Nile and not the Zionist state to the east.”

The Sinai Peninsula, already quite lawless, will only get worse, perhaps to the point of secession, he and Berkovsky wrote. Local Bedouin will have difficulty raising animals in the region and will turn, to an even greater degree, to smuggling material and people along a route established in the Bronze Age, through Sinai to Asia and Europe.

Syria, even if the war were swiftly resolved, is “on the cusp of catastrophe.” Jordan, too, is in dire need of water. And Gaza, like Syria, has been battered by unchecked drilling. The day after Israel left under the Oslo Accords, he said, the Palestinian Authority and other actors began digging 500 wells along the coastal aquifer even though Israel had warned them of the dangers. “Today there are around 4,000 of them and no more ground water. It’s over. There’s no fooling around with this stuff,” he said.

Only the two most stable states in the region – Israel and Turkey – have ample water.

Turkey is the sole Middle Eastern nation blessed with plentiful water sources. Ankara’s control of the Tigris and the Euphrates, among other rivers, means that Iraq and Syria, both downriver, are to a large extent dependent on Turkey for food, water and electricity. That strategic advantage, along with Turkey’s position as the bridge between the Middle East and Europe, “further serves its neo-Ottoman agenda,” Sofer said.

He envisioned an increased role for Turkey both in the Levant and, eventually, in central Asia and along the oil crossroads of the Persian Gulf, pitting it against Iran. Climate change, he conceded, has only a minor role in that future struggle for power but it is “an accelerant.”

Israel no longer suffers from drought. Desalination, conservation and sewage treatment have alleviated much of the natural scarcity. In February, the head of the Israel Water Authority, Alexander Kushnir, told the Times of Israel that the country’s water crisis has come to an end. Half of Israel’s two billion cubic meters of annual water use is generated artificially, he said, through desalination and sewage purification.

For Sofer, this self-sufficiency is an immense regional advantage. Israel could pump water east to Jenin in the West Bank and farther along to Jordan and north to Syria. International organizations could follow Israel’s example and fund regional desalination plants, which, he noted, cost less than a single day of modern full-scale war.

Instead, rather than an increase in cooperation, he feared, the region would likely witness ever more desperate competition. Sofer said his friends see him as a sort of Jeremiah. But the Middle East, he cautioned, is a region where “leaders wake up every morning and ask what can I do today to make matters worse.”

Arnon Sofer, a longtime professor at the IDF's National Defense College, sees a link between the war in Syria and the water shortages there (Photo credit: Moshe Shai/ Flash 90)

Arnon Sofer, a longtime professor at the IDF’s National Defense College, sees a link between the war in Syria and the water shortages there (Photo credit: Moshe Shai/ Flash 90)

 

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 9th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 

As reported by Matthew Russell Lee from the UN, it seems that there is a Russian-American agreement to let Assad of Syria continue to fight his opposition as it seems that the Qatar, Arab Sunni proposal,leads to an Al-Qaeda domination in a post-Syria configuration. This might be what some Arab States want to happen, but it is totally unacceptable to the US and other States. Syria is doomed one way or another, and the new reality is that the US will not waste more energy on playing along Arab lines.

 

UNITED NATIONS, May 9 — On the pending Syria UN General Assembly resolution drafted by Qatar, Russia’s Permanent Representative Vitaly Churkin has now written to all member states, opposing the resolution on procedure, substance and on the May 7 announcement by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and US Secretary of State Kerry.

 

Inner City Press has obtained a copy of Russia’s letter and puts it online, here.

 

Please see Lavrov’s letter and realize that Syria is being moved to the backburners – even though it is clear that people will continue to be killed or driven into exile. No solution in Syria is now also clear reason for not pushing a Palestinian resolution either – all what we expect now is lot of empty noise.

 

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 9th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

The Return of the Jordan Option
For Palestine.

Vehicles drive toward the Allenby Bridge Crossing July 9, 2009. The Israeli-controlled terminal leading to the Allenby Bridge across the Jordan River is the West Bank’s only land link to the Arab world. (photo by REUTERS/Ammar Awad )
By: Geoffrey Aronson for Al-Monitor Posted on May 8. 2013

A recent visitor to Amman reports some senior Jordanians declaring openly that “there never was a place called Palestine. There is no such thing as Palestine, only Jordan.” Such sentiments, while still a minority view, mark a sea change in the long-standing Jordanian deference to the PLO on developments west of the Jordan River. According to one Palestinian, such views are being encouraged by some voices in Fatah, who fear Hamas’ baton more than Amman’s reluctant embrace, and who no doubt believe, as many veterans in Fatah do, that all it will take to turn Jordan into Palestine is a Palestinian decision to do so.

“Jordan is Palestine” is the mirror image of  “Palestine is Jordan.” Jordanians identified with the latter are not contemplating a confederal agreement between respective Jordanian and and Palestinian states, but rather the restoration of Jordan’s uncontested place in Jerusalem and the West Bank on the eve of the June 1967 war.

The ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is not to be envied. History and geography have played a cruel trick on the leader of this unlikely country. He is squeezed between more powerful and often warring parties, presiding over a population of subjects thrown together by war and circumstance.To its credit, Jordan has succeeded more often than it has failed to construct a popular and workable, if fragile sense of national identity shared by disparate Palestinian and Transjordanian communities during the last nine decades. However, the self-immolation of Syria, Fatah’s failure to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the uncertain promise of the Arab Spring are posing new and unprecedented challenges for King Abdullah II, whose head lies ever uneasy on the royal throne.

The feasting on the corpse that was once Syria poses the most immediate challenge to Jordan, and it was at the heart of recent discussions during the King’s recent visit to Washington in the last week of April. But Jordan’s cascading problem managing the fallout from Syria complements the more essential challenge that has always been uppermost in the mind of Jordan’s political elite as well as its growing Islamic opposition. This challenge, of course, relates to the Palestinian dimension of Jordan’s national identity, and the King’s ability to manage this without his Hashemite or Transjordanian identity suffering as a consequence.

It is against Jordan’s basic nature to make precipitous moves in any direction, yet a dynamic trend favoring a “New Look” in Jordan’s Palestine policy — one that is viewed sympathetically in both Jerusalem and Washington — is hard to ignore.

For many years now Jordan has been confronting a most unwelcome strategic environment to its west, across the Jordan River. Fatah has failed to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the growing power of Hamas as a political factor has proceeded in tandem. Fatah is no friend of Jordan, where memories of Black September remain etched in the consciousness of the Jordanian elite. But Jordan long ago was forced by its own failures and by circumstances beyond its control to make its peace with the PLO, not only as the recognized representative of the Palestinian people — at least those residing east of the Jordan River —- but also as a strategic buffer against Israeli, American and Islamic/Arab claims against Amman. The PLO, notably after King Hussein’s 1988 disengagement from the West Bank, became Jordan’s insurance policy against the imposition of a solution at Jordan’s expense to Palestine’s problems in West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To Jordan’s dismay, it is being forced to realize that Fatah and the PLO it embodies cannot perform this task. This conclusion has been debated from time to time in recent years. The barometer of these discussions is Amman’s on-again, off-again dance with Khaled Meshaal and Hamas, most notably the 2009 thaw in relations engineered by Gen. Mohammad Dhahabi, who was at the time head of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department. If Fatah cannot be a Palestinian shield protecting Jordanian interests in a quiescent West Bank, it is argued, then perhaps Hamas should be given a go.

The other option, and the one today at the center of Jordan’s agenda, suggests a fundamental rethinking of Jordan’s exit from the West Bank that began with King Hussein’s failure in 1972 to reach an agreement on Israeli withdrawal with Moshe Dayan and that gained momentum with the Arab League decision to recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974.  Like Jordan’s unenthusiastic turn in Hamas’ direction, this option reflects Jordan’s despair at Fatah’s failure and is a hedge against Fatah’s capitulation to Israel in a deal that would endanger Jordan’s interest in preventing an influx of Palestinians eastward across the Jordan River.

One example of this trend is the “historic,” if precipitous, agreement between King Abdullah and PLO head Mahmoud Abbas in March confirming the Jordanian king’s stewardship of the holy places in Jerusalem.

“In this historic agreement, Abbas reiterated that the king is the custodian of holy sites in Jerusalem and that he has the right to exert all legal efforts to preserve them, especially Al-Aqsa mosque,” the palace said in a statement. Abbas said that the agreement confirmed “Jordan’s role since the era of the late King Hussein” and that it consolidated agreements established decades ago.

Abbas’ signature marks the first formal Palestinian recognition of Jordan’s central role in Jerusalem and it complements the understanding detailed in Jordan’s treaty with Israel in 1994. The treaty notes that “Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines.”

Abbas’ interest in formalizing Jordan’s role is a function of Palestinian weakness and stands in ironic contrast to the nominal, and apparently symbolic boost for sovereignty won at the UN last November.

The understanding on Jerusalem reflects the PLO’s interest in Amman as a diplomatic safe harbor, protecting against both Hamas and Israel, and Amman’s readiness to reaffirm its interest in Jerusalem at the PLO’s (and Hamas’) expense.

These interests are not inconsistent with the evolving diplomatic strategy being pursued by US Secretary of State John Kerry. For more than a year, Amman has been a key way station of Washington’s diplomacy, much to the dismay of some in Egypt who preside over long-stalled reconciliation efforts. But unlike President Mohammad Morsi, King Abdullah is interested in being identified with any American effort. Even if opposed to the ideas Kerry is now circulating, Jordan has rarely viewed itself as in a position to reject US efforts.

“Palestine is Jordan” has long been the rallying cry of Israel’s right wing. It is now finding an uncertain echo in Jordan.

Geoffrey Aronson has long been active in Track II diplomatic efforts on various Middle East issues. He writes widely on regional affairs.

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Jordan hails US-Russia plans for Syria peace conference


Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, meeting with US Secretary of state John Kerry in Rome Thursday, threw his support behind the US-Russian call for a Syria peace conference later this month. With over 500,000 Syrian refugees and 2,000 more coming every day, Jordan’s envoy said it’s imperative that a transition get underway to a political resolution that preserves Syria’s multi-ethnic society and borders.

“We are extremely encouraged by the results of the Secretary’s meetings in Moscow with the President and with the Foreign Minister and salute your achievements in that regard by identifying a path forward,” Judeh said at a meeting with Kerry at the US ambassador’s residence in Rome Thursday.

Jordan’s position, Judeh said, is that there “has to be a transitional period that results in a political solution that includes all the segments of Syrian society, no exclusion whatsoever…preserves Syria’s territorial integrity and unity, and…guarantees… pluralism and opportunity for everybody.”

Judeh said he was heading to Moscow Thursday for further discussions.  On Tuesday, Judeh issued a joint call  with Iran’s visiting Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi for both sides in Syria’s civil war to enter talks on a transition government.

Kerry, on the final leg of a trip to Moscow and Rome, said Thursday that he had sent US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford on to Istanbul to meet with the Syrian opposition and begin work to persuade them to come to the peace conference. They have expressed misgivings because it would get underway before any agreement on the departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, although US officials insist US policy hasn’t changed and that they do not see any possibility where Assad could remain the leader of Syria.

“The specific work of this next conference will be to bring representatives of the government and the opposition together to determine how we can fully implement the means of the [Geneva] communique, understanding that the communique’s language specifically says that the Government of Syria and the opposition have to put together, by mutual consent, the parties that will then become the transitional government itself,” Kerry said at a meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on Tuesday.

Washington and Moscow actually have common ground on Syria, except for the issue of the sequencing of the transition, Russian foreign affairs analyst Fyodor Lukyanov wrote  for Al-Monitor Thursday.

“We can say that Russia and the US differ today on only one issue: the sequence of actions,” Lukyanov wrote. “First Assad leaves, then the process of establishing a new political regime in Syria begins, or the other way around. Moscow supports the second version, and Washington the first. As strange as it seems, they are in agreement on everything else: After Assad, there is a risk that Syria will become ungovernable, and the goal of outside forces… is to prevent power from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.”

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How the Arab League Can Help
Israel, Palestine Negotiate

US Secretary of State John Kerry (L) shakes hands with Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani as they meet with members of the Arab League at Blair House in Washington April 29, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Jason Reed)

The April 29 meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry and an Arab League ministerial delegation of the Arab Peace Initiative (API) follow-up committee carried a double message.

The first was the United States’ willingness to seriously explore the possibility of resuming negotiations with the aim of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after visits to the region by President Barack Obama and the secretary of state.

Skeptics worry that a division of labor decided by the US president, whereby he focuses on Asia while leaving the Arab-Israeli conflict to his secretary of state, is not very promising, despite the commitment and personality of the latter.

The second message is that Arabs have been waiting for a willingness to dust off the API, as I have previously argued here, and put it on their agenda with the United States. They are showing a readiness to invest in the Palestinian issue at this critical moment in Syria. The meeting should be the beginning of a process that would also involve intensive US-Israeli contacts and other concerned parties in serious negotiations. Such negotiations should be conducted on a basis different from those that have failed to produce results for two decades.

Yet the Arab willingness to accept the principle of territorial swaps — limited as well as symmetrical in terms of area and quality — was seen by others in the United States and Israel conversely: something to precede the negotiations, or to be addressed separately from the basic issue, which is Israel’s acceptance of the June 1967 borders in conformity with UN Security Council Resolution 242.

Indeed, this resolution should be the basis for a settlement of the conflict and of a resolution of the occupation. The Palestinians have indicated many times their acceptance of minor adjustments to the borders of 1967 — adjustments that will be considered only in the context of negotiations for the two-state solution, not before.

Israel must formally accept the 1967 borders instead of engaging continuously in diplomatic acrobatics over the version of the Resolution 242 in which there is an omission of the word “the” before “territories.” Israel’s aim is to suggest that it does not have to withdraw from all the occupied territories and to legitimize its occupation of the territories it wants to annex. Yet the preamble of the resolution clearly states the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by means of war, thus invalidating the Israeli argument. Minor, symmetrical adjustments are an integrated part and facilitator of that deal, well defined according to Resolution 242. This does not allow for an unknown offer to be made by Israel.

It is equally important that Israel cease all settlement activity, which Obama mildly criticized during his visit as detrimental to the process. Indeed, they represent a real danger to a peaceful resolution because they systematically destroy any possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

Also, suggesting Arab normalization with Israel as an encouraging gesture toward Israel, a free gift, further complicates matters. The focus must be on the United States and other third parties committed to peace in the Middle East and aware of the dangers of inaction to spell out the guidelines for reaching peace.

These guidelines are found in relevant UN resolutions and earlier agreements. These third parties should stand firmly by these guidelines. This is how the United States, a third party, could make the serious resumption of negotiations on the basis of a clear timetable and not mere discussion. The aim is to reach a comprehensive peace that includes normalization, as is clearly stated in the API, without amendment, despite what some have insinuated.

It is worth noting that amending the API necessitates a resolution by an Arab Summit, a matter that is neither on the collective Arab agenda nor on the agenda of the delegation. It is needless to revive once more, under different names, interim solutions that will take us nowhere but to further crisis and result in more conflicts.

Ambassador Nassif Hitti is a senior Arab League official and the former head of the Arab League Mission in Paris. He is a former representative to UNESCO and a member of the Al-Monitor board of directors. The views he presents here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 9th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 Mahmoud Abbas was here in Vienna and visited some other European Heads of State – then he took the long flight to China. All of this is to explain his position and look for new interlocutors. Abbas does not need a door opener like Arafat did and The Austria of Messrs. Fisher, Fayman and Spindelegger, is not the Austria of “Old Chancellor” Kreisky. On the other hand China is something of a new a power in regard to West Asia – it has no previous involvement in the Middle East – except as customers for oil. Something that was facilitated to them by the US wars in Iraq.

Oh well – here are Abbas and Netanyahu in China!

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Netanyahu in China: Economic Partnership Can be ‘Winning Combination.’

May 6, 2013 1:27 pm

Israeli Prime Minister views tech innovations during his visit to China. Photo: Israel GPO.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up the first day of a five-day visit to China by meeting with dozens of Israeli businesspeople who represent companies that operate in Shanghai. The Israeli company representatives expressed great appreciation for the Prime Minister’s efforts to increase trade with China and noted the great importance of government support to doing business in China.

“We must make the national effort to enter Chinese markets and to create partnerships. In addition to your private initiatives, we need to create a government track with the Chinese,” Netanyahu told the Israeli reps.

Following the meeting Netanyahu met with Israeli and Chinese businesspeople and stressed the importance of strengthening the two countries’ economic relationship.

“The future belongs to those who lead in innovation and technology,” he said, adding that Israel manufactures  “more intellectual property than any other country in the world in relation to its size. If we create a partnership between Israel’s inventive capability and China’s manufacturing capability, we will have a winning combination.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is also in China on an official visit. Xinhua quoted him as saying: “It is very good that Netanyahu will visit China too because it is a good opportunity that the Chinese listen to both of us.”

Netanyahu will fly to Beijing later in the week. He is expected to sign a number of trade deals and discuss the Iranian nuclear issue before departing Friday.

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  • Irving D, Cohen

    China’s obvious desire to tap into Israel’s technological know-how may prove to be Israel’s greatest asset in her quest for peace.

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    News Analysis

    China Dips a Toe Into Middle East Peace

    Feng Li/Getty Images

    President Xi Jinping with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, in Beijing.

    BEIJING — China took a modest step into Middle East diplomacy this week, hosting back-to-back visits from Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

    But this was not exactly Camp David by the Forbidden City.

    The fact that the visits were timed so the two leaders would not meet — Mr. Abbas left Beijing on Tuesday, and Mr. Netanyahu arrived Wednesday after a swing through Shanghai — signaled that neither they nor Xi Jinping, China’s leader, were ready for actual talks. But Mr. Xi did present a four-point peace proposal to Mr. Abbas, which, though it did not contain any breakthrough ideas, hinted that China had given some thought to playing a more energetic, if very limited, role as mediator in one of the world’s most protracted conflicts.

    “As China’s economy, national strength and international status grow, Arab countries are looking more to China,” said Guo Xiangang, a vice president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing who follows China’s relations with Middle Eastern nations. “The expectations they place on China are growing.”

    In their meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Prime Minister Li Keqiang of China told Mr. Netanyahu that “the Palestinian issue is a core issue affecting the peace and stability of the Middle East, and a peaceful solution reached through dialogue and negotiations is the only effective answer,” according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

    “As a friend of both Israel and the Palestinians, China has always maintained an objective and fair stance, and is willing to strive together with all sides to actively advance the Middle East peace process,” Mr. Li said.

    China has been careful to take a clear and consistent but not strong stand on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. China has growing trade ties with Israel — the value of their trade relationship has been estimated in official Chinese news reports to be nearly $10 billion a year — but it supports Palestinian statehood and relies on crude oil imports from Iran and Arab nations to meet its energy needs. About half of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, and that dependency is expected to deepen.

    The core of the four-point plan that Mr. Xi presented to Mr. Abbas was the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, based on the 1967 boundaries and with East Jerusalem as its capital. The plan was a formal version of China’s traditional stand on the conflict.

    At the United Nations, where China sits on the Security Council, Mr. Abbas has pushed for greater status for the Palestinians, which has drawn economic reprisals from Israel and has led to a reduction in donations from foreign supporters. On Tuesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said at a news conference that Israel had to halt the building of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, stop violence against innocent civilians and end the blockade against the Gaza Strip to clear the way for peace talks.

    But China’s measured stand on the conflict was evident in some of Mr. Xi’s comments during his meeting with Mr. Abbas. “Israel’s right to exist and its reasonable security concerns should be fully respected,” Mr. Xi said, according to a report by Xinhua.

    China’s position is also complicated by its strong support of Iran and various Arab nations. Iran, with its nuclear program, is one of the greatest security concerns for both Israel and the United States. China has sided with Russia to try to impede Western proposals for greater actions against Syria, which is a close ally of Iran and has been using bloody means to try to stamp out a rebellion.

    Syria accused Israel of carrying out airstrikes last weekend on military targets outside Damascus. Ms. Hua, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, was asked at the news conference Tuesday whether Chinese leaders would raise the airstrikes with Mr. Netanyahu. “China and Israel are maintaining communication,” she said.

    Despite the spotlight on the visits by Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu, China is likely to remain a muted political actor in the Middle East, analysts of the region said. Beijing sees little to gain from being entangled in distant and often seemingly intractable disputes, said Yin Gang, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

    “China is a long way from the Middle East, and it can’t even reach a good solution to its own regional problems: North Korea, the Diaoyu Islands, the Philippines, Vietnam,” Mr. Yin said. “Even if China becomes a superpower with an economy on par with the United States’, it still won’t play a major role in the Middle East.”

    China’s ideological flexibility on the Middle East and North Africa was evident during the recent Libyan revolution. China refused to support Western-led military support of the rebels fighting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then intensified its relations with the rebels when it became obvious that Colonel Qaddafi’s government would fall.

    Mr. Netanyahu’s talks with Chinese leaders are likely to be dominated by bilateral issues, including economic ties. The positions of both sides on Iran’s nuclear program and on the bloodshed in Syria are too clear and entrenched to expect any shifts from the talks, said Mr. Yin and Mr. Guo, the two scholars.

    “Israel’s biggest concern is still Iran; it worries that Iran will develop nuclear weapons technology, and it’s looking for the international community to intensify economic sanctions and other pressure,” Mr. Guo said. “But China’s position is clear: it opposes military strikes against Iran and maintains that sanctions need to be measured.”

    Mr. Netanyahu’s trip to China is the first by an Israeli leader since 2007. In Shanghai, he visited a memorial to refugees who fled to the city from the Holocaust in Europe. Xinhua reported that in his meeting Tuesday with Yang Xiong, the mayor of Shanghai, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Israel-China cooperation in the fields of science, technology and manufacturing can result in a perfect partnership. The difference between cooperating with China and other countries is that the effect can be more than tenfold, rather than just one- or twofold.”

    Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Patrick Zuo and Sue-Lin Wong contributed research from Beijing.

    ===========================================

    The ‘start-up nation’ and the Chinese dream

    By H.E. GAO YANPING
    05/04/2013 23:20

    As a “start-up nation,” Israel has much to share and cooperate with China. If we work hand-in-hand, and combine our respective advantages, we will enjoy common development and win-win results.

    On May 5, 2013, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will embark on an official visit to China, his second since 1998. It will also be the first time an Israeli prime minister has paid visit to China since 2007.

    Netanyahu is going to meet with Chinese leaders in Beijing and exchange views on bilateral relations, as well as regional and international issues. During his visit, some bilateral cooperative agreements are expected to be signed, which will further strengthen the bonds between the two countries. Netanyahu’s visit is of great significance, and will promote a new high in China-Israel relations.

    His visit provides us with a good opportunity to see how far we have come, where we are now and where we are heading in the future.

    As an ancient Chinese saying goes, “Amity between people holds the key to sound relations between states.”

    The friendship between the Chinese and Jewish nations dates back more than 1,000 years. The Jewish people in then-Chinese capital Kaifeng enjoyed equal rights to the Chinese. From the 1880s onward, thousands of Jews went to northeast China because of rising anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, forming the largest Jewish community in the Far East. Before and during World War II, when Jewish people were struggling for survival against the Nazi Holocaust, Shanghai became the only city in the world open to Jews.

    There has never been anti-Semitism in China in the course of history. Some Jewish people in China also actively supported and participated in the Chinese struggle against Japanese invasion.

    Later on, they worked hard with the Chinese people in building the new China. The friendly interaction between the two peoples has laid a solid foundation for the establishment and development of diplomatic ties between China and Israel.

    On January 24, 1992, China and Israel established diplomatic relations.

    Since then, our relations have stood up to test of a variety of complex situations and international challenges. We experienced some ups and downs, but we dealt with our relations from an overall and long-term perspective, and kept the momentum going.

    Then-Chinese president Jiang Zeming visited Israel in 2000. Four Israeli presidents and three prime ministers have visited China since 1992, including prime minister Netanyahu’s first visit to China in 1998. The exchanges between the two countries now take place at the central governmental level, as well as at the provincial and municipal levels, and involve people from all walks of life.

    The busiest record I hold is receiving seven high-level Chinese official delegations in one week last April. The cultural and people-to-people exchanges are also in full bloom.

    Many performance groups also come to Israel, and offer Israeli audiences the finest Chinese culture. Chinese celebrities post beautiful photos in the Chinese social media after their trip to Israel, which amaze and encourage more people to visit Israel. Israelis have also experienced the Chinese people’s friendly attitude. When the famous Israeli singer Ahinoam Nini held concerts in China in 2011, she wrote in her blog that “the Chinese love Israel more than any other people I have ever met.”

    The pragmatic cooperation between the two countries has been flourishing.

    The two-way trade volume increased almost 200 times, from only a little more than $50 million in 1992 to $9.91 billion in 2012, which means that today, bilateral trade in two days equals that of the whole year of 1992. Our cooperation has been expanded from agricultural cooperation in the early days to almost all areas today, such as science and technology, education, culture, arts, tourism and academia. With the burgeoning cooperation come more tangible benefits and a lot of job opportunities for the two peoples.

    Looking to the future, our relations are blessed with marvelous opportunities for further development. China has successfully concluded the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the 12th National People’s Congress, and elected new leadership over the past 6 months.

    We have drawn the blueprint for China’s development in the years to come.

    The main goals we set are as follows: By 2020, China’s GDP and per capita incomes for urban and rural residents will double the 2010 figures, and the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects will be completed.

    By the mid-21st century, China will be turned into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious; and the Chinese dream, namely, the great renewal of the Chinese nation, will be realized.

    The more China grows itself, the more development opportunities it will create for the world. It is projected that in the coming five years, China’s imports will reach some $10 trillion, its outbound investment $500b., and the number of its outbound tourists may well exceed 400 million, 50 times Israel’s total population.

    Looking ahead, we are full of confidence in China’s future. Meanwhile, we are aware that China remains the world’s largest developing country, and it faces many difficulties and challenges on its road to progress. We are unwaveringly committed to reform and opening up, and will concentrate on the major task of shifting the growth model. We are endeavoring to implement the strategy of innovation-driven development, and taking steps to promote innovation to catch up with global advances. Israel is a stakeholder in this regard.

    Israel is small in size but big in innovation.

    As a “start-up nation,” Israel has much to share and cooperate with China. If we work hand-in-hand, and combine our respective advantages, we will enjoy common development and win-win results. I am pleased to note reports Prime Minister Netanyahu has called on the Israeli ministers to fly to China as much as possible. I really appreciate his vision. I am ready to work with the Israeli side to promote the bilateral cooperation in various fields.

    With the interdependence between countries deepening in the globalized world, China and Israel have a shared destiny. The closer our cooperation is, the more benefits will accrue for both our peoples, and the more contributions we will be able to make to regional stability, world peace and global prosperity.

    I am fully convinced that with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to China, a brighter future for our friendship and cooperation will be ushered in.

    The writer is the People’s Republic of China’s ambassador to the State of Israel.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 8th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

Iran, Israel Need to Talk About Syria
Meir Javedanfar for Al-Monitor
Kuwaiti Opposition Leader ‘Not Asking to Overthrow Regime’
Jamie Etheridge for Al-Monitor
Kurdish Group Gaining Autonomy in Northern Syria
Andrea Glioti for Al-Monitor
Jordan, Iran Agree on Need for Political Solution in Syria
Osama Al Sharif for Al-Monitor
Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite Divide About Governance
Harith al-Qarawee for Al-Monitor
Turkey-Israel: Toward a ‘Cold’ Normalization
Arad Nir for Al-Monitor
Hamas Slams Qatar, Arab League on Peace Plan
Mohammed Suliman for Al-Monitor

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 6th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East

Muslim, Jewish, Christian Chefs Cook for Peace in Jerusalem.

American chef Art Smith poses in his kitchen at home in Hyde Park, Chicago, in this undated photo handout. (photo by REUTERS/Kipling Swehla)
By: Saideh Jamshidi for Al-Monitor Posted on May 3, 2013.

A group of Muslim, Jewish and Christian chefs from Chefs for Peace, along with American celebrity chef Art Smith, gathered on April 28 in Jerusalem to cook vegetarian dishes for a group of 60 guests, including US diplomats and alumni and students from various universities in the United States.

The ceremony took place in one of the best-known restaurants in Jerusalem, Eucalyptus, owned by award-winning chef Moshe Bassam, who is known for including ingredients mentioned in the Bible in his dishes and for his love of the history behind foods. “Moshe is a living treasure of Israel,” said Smith. “We went to the countryside to pick up wild thyme, asparagus and wild mushrooms [before the event].”

Bassam is not the only person who takes pride in using homegrown herbs and vegetables. “I brought grapes from the [US] South to use in my dish during the weekend,” said Smith.

Each of the five chefs — four from Chefs for Peace plus Smith — prepared their dishes in front their guests. Smith’s dish, not surprisingly, was made of wild mushrooms, grapes and local herbs. Johnny Goric, another chef and the organizer of the event, made a Mediterranean lentil salad. 

Smith and the group have one important goal: to create healthy and peaceful dishes. Chefs for Peace consists of 13 chefs, including founder Kevork Alemian, who cook all over the world, adhering to a few strict rules. First, every event must include at least one Muslim, one Christian and one Jewish chef. Second, there is no alcohol in any of the dishes. Third, everything is both kosher and halal.

“[The] kitchen can be a dangerous place,” said Alemian. “There are all kinds of sharp knives or smoke, and flames are everywhere, but we do not stab each other!”

The idea for Chefs for Peace first occurred to Alemian while at the Slow Food Festival in Italy about 12 years ago. He observed three chefs — a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim — working together to create different dishes for the festival.

Upon his return to Jerusalem in 2001, he gathered his chef friends to explain his idea for a nonprofit, non-political organization called Chefs for Peace. “[I] said, ‘Hey guys, listen, I have this crazy idea that is coming from a crazy Armenian chef,’” he explained. “Everything looked like a joke at the beginning.”

They launched their organization that year and have since traveled to numerous countries to cook for diverse groups of people. They understand the power of food as a bond between different peoples and religions, and they see peace as a delicious possibility.

One recent activity for Chefs for Peace was to cook for six days for a municipal council in the West Bank. The group had a commitment to travel to Nablus and then to Netanya in Israel to meet with different municipalities on both sides.

“These people couldn’t meet in the same place at the same time because the wall separated Israel from Palestine,” Goric explained. Chefs for Peace organized a special menu and gala dinner at an ancient chapel in Jerusalem. “You would feel all the holiness in the place,” Goric said.

According to Johnny Goric, executive chef of the Legacy Boutique Hotel in Jerusalem, Jewish, Christian and Muslim chefs have to work peacefully together in Jerusalem. “You would end up working under stress created by the intensity of your job,” Goric said. “There are flames around you, sharp knives everywhere, and you work for 12 to 14 hours straight without even have a fight about anything.”

Goric believes the kind of work these chefs do in Jerusalem kitchens should be a positive example for all Israelis and Palestinians. He asked, “Why can’t we bring this kind of work to the streets of Israel and Palestine, for the sake of peace for both people and both nations?”

In a region rife with conflict, uprisings and revolutions, peace is a perpetual question. On its website, Chefs for Peace indicates that its essential ingredients are bread and salt. Salt, in Middle Eastern cultures, symbolizes a bond of brotherhood.

“We do not waste our time in kitchens to talk about politics,” he said before pausing for a moment. “You know what we talk about? We talk about sex, life and enjoyment.”

Saideh Jamshidi is an American-Iranian journalist, filmmaker and editor covering Middle East news and Muslim women for the Global Press Institute and Chicagoistheworld.com. Saideh worked in major newspapers in Iran before settling in the United States as a foreign correspondent. On Twitter: @yazirum

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 5th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 

Canada’s Israel Support Draws Ire From Arab Nations at UN.

May 3, 2013 3:04 pm 3 comments

Author:

avatar JNS.org

World headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, Canada. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Some Arab nations are making an effort to isolate Canada at the United Nations in retaliation for the Canadian government’s pro-Israel stance.

Qatar is working to gather votes from 115 countries to relocate the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which determines global rules for airplane transportation, from Montreal to the Middle East by 2016. In addition, Arab UN ambassadors met in New York on April 23 to discuss Palestinian issues, and discussed ways to rally support against the Canadian government among international organizations.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is known for his staunch support of Israel and maintains a close relationship with the Israeli government. In April, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird stoked Arab anger by meeting Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni in eastern Jerusalem, an area where the Palestinians dispute Israeli jurisdiction.

Joseph Lavoie, a spokesman for Baird, said Canada will “fight tooth and nail” to keep the ICAO in Montreal. “Canada will not apologize for promoting a principled foreign policy,” Lavoie said, according to the Daily Globe and Mail.

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Comment from Mel

The United Nations headquarters and its overfed diplomats have earned deportation to the Middle East.

The enemies of Western Civilization have not earned the right to enjoy its benefits.

New York and Montreal are too good for them.

Let’s find out how they like eating and swimming in sand!

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 5th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 (illustration: Solar News)
(illustration: Solar News)

 

The Incredible Shrinking Cost of Solar Energy.

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment on Reader Supported News.

04 May 13

 

ob Wile uses a graph to point out the obvious, the dramatic fall in the cost of solar power generation. In many countries– Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal — and in parts of the US such as the Southwest, solar is at grid parity. That means it is as inexpensive to build a solar plant as a gas or coal one. The pace of technological innovation in the solar field has also accelerated, so that costs have started falling precipitously and efficiency is rapidly increasing.  

By 2015, solar panels should have fallen to 42 cents per watt.

Reneweconomy.com says that the best Chinese solar panels fell in cost by 50% between 2009 and 2012. That incredible achievement is what has driven so many solar companies bankrupt– if you have the older technology, your panels are suddenly expensive and you can’t compete. It is like no one wants a 4 year old computer.

Conservatives shed no tears when better computers drive slower ones out of the market, but point to solar companies’ shake-out as somehow bad or unnatural. No wonder US solar installations jumped 76% in 2012.

The reductions in cost over the next two years are expected to continue, at a slowing but still impressive 30% rate:

Construction has begun on the world’s largest solar plant. MidAmerican Solar and SunPower Corp. are building a 579 megawatt installation, the Antelope Valley Solar Project, in Kern and Los Angeles counties in California. That is half a gigawatt, just enormous. It will provide electricity to 400,000 homes in the state (roughly 2 million people?), and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 775,000 tons a year. The US emits 5 billion metric tons a year of C02, second only to China, and forms a big part of the world’s carbon problem all by itself. We just need 645 more of the Antelope Valley projects.

Important new research also shows that hybrid plants that have both solar panels and wind turbines dramatically increase efficiency and help with integration into the electrical grid. Earlier concerns that the turbines would cast shadows and so detract from the efficiency of the solar panels appear to have been overblown. Because in most places in the US there is more sun in the summer and more wind in the winter, a combined plant keeps the electricity feeding into the grid at a more constant rate all year round, which is more desirable than big spikes and fall-offs.

That Germany, then China, then the US are the world’s largest solar markets is no surprise. But that number 17 Japan will increase its solar installations by 120% in 2013 and so may be the second hottest solar market, just after China, this year, would mark a big change. Japan may well have 5 gigawatts of solar installed by the end of this year, even though the relatively new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is no particular friend of the renewables. In my own view, if Japan made the right governmental and private investments, it could overtake China in the solar field and reverse its long post-bubble stagnation.

ABB has been commissioned a large solar electricity generating plant on the edge of the Kalahari Desert near Cape Town, South Africa. It will supply the electricity needs of around 40,000 persons and reduce annual emissions by 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide. South Africa emits 500 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, and is third in the world for per capita emissions. (Still, it only emits a 10th as much over-all as the US). But they just need a thousand more plants like the Kalahari one, and voila! South Africa is also imposing a carbon tax, which will hurry things along. (At the moment, South Africa is far too dependent on dirty coal plants, which not only fuel climate change but also spew deadly toxins such as mercury into the atmosphere, whence it goes into human beings.

Because of South African and Israeli demand in particular, demand for solar panels in the Middle East and Africa has risen over 600% during the past year. Saudi Arabia’s announced plans to save its petroleum for export by going solar at home will add a great deal to regional demand if it sticks to those plans. (In most countries, petroleum isn’t used much for electricity generation as opposed to transportation, but in oil states such as Saudi Arabia it often is used in power plants; but that cuts down on foreign exchange earnings.)

The two Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan are emerging as the solar giants in India, with each having now passed half a gigawatt in solar electricity generation capacity. The two account for some 88% of all of India’s solar power. But Rajasthan may soon outstrip Gujarat, given the state’s solar-friendly commitments, its ample amounts of scorching sunlight, and its vast deserts.

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 3rd, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL May 3, 2013:

The Arab League offers an improved proposal for peace in the Middle East, a welcome announcement.

One Step Forward

By
Published – The New York Times on-line: May 2, 2013 2 Comments

In any discussion of a negotiated peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, a crucial question involves what the Arab states would do.
On Tuesday, the Arab League reaffirmed its 2002 peace initiative and suggested that the proposal could be modified to bring it more in line with American and Israeli ideas.

The welcome announcement could be very significant. Arab leaders deserve credit for reviving the initiative, as does Secretary of State John Kerry for trying to reinvigorate some kind of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Mr. Kerry, calling the move a “very big step forward,” said it meant Arab leaders were offering a security arrangement for the region.

The Arab League initiative, approved by all Arab states but rejected by Israel 11 years ago, endorses a two-state solution while promising peace and normalization in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugees issue.

After a meeting on Monday with Mr. Kerry and Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., Qatar’s foreign minister said the league had eased its demand that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders. Instead, the minister accepted the possibility of adjusting those borders with a comparable and mutually agreed “minor swap of land.” Israelis and Palestinians were close to a deal along these lines in 2008.

If there is ever to be a peace deal, Israelis will have to be persuaded that the Arab states, not just the Palestinians, accept their right to exist. And Palestinians will need to feel that the Arab states are behind them.

This is the first hopeful sign in a long time. But it soon ran into trouble from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel who reacted coolly on Wednesday and questioned the fundamental idea of exchanging land for peace. “The root of the conflict isn’t territorial,” he told Israeli diplomats. “The Palestinians’ failure to accept the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is the root of the conflict.”

On Thursday, he said any peace deal would be put to a referendum, which some experts say could be an obstacle. However, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Mr. Netanyahu’s peace negotiator, welcomed the Arab proposal, as did Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, and other opposition politicians.

“Mideast peace” has become a throwaway line. But that goal is unquestionably the right course for the Israelis, Palestinians and an increasingly unstable region. Arab leaders, after standing on the sidelines for too long, have made a contribution by giving the two sides something to talk about. Now it’s up to the Israelis and Palestinians, working with the United States, to take it forward.

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Arab Peace Initiative, take 2: Major development or ‘scam’?

www.timesofisrael.com/arab-peace-initiative-take-2-major-development-or-scam/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=e92fc84b62-2013_05_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-e92fc84b62-54419797

www.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-armys-most-improbable-arab-prosecutor/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=e92fc84b62-2013_05_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-e92fc84b62-54419797

  • Thursday, May 2, 2013
  • Iyyar 22, 5773

Could the amended formula for a two-state solution yield a breakthrough?
The consensual answer seems to be, ‘Maybe, but…’

By May 1, 2013, 9:16 pm 9
US Secretary of State John Kerry with Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, second from left, and Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby, April 29, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

US Secretary of State John Kerry with Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani, second from left, and Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby, April 29, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

In 2002, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon tasked his foreign policy adviser, Danny Ayalon, with further exploring the idea of the Arab League’s new peace initiative.

“He sent me to find out if the Saudis were serious,” Ayalon recalled recently, adding that he tried to arrange, through middlemen, a meeting with Adel Jubeir, an adviser to then-crown prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Earlier that year, Abdullah had proposed the plan, which seemed to offer Israel normalized relations with the Arab world in exchange for territorial concessions, a formula for handling Palestinian refugee claims and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We almost met in a restaurant in Washington and at the last minute he didn’t want to meet,” Ayalon said of Jubeir. “We promised it would be under the radar, it would be very low-profile.” The Saudis reneged on the scheduled meeting, and the rest is history — Israel never formally responded to the offer.

Ayalon, who served as deputy foreign minister until earlier this year, said Jerusalem never warmed to the proposal because it was presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, with no room for discussions. However, he said in early March, it could serve “as a basis for negotiations in the future, when conditions are much clearer here.”

Two months later, it is harder to argue that the peace initiative’s terms are written in stone. On Monday, the Arab League — which formally adopted the proposal at a March 2002 summit in Beirut — for the first time showed some flexibility in allowing that, to reach a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “comparable,” mutually agreed and “minor” land swaps could be possible.

After both Israeli and Palestinian leaders signaled a certain satisfaction with the Arab League’s move, it seems that a renewal of peace talks may be imminent. But would such talks actually stand a chance? Is the fact that the Arab League now seems to have wrapped its mind around the idea that Israel will never agree to fully withdraw to the 1967 lines enough to enable a breakthrough?

‘In a way, it puts the ball in Israel’s court. It is really now going to be up to Israel to respond to this in some way’

After all, the idea of mutually agreed land swaps has been around for more than a decade, and has been accepted, to varying degrees, by all parties involved. Also, the Saudi-inspired peace initiative asks for more than an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank; some of its demands are ostensible nonstarters for Israel’s newly elected government, such as returning to Golan Heights and dividing Jerusalem.

Still, “this is a significant development in several areas,” said Middle East expert and historian Joshua Teitelbaum. “In a way, it puts the ball in Israel’s court. It is really now going to be up to Israel to respond to this in some way, either through an initiative of its own or beginning to explore the peace process based on the positive aspects of the Arab initiative.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tacitly welcomed the steps to advance the peace process taken by the Arab League. “Israel is ready to start negotiations — anytime, anywhere — without any preconditions,” an Israeli official told The Times of Israel Wednesday. Israeli politicians from the left and the center, ranging from opposition leader Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) to cabinet members such as Minister Yaakov Peri (Yesh Atid), were pleased with the renewed initiative and urged the government to see it as a real opportunity to advance the peace process.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who hosted the Arab League delegation in Washington that announced its softened stance on the 67 lines, sounded even more optimistic. While the path to a peace agreement was still long, “I don’t think you can underestimate… the significance of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, [United] Arab Emirates, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and others coming to the table and saying, ‘We are prepared to make peace now in 2013,’” he said.

Teitelbaum, a senior researcher at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, assessed that “chances are not good” for the current government to reach a final-status agreement based solely on the Arab League’s slightly more flexible stance. Yet he called on Jerusalem not let this opening go unnoticed in Arab capitals.

“At times, Israel needs to acknowledge when there’s flexibility on the other end,” he said. “For many years it was a take-it-or-leave-it proposal, and now it’s not anymore. Now they accepted some language that is not entirely objectionable to Israel and many aspects of this peace initiative are acceptable to Israel.”

The author of a comprehensive paper about Israel’s position regarding the Arab peace initiative, Teitelbaum said that despite this week’s modification, there are still many gaps between the Arab and Israeli positions that might prove difficult to bridge.

“There are some nonstarters; they are very difficult and they’re not going away,” noted Teitelbaum, who also serves as consultant for several US and Israeli government agencies. “The question is, tactically, should Israel answer in the positive and say that we have objections to the peace initiative but since now the Arab League has shown some flexibility we will be willing to discuss it in an acceptable forum? That would go a long way toward positioning Israel as a state that is pursuing peace. And it would improve our relations with the United States. It could be a very positive development.”

Netanyahu, Obama and Abbas during a meeting in New York in 2009 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash90)Netanyahu, Obama and Abbas during a meeting in New York in 2009 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/Flash90)

Gershon Baskin, the co-chairman and founder of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, concurred.

“Israel has complained that the Arab peace initiative doesn’t take into account changes that have happened on the ground since 1967,” he said. “In agreeing to the principle of territorial swaps, they have in fact adopted what was the position of George W. Bush in his famous letter to Ariel Sharon.”

In April of 2004, the former US president wrote to the Israeli leader that “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” Rather, Bush wrote, it is “realistic to expect” that a peace agreement will be on “the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

Already back in 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton spoke of a “land swap,” in what came to be known as the “Clinton parameters.” At the time, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak accepted the proposal, albeit with certain reservations. The idea of annexing the settlement blocs to Israel and offering the Palestinians territory from Israel proper in return has since been cited countless times as a model to arrive at a two-state solution.

“We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” US President Barack Obama declared in May 2011. This proposition has been accepted, in principle, by both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the previous Israeli government under Ehud Olmert. (Netanyahu’s idea of a two-state solution remains unclear.)

So if territorial swaps are a generally agreed-upon concept, is the Arab League’s acceptance of it really such a big deal?

It is, said Akiva Eldar, a veteran Israeli reporter on the peace process. “Up until now, the Americans paid lip service to the Arab Peace Initiative, and Obama mentioned it in his speeches, but there weren’t any official diplomatic contacts to move the process from a bilateral level to a regional peace initiative that also involves the Arab countries,” he said.

“It’s a formal upgrade,” Eldar added. “Up until now, the idea of land swaps was merely an ‘oral tradition.’ Now, the Arab states authorized [Abbas] to reach an agreement that’s based on the Clinton parameters, the road map proposed by the Middle East Quartet, and previous agreements.

It is also important to note that the Arab League’s overture comes at a time of regional upheaval, said Eldar, who wrote for many years for Haaretz and is now a senior columnist at Al Monitor. Despite, or maybe because of, worries about Syria falling apart and Iran heading toward a nuclear weapon, the Arab League is willing to soften its stance vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A general view of the Arab League summit in Doha, Qatar, Tuesday, March 26 (photo credit: AP/Ghiath Mohamad)A general view of the Arab League summit in Doha, Qatar, Tuesday, March 26 (photo credit: AP/Ghiath Mohamad)

Even Egypt, which is ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, supports the adjustment of the 2002 peace offer, Eldar pointed out. “The initiative contains the words ‘normal relations’ [with Israel], which is very hard for an Islamist state to accept, but these words are still there. It’s very significant that today they can talk about this. And it also isolates Hamas, which is not ready to recognize Israel’s right to exist,” he said.

Still, despite the ostensible rapprochement, some pundits don’t see how the mere acceptance of land swaps could help reach a genuine breakthrough.

Barry Rubin, director of the Herzliya-based Global Research in International Affairs Center, thinks the Arab peace initiative is “both a good thing and a scam.” While he agrees that the Gulf States are ready to consider ending the conflict with Israel, partly because they are afraid of Iran and could use good publicity in the West, there are a number of issues he thinks will make peace on the Arab League’s terms impossible.

First of all, Rubin doubts that all countries which signed on to the initiative really mean it. “Are we to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, the Hezbollah-dominated regime in Lebanon, and the quirky but pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood regime in Qatar have suddenly reversed everything that they have been saying in order to seek a compromise peace with Israel? Highly doubtful to say the least,” he wrote.

Rubin also points to several provisions in the text of the Arab Peace Initiative that were hardly mentioned in the media coverage this week, and that in his view will kill any prospects of a deal. For instance, the initiative calls for a “just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” which he understands to mean that Israel would have to accept “the immigration of hundreds of thousands of passionately anti-Israel Palestinians” within its borders.

However, Israeli proponents of the initiative point to a clause in the draft that states that any solution to the refugee question needs “to be agreed upon,” meaning that Israel will have a definitive say in the number of Palestinians who would enter its territory.

The Arab League initiative also contains several other possible deal-breakers: a demand to make East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state; a provision allowing Arab states to refuse to take in Palestinian refugees; and a call for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria. To whom should Israel give the Golan?, some analysts wonder: Syria is deeply embattled in a bloody civil war, with no side willing — or able — to sign, much less honor, an agreement with Israel.

Yet more optimistic pundits say that none of the issues is unsolvable. With regards to Syria, the Arab League is willing to leave a seat empty for Syria, suggested Eldar, just like Jews do for the Prophet Elijah on seder night.

“Even the Arabs understand that now is not the time; they are not expecting Israel to return to the 1967 lines in the Golan. They are rational enough to know there is no one with whom to conduct negotiations. But it leaves an opening for the moment there is a proper government in Syria,” he said.

The division of Jerusalem is another key element of the Arab Peace Initiative that will likely prevent the current government from accepting it as the basis for peace talks.

Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid political party, seen embracing Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett in the Knesset, February, 2013. (photo credit: Miriam Alster/FLASH90)Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid political party, seen embracing Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett in the Knesset, February, 2013. (photo credit: Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

Netanyahu is a staunch opponent of any plan that would divide the city. So are the two key allies in his coalition — centrist Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, of the right-wing Jewish Home party.

“I’ve been saying and writing for a long time that there is an Arab partner but there is no Israeli partner,” Eldar said. The only way for the current government to endorse the peace plan is for Lapid “to wake up and realize the potential he has,” he added. “He could bring down the government. But I don’t believe that will happen.”

Baskin, who two years ago initiated the secret back channel between Israel and Hamas that led to the release of Gilad Shalit, believes that a final-status agreement is possible — even with the current government. In the past, more than one Israeli leader pledged never to touch Jerusalem, only to later conduct serious negotiations about its division, he said. “Peace negotiations have a dynamic of their own.”

================================================================
amd from Uri Avnery:

Uri Avnery

May 4, 2013

 

                                                No, We Can’t!

 

 

AN AMBASSADOR is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country, a British statesman famously wrote some 400 years ago. That is true, of course, for all diplomats.

 

The question is whether the diplomat lies only to others, or also to himself.

 

I am asking this these days when I follow the arduous efforts of John Kerry, the new American foreign secretary, to jump-start the Israeli-Arab “peace process”.

 

Kerry seems to be an honest man. A serious man. A patient man. But does he really believe that his endeavors will lead anywhere?

 

 

TRUE, THIS week Kerry did achieve a remarkable success.

 

A delegation of Arab foreign ministers, including the Palestinian, met with him in Washington. They were led by the Qatari prime minister – a relative of the Emir, of course – whose country is assuming a more and more prominent role in the Arab world.

 

At the meeting, the ministers emphasized that the Arab Peace Initiative is still valid.

 

This initiative, forged 10 years ago by the then Saudi Crown Prince (and present King) Abdullah, was endorsed by the entire Arab League in the March 2002 Summit Conference in Beirut. Yasser Arafat could not attend, because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that if he left the country, he would not be allowed to return. But Arafat officially accepted the initiative.

 

It will be remembered that soon after the 1967 war, the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum promulgated the Three Noes: No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. The new initiative was a total reversal of that resolution, which was born out of humiliation and despair.

 

The Saudi initiative was reaffirmed unanimously in the 2007 Summit Conference in Riyadh. All Arab rulers attended, including Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine who voted in favor, excluding only Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

 

The initiative says unequivocally that all Arab countries would announce the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, sign peace treaties with Israel, and institute normal relations with Israel. In return, Israel would withdraw to the June 4, 1967 border (the Green Line). The State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, would be established. The refugee problem would be solved by agreement (meaning agreement with Israel).  

 

As I wrote at the time, if anyone had told us in May 1967 that the Arab world would make such an offer, they would have been locked up in an institution for the mentally ill. But those of us who advocated the acceptance of the Arab initiative were branded as traitors.

 

In his conference with the Arab ministers this week, John Kerry succeeded in pushing them a step further. They agreed to add that the 1967 Green Line may be changed by swaps of territories. This means that the large settlements along the border, where the great majority of the settlers reside, would be annexed to Israel, in return for largely inferior Israeli land.

 

 

WHEN THE initiative was first aired, the Israeli government was desperately looking for a way out.

 

The first excuse that sprang to mind – then as always – was the refugee problem. It is easy to create panic in Israel with the nightmare of millions of refugees “flooding” Israel, putting an end to the Jewishness of the Jewish State.

 

Sharon, the Prime Minister at the time, willfully ignored the crucial clause inserted by the Saudis into their plan: that there would be an “agreed” solution. This clearly means that Israel was accorded the right to veto any solution. In practice, this would amount to the return of a symbolic number, if any at all.

 

Why did the initiative mention the refugees at all? Well, no Arab could possibly publish a peace plan that did not mention them. Even so, the Lebanese objected to the clause, because it would leave the refugees in Lebanon.

 

But the refugees are always a useful bogeyman. Then and now.

 

 

ONE DAY before the original Saudi initiative was submitted to the Beirut Summit, on March 27, 2002, something terrible happened: Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre in Netanya, with 40 dead and hundreds wounded. It was on the eve of Passover, the joyous Jewish holiday.

 

The Israeli public was inflamed. Sharon immediately responded that In these circumstances, the Arab peace initiative would not even be considered. Never mind that the atrocity was committed by Hamas with the express purpose of sabotaging the Saudi initiative and undermining Arafat, who supported it. Sharon mendaciously blamed Arafat for the bloody deed, and that was that.

 

Curiously – or maybe not – a similar thing happened this week. On the very day the upgraded Arab initiative was published, a young Palestinian killed a settler with a knife at a checkpoint – the first Jew killed in the West Bank for more than a year and a half.

 

The victim, Evyatar Borowsky, was the 31-year old father of five children – usual for an orthodox man. He was a resident of the Yitzhar settlement near Nablus, perhaps the most extreme anti-Arab settlement in the entire West Bank. He looked like the quintessential ideological settler – blond, bearded, with East-European looks, long payot (side locks), and a large colored kippah. The perpetrator came from the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. He was shot and severely injured. He is now in an Israeli hospital.

 

Before the incident, Netanyahu had been hard at work to formulate a statement that would reject the peace initiative without insulting the Americans. After the killing, he decided that there was no need. The terrorist has done his job. (As an old Jewish saying goes: “The work of the righteous one is done by others”.)

 

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who is in charge of the (nonexistent) negotiations with the Palestinians, and President Shimon Peres welcomed the Arab statement. But Livni’s influence in the government is next to nil, and Peres is by now a joke in Israel.

 

 

IF THE American Secretary of State really believes that he can nudge our government slowly and gradually to “meaningful” negotiation with the Palestinians, he is deluding himself. If he does not believe it, he is trying to delude others.

 

There have been no real negotiations with the Palestinians since Ehud Barak came back from the Camp David conference in 2000, waving the slogan “We Have No Partner for Peace”. With this he destroyed the Israeli peace movement and brought Ariel Sharon to power.

 

Before that, there were no real negotiations either. Yitzhak Shamir announced that he was happy to negotiate for ever. (Shamir, by the way, declared that it was a virtue to “lie for the fatherland”.) Documents were produced and gathered dust, conferences were photographed and forgotten, agreements were signed and made no real difference. Nothing moved. Nothing – apart from settlement activity, that is.

 

Why? How would anyone entertain the belief that from now on everything would be different?       

 

Kerry will elicit some more words from the Arabs. Some more promises from Netanyahu. There may even be a festive opening of a new round of negotiations, a great victory for President Obama and Kerry.

 

But nothing will change. Negotiations will just drag on. And on. And on.

 

For the same reason that there has been no movement in the past, there will be no movement in the future – unless…

 

 

UNLESS. UNLESS Obama takes the bull by the horns, which, it seems, he is exceedingly unwilling to do.

 

The horns of the bull are the horns of the dilemma, on which Israel is sitting.

 

It is the historic choice facing us: Greater Israel or Peace?

 

Peace, any conceivable peace, the very basis of the Arab Initiative, means Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and the establishment of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. No ifs, no buts, no perhapses.

 

The opposite of peace is Israeli rule over the whole of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in one form or another. (Lately, some despairing Israeli peaceniks have been embracing this, in the absurd hope that in this Greater Israel, Israel would grant equality to the Arabs.)

 

If President Obama has the will and the power to compel the government of Israel to make this historic decision and choose peace, may the political price for the president be as it may, then he should proceed.

 

If this will and this power do not exist, the whole great peace effort is an exercise in deception, and honorable men should not indulge in it.

 

They should honestly face the two sides and the world and tell them:

 

No, We Can’t.

 

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 29th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

April 15-21, 2013, I participated on a trip to Baltic Sea States of the KPV (Komunal Politische Vereignigung) of the Politische Akademie of the Austrian Peoples Party (OEVP). Above took us to Estonia  Saturday April-20 to Sunday April 21-st. This was a weekend and it might have been a too short time for serious learning about matters of Energy Policy. But I was fortunate to come back with enough information because I had the chance to meet very helpful people and I was prepared ahead with my questions.

We drove from St. Petersburg in Russia to Narva in Estonia and then continued to the capital – Tallinn. We had the luck of having a very good Estonian guide and were honored that evening with a reception at the residence of Austrian Ambassador H. E. Ms. Renate Kobler who invited as well local and Austrian resource people and made sure to establish contacts according to our interests.

I had in effect two different set of interests. One was in regard to a transportation policy instituted this year by the city of Tallinn that offers free rides on the electric street-cars to documented residents of the city while having increased charges for the out-of-towners. The idea behind this being that people will be moving back to the city from the suburbs and increase the tax roles thus making up for some of the losses and allow for gains in air quality by getting out of their cars. I learned that though nice in theory, seemingly it did not work in practice because it applied mainly to the poor – so it did not result in enhanced income from taxes leaving just the lower income from the tram-rides. The topic was originally brought to my attention by the Austrian Standard of April 5, 2013.

This was the minor interest of my two suggested topics.

The other topic – and that one of major interest these days – dealt with the use of oil-shales for energy – an issue of global importance  when Shale-Gas has become the energy interests’ battle cry. It was brought out of obscurity in the United States, and Europe is talking as if it was going to follow suit. Austria has also shales and at present media battles rage between business interests and the environmentalists – with the Eurosolar monthly table all convinced that Austria can become energy self-sufficient without touching the shales.

Estonia, as well as Spain, are countries with experience in what can happen when energy is obtained from these shales.

Under the Soviets, the shales were mined and used like a lower grade coal in thermal power plants. What was left are mountains of ash from the combustion process and mountains of  spent shales from the retorting process in which the product was a synthetic crude oil. These mountains of by-product contain heavy metals and when washed by rains these heavy metals poisoned the underground water, thus making it unusable for drinking and agriculture. Everybody I talked to told me the same thing – the losses around Narva are immense.

Wikipedia tells us: “Oil shale in Estonia is an important resource for the national economy. Estonia‘s oil shale deposits account for just 17% of total deposits in the European Union but the country generates 90% of its power from this source. The oil shale industry in Estonia employs 7,500 people—about one percent of the national work force—and accounts for four percent of its gross domestic product.[1]

 

There are two kinds of oil shale in Estonia – Dictyonema argillite (claystone) and kukersite.[2] The first attempt to establish an open-cast oil shale pit and to start oil production was undertaken in 1838.[3] Modern utilization of oil shale commenced in 1916. Production began in 1921 and the generation of power from oil shale in 1924.[4]

 

In 2005 Estonia was the leading producer of shale oil in the world. Of all the power plants fired by oil shale, the largest was in this country.[1][5] As of 2007, six mines (open cast or underground) were extracting oil shale in Estonia.[2]“

Kukersite, named after the Kukruse settlement in Estonia, is the better quality shale. Estonian kukersite deposits are one of the world’s highest-grade shale deposits with more than 40% organic content and 66% conversion ratio into shale oil and oil shale gas. They have relatively a lower content of heavy metals.

in the 1830s, although the attempt of shale oil distillation failed, oil shale was used as a low-grade fuel. Then studies of Estonian oil shale resources and mining possibilities intensified in the beginning of 20th century because of industrial development of Saint Petersburg and a shortage of fuel resources in the region. Finally – the world’s two largest oil shale-fired power stations – Balti Power Plant and Eesti Power Plant (known as the Narva Power Plants) – were opened in 1965 and in 1973. Because of the success of oil shale-based power generation, Estonian oil shale production peaked in 1980 at 31.35 million tonnes.[3] In 2004, two power units with circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC) boilers were put into operation at Narva Power Plant.[4] In 1984, the scientific-technical journal Oil Shale was founded in Estonia.[15]

Some of the spent shale is used in cement manufacturing and Uranium is a by-product.

Kerogen (from Greek for wax + -gen, that which produces)[1]  is a mixture of organic chemical compounds that make up a portion of the organic matter in sedimentary rocks.[2] It is insoluble in normal organic solvents because of a huge molecular weight. The soluble portion is known as bitumen. When heated to the right temperatures in the Earth’s crust, (oil window ca. 60–160 °C, gas window ca. 150–200 °C, both depending on how quickly the source rock is heated) some types of kerogen release crude oil or natural gas, collectively known as hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). When such kerogens are present in high concentration in rocks such as shale they form possible source rocks. Shales rich in kerogens that have not been heated to a warmer temperature to release their hydrocarbons will eventually  form oil shale deposits. (The name “kerogen” was introduced by the Scottish organic chemist Alexander Crum Brown in 1906.)

What above tells us is that the organic matter in shales is in the form of very large molecular weight polymers. These can be deconstructed at high temperature in retorts, and then the quality of the remaining ash (or spent shale) can be investigated and the potential damage to the environment assessed. An alternative could be to create a fire underground and collect above ground the released oil or gas created by breaking up the kerogen polymer. In such case the damage from the ash cannot be assessed without knowing the underground conditions and where the underground waters will take the released heavy metals. The Shale Gas operations now in the United States are underground production sites explained as examples of Hydro-Fracking which sounds incoherent when we do not know the operating temperatures which are needed to break chemical bonds of that polymer. Neither the new American production companies nor the EU Shale Gas production interests give us such technology details as they did not even obtain patents that would have required transparency.

This present posting has an added purpose.

I learned that  June 10-13, 2013, the Estonian users of shale-for-energy intend a Shales Symposium in Tallinn as a follow up to the 2006 Symposium that was held in Ammann, Jordan.

The Symposium in Tallinn will be followed by a Field Trip to Estonian oil shale processing industry – an extraordinary opportunity to visit the most important sites of Estonian oil shale industry, including the new, recently completed Enefit280 Oil Plant.

I would like to hope that the European Commission send some inquisitive people to that symposium in order to learn about the side-effects or the environmentally harming “externalities” that could cause harm to the underground aquifers.

Further, as mentioned at the beginning, another European location were there was experience with Oil Shale Retorting is Puertollano, in the Ciudad Real region of Spain. With information from these  sites the EU could be in a better position to judge the issues involved.

I was personally involved with the Purtollano plant of the Empressa Nacional de Pisara Bituminosa Calvo Sotelo in 1959. That plant was producing lubricants or viscous petroleum product alternatives in huge retorts and leaving behind mountains of spent shale as well. Looking at the remains of those mountains – in Puertollano and in Narva, could help the decision making process at the EU.

We realize the importance of the energy independence goal – but as it can be reached in various ways, it is important to start out with open eyes.

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Estonia and Sweden Oil Shale Estonia and Sweden Oil Shale Map

Map of kukersite deposits in northern Estonia and Russia (locations after Kattai and Lokk, 1998; and Bauert, 1994). Also, areas of Alum Shale in Sweden (locations after Andersson and others, 1985).

 

Estonia and Sweden Oil-Shale Deposits

Reprint of: United States Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2005-5294
By John R. Dyni

Estonia

The Ordovician kukersite deposits of Estonia have been known since the 1700s. However, active exploration only began as a result of fuel shortages brought on by World War I. Full-scale mining began in 1918. Oil-shale production in that year was 17,000 tons by open-pit mining, and by 1940, the annual production reached 1.7 million tons. However, it was not until after World War II, during the Soviet era, that production climbed dramatically, peaking in 1980 when 31.4 million tons of oil shale were mined from eleven open-pit and underground mines.

The annual production of oil shale decreased after 1980 to about 14 million tons in 1994-95 (Katti and Lokk, 1998; Reinsalu, 1998a) then began to increase again. In 1997, 22 million tons of oil shale were produced from six room-and-pillar underground mines and three open-pit mines (Opik, 1998). Of this amount, 81 percent was used to fuel electric power plants, 16 percent was processed into petrochemicals, and the remainder was used to manufacture cement as well as other minor products. State subsidies for oil-shale companies in 1997 amounted to 132.4 million Estonian kroons (9.7 million U.S. dollars) (Reinsalu, 1998a).

The kukersite deposits occupy more than 50,000 km2 in northern Estonia and extend eastward into Russia toward St. Petersburg where it is known as the Leningrad deposit. In Estonia a somewhat younger deposit of kukersite, the Tapa deposit, overlies the Estonia deposit.

As many as 50 beds of kukersite and kerogen-rich limestone alternating with biomicritic limestone are in the Kõrgekallas and Viivikonna Formations of Middle Ordovician age. These beds form a 20- to 30-m-thick sequence in the middle of the Estonia field. Individual kukersite beds are commonly 10-40 cm thick and reach as much as 2.4 m. The organic content of the richest kukersite beds reaches 40-45 weight percent (Bauert, 1994).

Rock-Eval analyses of the richest-grade kukersite in Estonia show oil yields as high as 300 to 470 mg/g of shale, which is equivalent to about 320 to 500 l/t. The calorific value in seven open-pit mines ranges from 2,440 to 3,020 kcal/kg (Reinsalu, 1998a, his table 5). Most of the organic matter is derived from the fossil green alga, Gloeocapsomorpha prisca, which has affinities to the modern cyanobacterium, Entophysalis major, an extant species that forms algal mats in intertidal to very shallow subtidal waters (Bauert, 1994).

Matrix minerals in Estonian kukersite and interbedded limestones includes dominantly low-Mg calcite (>50 percent), dolomite (<10-15 percent), and siliciclastic minerals including quartz, feldspars, illite, chlorite, and pyrite (<10-15 percent). The kukersite beds and associated limestones are evidently not enriched in heavy metals, unlike the Lower Ordovician Dictyonema Shale of northern Estonia and Sweden (Bauert, 1994; Andersson and others, 1985).

Bauert (1994, p. 418-420) suggested that the kukersite and limestone sequence was deposited in a series of east-west “stacked belts” in a shallow subtidal marine basin adjacent to a shallow coastal area on the north side of the Baltic Sea near Finland. The abundance of marine macrofossils and low pyrite content indicate an oxygenated-water setting with negligible bottom currents as evidenced by widespread lateral continuity of uniformly thin beds of kukersite.

Kattai and Lokk (1998, p. 109) estimated the proved and probable reserves of kukersite to be 5.94 billion tons. A good review of the criteria for estimating Estonia’s resources of kukersite oil shale was made by Reinsalu (1998b). In addition to thickness of overburden and thickness and grade of the oil shale, Reinsalu defined a given bed of kukersite as constituting a reserve, if the cost of mining and delivering the oil shale to the consumer was less than the cost of the delivery of the equivalent amount of coal having an energy value of 7,000 kcal/kg. He defined a bed of kukersite as a resource as one having an energy rating exceeding 25 GJ/m2 of bed area. On this basis, the total resources of Estonian kukersite in beds A through F (fig. 8) are estimated to be 6.3 billion tons, which includes 2 billion tons of “active” reserves (defined as oil shale “worth mining”). The Tapa deposit is not included in these estimates.

The number of exploratory drill holes in the Estonia field exceeds 10,000. The Estonia kukersite has been relatively thoroughly explored, whereas the Tapa deposit is currently in the prospecting stage.

 -Dictyonema Shale

Another older oil-shale deposit, the marine Dictyonema Shale of Early Ordovician age, underlies most of northern Estonia. Until recently, little has been published about this unit because it was covertly mined for uranium during the Soviet era. The unit ranges from less than 0.5 to more than 5 m in thickness. A total of 22.5 tons of elemental uranium was produced from 271,575 tons of Dictyonema Shale from an underground mine near Sillamäe. The uranium (U3O8) was extracted from the ore in a processing plant at Sillamäe (Lippmaa and Maramäe, 1999, 2000, 2001).

The future of oil-shale mining in Estonia faces a number of problems including competition from natural gas, petroleum, and coal. The present open-pit mines in the kukersite deposits will eventually need to be converted to more expensive underground operations as the deeper oil shale is mined. Serious air and ground-water pollution have resulted from burning oil shale and leaching of trace metals and organic compounds from spoil piles left from many years of mining and processing the oil shales. Reclamation of mined-out areas and their associated piles of spent shale, and studies to ameliorate the environmental degradation of the mined lands by the oil-shale industry are underway. The geology, mining, and reclamation of the Estonia kukersite deposit were reviewed in detail by Kattai and others (2000).

 

 

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 28th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 digital-edition.israelhayom.co.il…

We found this information on-line 0n page 3 – left lower corner – of the Hebrew edition of the Right-Wing Israel Hayom newspaper. We got directed to it by the English language APN News Nosh of April 28, 2013 which is a Left-Wing media. So, we give it some credibility.

If the following turns out to be a correct description of Qatar readiness to deal with Israel – this is a serious development that can lead to the Arab Gulf States recognition of Israel de-Jure and not just de-Facto.

 

Qatari prince likely to visit Israel?

The representative of the royal family will arrive to launch the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Business Arbitration in Jerusalem, said Gen. (res.) Oren Shahor, head of Israel Chamber of Commerce. “Qatar is interested in investing hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the hi-tech field and sees Israel as a strategic source for gaining knowledge and technology.”
(Israel Hayom, April 28, 2013, p. 3)

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 24th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

We post the following because we were present in New York City at the first dinner Rabbi Marc Schneier hosted the Bahraini Ambassador to the UN. That was at the time an extension of Rabbi Schneier’s outreach to Muslims in the US – when he organized joint dinners between Jewish and Muslim communities in various places in the US. Eventually common interests will lead the way to the de-Jure acceptance of Israel as well.

 

New Header 

Gulf states ready for peace, says well-connected US rabbi

Marc Schneier, who has good ties with Bahraini royal family, urges Netanyahu to take a page out of the Sadat playbook and make the first public overture

Rabbi Marc Schneier with King Hamad at the Bahraini Crown Palace, December 2011. (photo Walter Ruby/Foundation for Et hnic Understanding)

By Raphael Ahren

April 23, 2013

Israel should publicly commend Bahrain for labeling Hezbollah a terrorist organization and it should try to build strategic alliances with all Gulf states based on a common opposition to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a prominent American rabbi with ties to the Bahraini royal family said.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, an American congregational leader who recently met with the Bahraini king and the crown prince, urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit an Arab country and seize Israel and Sunni Muslims’ common distrust of Tehran as a path toward warming relations with parts of the Arab world.

However, an expert on the politics of the gulf states said that while Bahrain’s move to blacklist Hezbollah did present “an opening,” a real improvement of bilateral ties remains elusive and would likely stay under the radar.

“We’re so myopic, we’re so focused on Europe, and here you have a very significant development that took place in Bahrain,” Schneier told The Times of Israel, referring to the tiny Gulf state’s recent decision to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization. “I am calling for a conversation to take place, a conversation that needs to begin within Israel about looking east, not only looking west.”

Schneier bemoaned the fact that the Bahraini parliament’s March 26 decision to outlaw the Lebanese-Shiite group received little press coverage in Israel, and that Jerusalem didn’t comment at all.

“No one’s even discussing this,” he lamented. “After Bahrain passed this legislation, I was simply amazed how little attention this was given in Israel. It is a landmark event, particularly because it’s an Arab country that has called on other Arab countries to follow suit.”

“Israel needs to remember it lives in the Middle East and not in the Middle West,” Schneier added. “There is an opportunity to begin to create some kind of strategic alliance with the gulf states, which have been very expressive about their concerns about Iran and its satellite organizations like Hezbollah.”

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem declined to comment on Schneier’s remarks, but a diplomatic official told The Times of Israel that “If the Bahrainis had wanted Israel to say something, they could have sent us a message through diplomatic channels. Since they didn’t, we didn’t.”

The Bahraini Foreign Ministry did not respond to a Times of Israel query on this matter.

Schneier, perhaps best known for being the founder of The Hampton Synagogue, which is frequented by affluent and prominent US Jews, is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

In the framework of his interfaith work, he developed a relationship with Bahrain’s ambassador to the US, Houda Nonoo, the first Jew to represent an Arab country in Washington. In December 2011, Schneier was received by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa at the royal palace in Manama. The king told him that Bahrain and Israel have a common enemy in Iran. He has been in “close contact with the royal family ever since,” Schneier said.

Rabbi Marc Schneier with Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who is also deputy supreme commander and first deputy prime minister (photo credit: courtesy Foundation for Ethnic Understanding)

In March, Schneier returned to Manama to meet with the heir apparent, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who is also the deputy supreme commander of the Bahraini army and first deputy prime minister. He “validated and reconfirmed” his father’s statements about Israel and Iran, Schneier said.

Israel and Bahrain do not maintain diplomatic relations, but in 2005 King Hamad told the US ambassador that his state has contacts with Israel “at the intelligence/security level (i.e., with Mossad),” according to a secret US diplomatic cable published two years ago by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. He also indicated willingness “to move forward in other areas, although it will be difficult for Bahrain to be the first.” The development of “trade contacts,” though, would have to wait for the implementation of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the king told the ambassador.

Other WikiLeaks documents show that senior officials from both countries have spoken in recent years, such as a 2007 meeting between then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni and Bahraini foreign minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa in New York. The Bahraini foreign minister in 2009 also signaled that he was willing to meet Netanyahu to try to advance the peace process, but ultimately decided not to go ahead with the plan.

Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed that the gulf states and Israel have a common foe in Iran. “The designation of Hezbollah is certainly an opening; it shows that they’re concerned about this non-state actor that Israel obviously regards as a dire threat as well,” he said.

 

However, a real rapprochement between Manama and Jerusalem remains unlikely, asserted Wehrey, who focuses on political reform and security issues in the Arab Gulf states and US policy in the Middle East. “On a strategic level, yes, there is a shared threat, but that doesn’t negate the very issue they’re facing from domestic parties and their populations. Many Bahrainis and citizens of other gulf states feel strongly about the Palestinian cause and the governments will therefore have to tread very carefully in how it approaches relations to Israel,” he said. “If there are ties, they would be under the table and hidden from the public view.”

According to the website of the kingdom’s foreign ministry, Bahrain supports the creation of a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 lines and the “right of return of Palestinian refugees.” Manama also holds Jerusalem responsible “for the unfortunate, deteriorating, and painful situation in the Palestinian lands as a result of Israel’s aggressive practices including: assassinations; settlement-building; and the erection of the Separation Wall; as well as attacking holy places, and imposing economic blockades,” the site states.

It is not even clear why Israel would want to develop overt ties with Bahrain, added Wehrey, noting that the autocratic regime is currently facing enormous criticism for its poor human rights record and the way it suppresses public unrest. A strong affiliation with such a state – which is not a regional powerhouse like, for instance, Saudi Arabia – “might actually damage Israel’s position,” he said.

But Schneier, speaking to The Times of Israel from his home in New York, believes that if Jerusalem made a genuine effort to negotiate a peace treaty with the Palestinians, then Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Oman would be willing to recognize Israel and normalize relations. “All gulf states are ready,” he said. “We now have the opportunity, or the tension, to move that thing along because of Iran.”

The rabbi called on Netanyahu to make the first step by approaching the Arab states. “I believe the prime minister should take a page out of Sadat’s playbook and either show up at one of the capitals of the gulf states or appear before the Arab League,” he said, referring to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s 1977 visit to Israel, which laid the foundation for a peace agreement between the two countries signed two years later.

 

“There is a precedent for it,” Schneier said. “As long as Israel continues to do its share at trying to arrive at a resolution with the Palestinian people, then I believe there is an opportunity here.”

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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 14th, 2013
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

 

 

Saudi Kingdom to halt wheat production by 2016

The Kingdom is likely to totally depend on wheat imports starting from 2016, says Waleed El-Khereiji, head of Grains and Silos Flour …

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Saudi- ‘Big opportunity’ in SR 1 bn biscuit market
Saudi Arabia is one of the primary emerging markets for top biscuits maker Britannia and it sees big opportunities in the Kingdom because …

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