Authorities vs Environmentalism

Full scale warfare isn't necessary for me to take note of a case of 'ecowar'. Far from it - for starters see the crime tag. Large scale covert conflict between states and their conscious populations however is a rather new thing. Or at least something that seems to be increasing.

In the UK authorities have been busted infiltrating legal environmental groups.

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash

[...]

"The methods employed are disturbing, and more worrying yet is the lack of any clearly identifiable body responsible for this. These individuals seem to have some kind of police support or at the very least connections with the police – the access to police stations confirms that – but my concern is the lack of accountability and the threat to the individual and her right to protest."

• Police caught on tape trying to recruit Plane Stupid protester as spy
• Police 'pay protester informers'

Basically France delivered an identical story of late...

French media reported that the largely state-owned French electricity company EDF has been caught spying on Greenpeace France.

[...]

spies have apparently infiltrated several anti-nuclear groups in France and reportedly sometimes with the blessing of the French secret services.

• France involved in another major nuclear scandal, accused of spying against Greenpeace

In the USA FBI is investigating suspected 'eco-terrorism'.

Fires gutted four multimillion-dollar model homes in a Seattle suburb on Monday, and authorities found a sign purportedly left by ecoterrorists that mocks claims that the homes were environmentally friendly.

• Seattle-Area Fires May Be Ecoterror, Authorities Say

I suspect a lot more of this type of news in the future. It won't suffice to say that Al-Qaida hasn't helped environmentalism. No doubt anti-terror laws will be utilized against people trying to save the planet now politicians aren't. And some activist cells will radicalise.

Europe illegally dumps toxic, nuclear waste in Somali waters

Just discovered an angle to the Somali fishing-oil-piracy trouble that I somehow entirely missed: Dumped toxic waste!

"[Our motive is] to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters … We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."
- Sugule Ali, Somali pirate

So, on top of the Somali fishermen being robbed by Western colleagues they are dying from mysterious diseases as all sorts of toxic waste - including nuclear - washes up shore. It became too apparent to ignore as the Tsunami speeded up and aggravated the situation and about 300 died. Some waste has been traced to European industries who have paid the Italian Mafia to dispose of it.

"There's uranium radioactive waste, there's leads, there's heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, there's industrial wastes, and there's hospital wastes, chemical wastes, you name it [...] These problems range from acute respiratory infections to dry, heavy coughing, mouth bleedings, abdominal hemorrhages, what they described as unusual skin chemical reactions."
- Nick Nuttall, UNEP

• You are being lied to about pirates, by Johann Hari, February 2009.
• UN: Nuclear Waste Being Released on Somalia's Shores After Tsunami, February 2005.
  

Israel built its nuclear bombs with stolen Egyptian uranium

Funny how so many of Israels wars and occupied territories just happen to include a tale of a natural resource. There is the Palestinian water, the off shore gas and now: the Egyptian uranium. See 'Israel secretly exploited Egypt's uranium'; a story seen a couple of places around the net.

According to this story, Israel built its nuclear bombs using uranium taken from the Sinai Peninsula [Wikipedia] during the 1950ies. Israel has had various military operations on the peninsula in the course of its conflicts with Arab countries including a brief invasion in 1956. According to the official secret of Israels nuclear weapons the uranium used was from low quality deposits in the Negev desert. Perhaps not?

This story is told by 83-year-old Israeli Professor Uriel Bachrach who worked for the Science Corps of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In his recent Hebrew only book, The Power of Knowledge, he reveals how he participated in an undercover operation in the Sinai; disguised as German engineers. Very interesting - but I would like some more and better sources on the story from the book than Arab media briefs.

Water of the "Holy Land":

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For quite some time I have been keeping an eye on the influence of water in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. On top of all the other 'ecowars' I have Google track for me. But I have been reluctant to post on it for a variety of reasons. Now I have decided to do something else: Just share the online research - and at the same time recommend an online tool, Diigo, that I have found extremely useful.

To go straight to the real thing please check out my Diigo list Water of The Holy Land.

Diigo is an online social bookmarking site with one distinct edge: it includes a 'web-marker pen'. As you read the article you want to take note of you can mark texts in yellow using your mouse just as you would reading a printed article using a yellow filt pen. What you see watching the list is all the text I have marked in all the articles I have bookmarked. So, don't disagree with me here. In stead critizise the sources, suggest missing information. (There are many other sweet features to Diigo and I have used it simultaneously with the competitor Twine for some time which it beats in nearly every category but I will move on to the subject now. Try this video for more on Diigo.)

The short-short version

• The Middle East is an already relatively arid region getting drier by the season
• Israel is exporting water intense crops (Oranges etc)
• There is little water under the UN-approved Israeli territories
• There is water in the Palestinian underground, the Golan heights and flowing from Lebanon
• We just happen to see conflict in exactly these three areas

Highlights of the highlights

To add just a little more detail here are some copy/pasted texts from my Diigo highlights.

Israel ran out of water in the 1950s: it has not since then produced enough water to meet all of its needs, including food production. [...] Palestinian and Israeli water professionals interact on a Joint Water Committee, established by the Oslo-II Accords in 1995. It is not an equal partnership: Israel has de facto veto power on the committee

There are three major water sources for Israelis and Palestinians: the Jordan River system, the Mountain Aquifer, and the Coastal Aquifer. [...] The Jordan River system, which straddles the borders of Israel and the territories, is completely off limits to the Palestinians by order of the Israeli authorities [...] the Mountain Aquifer, 85 percent of which lies under the West Bank. The 1995 Oslo accords stipulated that Palestinians would have access to 20 percent of that aquifer, with Israel controlling the remaining 80 percent. A recent U.N. report, however, revealed that Israel has restricted Palestinian access to 12 percent. [...] since 1967 no Palestinian may drill a new well in the basin without Israeli permission [...] Until 2006, less than 10 percent of water in Gaza was fit for consumption. When Israel destroyed the water purifiers that year, purification of water has basically halted. [...] Under the Geneva Convention, the Israelis are required to supply the Palestinians with an adequate amount of water.

Israelis per capita use up to five times as much water as Palestinians

For many Palestinians, the fall harvest of some 10 million trees used to be a joyful ritual steeped in tradition. But the West Bank's olive groves have increasingly become a target of extremist Jewish settlers who, hilltop by hilltop, seek to expand their control over land they say they were promised by God. [...] Compounding the farmers' problems, more trees are harder to reach because they lie beyond Israel's lengthening West Bank separation barrier or close to Jewish settlements and their multiplying satellite camps.

4400 dunums of agricultural land are now behind the Israeli apartheid wall. Most of our [Palestinian] wells and water resources are now behind the Israeli wall.

The Golan Heights' key resource is not land but the Sea of Genneseret, or Lake Kinneret. Damascus lost the territory and the access to its water resources in the Six-Day War, with the water supply issue being more urgent for Israel than for Syria.

"Some of them [Israelis] will come and put dead animals and so on into the community water supply, and then-I mean, what do you do, if there's nothing else?"

A recent U.N. report found that Palestinians in some of the hardest-hit communities were spending as much as 30 percent to 40 percent of their income on water delivered by truck.

While I did not explicitly list sources they are extremely easily identified via the Diigo list.

Further simplification

What came first: The hen or the egg? The water issue or the war? As if simplifying the conflict to a rivalry over wells by quoting news sources wasn't enough let me just real quick do it by simplifying the recently popular Israel vs Palestine historical map and adding some water sources by life saver icons:


Critique very much welcome.

Update, June 2009: A Google Map companion (itself subject to updates).




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