In the scorching summer heat, an Israeli farmer tends to a dripline taking a mix of ground and recycled water to palm trees — an approach honed for decades in the arid nation and now drawing wide interest abroad.
At the plantation in a desert near Eilat, a coastal holiday resort on Israel’s southern tip, the mineral-rich water passes through a plastic tube, nourishing the dates high above.
“All of Eilat’s sewage is treated,” said Arik Ashkenazi, chief engineer of Ein Netafim, Eilat’s water and sewage utility, during a tour of the facility that sees wastewater cleared of solids and biological hazards.
Illustration: Mountain People
“The treated wastewater is transferred, to the last drop, to farmers,” who mix it with groundwater and use it on the trees, he said.
Eliat is hemmed in between the desert and Red Sea, isolated from the rest of Israel with no natural freshwater. Its drinking water is a combination of desalinated groundwater and seawater.
After domestic use turns it into sewage, it is treated and then allocated to farmers, enabling the parched region to support agriculture.
While Eilat used to be the exception in Israel’s water management, it is now more of a prototype for the nation and perhaps the world.
Globally, more than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, the UN says, with floods and droughts triggered by climate change further exacerbating the situation.
Alarming data presented by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs shows “80 percent of wastewater in the world flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused.”
Israel began recycling wastewater when it saw that its water sources — groundwater and water from the northern Sea of Galilee — were insufficient to meet the needs of a growing population.
“We began to realize that sewage was a water source, reaching almost 100 percent reuse in Israel,” said Yossi Yaacoby, vice president of engineering for Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, adding that 90 percent of the treated wastewater went to agriculture.
“That wasn’t enough either, so we began desalinating seawater,” he said, beginning with Eilat in 1997 and then the Mediterranean, with desalinated water now providing 60 to 80 percent of Israel’s drinking water.
Israel has had sole access to the Sea of Galillee, a freshwater lake, since seizing the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
In the 1960s, Israel’s construction of its so-called national carrier — the pipeline transferring water from the Sea of Galilee to drier and more populated parts of the nation — caused tensions and even exchanges of fire with Syria.
“Water was a source of conflict,” Yaacoby said.
Nowadays, “Israel understands that water is a foundation for peace,” he added, with Israel selling it to some of its neighbors.
“We supply the Jordanians 100 million [cubic meters] from the Sea of Galilee, and a similar quantity to the Palestinians — mainly in the West Bank with a small amount to Gaza, and it will increase,” Yaacoby said.
With rising climate instability, growing populations and dwindling resources, it is not only Middle East nations that Israel is helping to tackle their water problems.
“The world is undergoing a huge crisis,” Yaacoby said, adding that “states you’d never imagine,” such as France, Germany and Italy, were rethinking the issue.
“Israel understood from its inception that water is a scarce resource [and now] has a large reservoir of knowledge accumulated over the years pertaining to regulatory matters, managing water sources,” he said.
In addition, Israel is “constantly developing technologies” in the field of water, Yaacoby said.
Clive Lipchin, an expert on water management at the Arava Institute in southern Israel, said the rising unpredictability due to climate change should make “everybody around the world” consider desalination and treating wastewater, but beyond the technologies being expensive and high on energy consumption, a comprehensive solution would demand people changing their attitude on the use of water.
“It’s a basic right, but it cannot be a free good. People have to pay,” Lipchin said.
“Most people around the world do not pay. So that’s a huge barrier” and a challenge to governments whose citizens have been paying nothing for decades, he said.
Yaacoby, too, said that the main challenge for the future of water use is not in the realm of engineering, but rather the mindset of people who are in no rush to preserve water they receive for free.
Such a change requires “courageous political decisions,” he said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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