There are no more fish in the Sea of Galilee.
After time immemorial, the historic lake is now ecologically
dead, forever. RIP Peace.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2011/01/fishless-sea-of-galilee/
The Sea of Galilee is known for its tempestuous
storms and thriving fishing industry. But life there is
changing with less rain and almost no fish left.
The lowest in the world and Israel’s only freshwater
lake,
the Sea of Galilee is
fed by the Jordan River and supplies much of the
region’s water. Famously the site for many of Jesus’
sermons, it also has a long fishing history. In the first
century, the historian Flavius Josephus wrote that 230
fishing boats thrived on the lake. Twenty centuries later,
the lake is at risk of being
emptied of all its fish. This news just in from the
Jerusalem Post. The Agriculture and Rural Development
Ministry has issued temporary fishing licenses to fishermen
in order to buy time. In between now and February 28, 2011,
when the licenses will expire, the Knesset economic
committee must decide what to do about the unprecedented low
fish stock levels. In just one decade, fish stocks dropped
by almost 2,000 tonnes from 2,144 in 1999 to just 156.8 in
2009. Apart from impacting on the livelihood of local
fishermen, which is serious enough, what are the ecological
effects of an over-fished lake? Last year
a fishing ban was put in place in order to increase fish
stock. It remains to be seen whether similar action will be
taken this year.
Compounding the lake’s ecological health
are low water levels, presently at their lowest ever.
Although last year between March and June the lake levels
were above the “red line” – below which levels are thought
to be particularly bad – lack of rain has kept levels
devastatingly low. This despite efforts to cut back on the
amount of water pumped out of the lake, last year, Lake
Kinneret only received, on average, 60% of its annual
rainfall.
Just before I was forced to leave Israel, some
seven years ago, I took my son on what I thought would be an
unforgettable childhood memory. An admirer of my writing
owned a rare treasure in Israel, a fishing powerboat, and he
invited my son and me on a trip of nearly a lifetime. With
worms we dug from cow manure the day before in hand, at 3:00
AM, we launched the craft in the west of Lake Kinneret, for
a water trip to fishing paradise. It was a dark, spooky ride
along the coast, passing such ghost sites invisible from
land, as a 19th century sunken riverboat, until we reached
the vast reeds of the Jordan River outlet. There, in the
encompassing, scary darkness, I hooked the worms and
released our lines.
But, there were no bites. Just occasional snags.
No fishing explanation.
As the sun rose, we were in the northern Jordan River
delta, a place I knew well from the past. During the 1980's,
I wrote offbeat stories for an influential monthly called,
The Israel Digest. One story, which received massive
international reprints, was about my day with licensed
Galilee fishermen. Actually it was OUR day; accompanying me
was my girlfriend of the era, Shirley Schwartz, who shot
lovely photos of the adventure. They sold half the reprints
of fishermen hauling in their boats, hundreds of pounds of
large, squirming Galilee fish, many, just hours later,
frying above the charcoals of really tasty Tiberius sidewalk
cafes. This was then, Sea of Galilee reality.
Today, they must import their fish.
My fishing day ended with one crummy fish. I did
everything right; right bait, right place, right time. I
failed before my son. What did I do wrong? The fish were
dead, is what I did wrong. They were not to be caught, is
what I did wrong.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/04/israel-fishing-ban-sea-galilee/
Generations have carried on this tradition, and today
the most popular fish in the lake is dubbed St. Peter’s
Fish, or Tilapia. But after being almost overfished to
death, in the coming six weeks the Israeli government will
gradually enforce a total ban on fishing in the biblical
lake an effort to bring it back to life. The new, two-year
ban will force some 200 licensed fishermen out of the Sea of
Galilee in search of a new trade.“We will support the
fishermen and make sure the lake is restocked with fish,”
Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said when
announcing the ban after his weekly cabinet meeting. The Sea
of Galilee has witnessed a dramatic decline in fish, largely
due to illegal practices such as catching breeding fish and
preventing fish populations from growing. Millions of hungry
migratory birds also feed heavily on the fish...“In most
Mediterranean countries, fishing is banned during the summer
time and this allows the fish to breed and to grow,” says
Prof. Goren. “Here in Israel we don’t have any regulation of
this kind right now. So the fishermen fish all year round
and they don’t give the fish any chance. They remove the
mothers while they are small before they get to maturity and
that is it.”
Again, the fishermen get the blame for the
disappearance of close to all fish life in Lake Kinneret.
There were likely far more fishermen in biblical times than
anytime in the past ten years when fish stocks dropped from
typical to nearly non-existent.
THEY ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF
THE SEA OF GALILEE'S DEATH! A combination of global
warning and "peace" is. As for the drought coinciding with
"peace," darn the timing or it was divine intervention.
Choose whatever you feel comfortable with. The core fact is,
the Sea Of Galilee was doomed anyway by peace.
I knew that way back in '94 when I interviewed the
water negotiator for the Israel-Jordan peace accord:
The truth is that the Kinneret is drying up
from the activities of the "peacemakers." I should know. In
1994, I interviewed the chief Israeli negotiator of the
Water Treaty between Jordan and Israel. Back then I was the
Israeli correspondent for a London company called the Gemini
News Service. Thanks to them, my work was published widely
throughout Third World newspapers. I noticed a newspaper
quote about the water negotiations from Yaacov Tsemach of
the national water company, Tahal. It caught my eye because
a Yaacov Tsemach was my really good, longtime army buddy. I
admired his sharp wit and, a rarity among Israelis, great
sense of humor. So I called Tahal and to my total delight,
it was my buddy on the line.
We arranged to meet and got along like old times. He
was assistant to the chief negotiator of the water sections
of the then-building, Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty. I
asked if I could interview the negotiator and he said he'd
put in a good word for me. Well, a good word from Yaacov did
the trick. If I agreed to keep the negotiator's name
anonymous, he would meet with me within the week.
We met at a Tel Aviv restaurant and he began, like
all good bureaucrats, handing me graphs and surveys. In
retrospect, I've wondered why I brought out so many sources,
but the truth must be, the rest of the media were selling
"peace" and I was looking where they chose not to enter. The
bar graphs showed a lot of blue above the "red" line of the
lake over 30 odd years before the Treaty, then it sunk after
the proposed "peace" agreement. I, naturally, asked what
happened.
The negotiator ordered a drink, then shortly after,
another. And he became teary.
"I sure hope our leaders know what they're doing," he
said. "Because if they're wrong, the Kinneret will disappear
in a generation. Within twenty years, it will be nearly
useless for our water needs."
I asked what he meant. He then gave me the title of
my Gemini article, "Giving Away Dream Water."
"The government is going to give away 50 million
cubic meters of lake water a year and they ordered me to
find it. I'm giving away dream water."
The negotiator told me where he went looking for the
water. "There are brackish streams on the west of the lake.
We'll give that away. We'll dam the Yarmuk and give that
water away."
By a natural near-miracle, the Golan Heights'
snow melt in March, fill the Jordan River, Hula Lake and the
Sea of Galilee with sufficient
clean water to last
until next Spring. But in the 1950's, Israel, all but
completely, drained her second largest lake, the Hula,
mostly to plant a few more avocado groves. The country got a
few more avocados and endlessly more methane fires, rat
infestations, and ecological devastation from the dead
lakebed.
Water, that used to be filtered of bacterial disease
and infections by Lake Hula, poured straight into the
Kinneret, some 300 ft, below sea level, and via the southern
exit of the Jordan River, polluted the Dead Sea, some 100
ft. below sea level. The result for the Dead Sea, at least
partly, was an environmental breakdown.
Before we get the cold, hard facts, another
disturbing story; the lost tragedy of Israel's third biggest
lake, Agam Baruch.
Situated just below Mount Megiddo in the Jezreel
Valley, there once was a significant lake formed by damming
the source of the Kishon River. I discovered it during an
army training exercise in 1980. Soon after, I turned it into
a beloved fishing and camping spot for over two decades. Oh,
the stories I won't tell...but the fishing was just as good.
In 2004, I returned with my son for a weekend of
fishing and camping and what did we find? The lake, from one
end to the other, was covered in belly-up white. All the
fish had been poisoned. The big, the small, the tilapia, the
eels, the catfish, the carp, were all dead.
We returned in 2005, me anyway, hoping the lake had
recovered, and found the lake was drained, now a puddle, not
even a lagoon. Yet fishermen surrounded the puddle, throwing
in their hooks, with not a fish anymore alive.
I never discovered if the lake was killed by
terrorism or by accident, but Israel's third largest
freshwater body, like its second, the Hula, is gone forever.
Now look at how nearby pollution is killing the Sea of
Galilee.
.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2009/03/israel-jordan-polluted-rive/
As if the
regional water scarcity wasn’t bad enough already,
Israel will soon begin compensating Jordan with freshwater
after oil waste and sewage contaminated the shared Yarmouk
River water supply. After detecting pollution from the
Israeli side of the river last week, the Jordanian Ministry
of Water and Irrigation suspended pumping from the King
Abdullah Canal, which supplies Amman with one-third of its
total water demand. The ministry also filed an official
complaint against the Israeli government, claming a
violation of Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel.
According to the agreement, Jordan receives 60,000 cubic
meters of water daily from Israel’s Lake Kinneret during the
month of March. Jordan Valley Authority (JVA) Secretary
General Musa Jamaani said Israel will pump up to 180,000
cubic meters from the Kinneret to Jordan, and will pump
another 50-60,000 cubic meters this summer.
Mr. Jamaani also indicated that, although the relevant
authorities will take steps to prevent similar incidents in
the future, there are no safety guarantees. He said, “If it
reoccurs, we will close down the waterways and get our
compensation. If Israel is fine with supplying us extra
water in return for what it pollutes, it’s up to them… the
pressure is on them rather than on us.”
So here is how the Sea of Galilee ecologically
works. It is surrounded by salt streams. It does not become
the Dead Sea because, unlike it, it has an exit, the south
end of the Jordan River, flowing well over a thousand feet
down in a hundred miles to the lowest spot on earth, the
Dead Sea. But if the Sea of Galilee loses too much
freshwater, the salt streams win, turning the lake too briny
and saline to support life. This level is called the Black
Line, and once breached, the lake is killed FOREVER.
Israel is compensating Jordan for the water it
polluted at a rate that falls far below the Sea of Galilee's
Black Line. The issue, not discussed here, is WHY Israel
gave away its water to Jordan, not to mention the
Palestinians (23,000 thousand c/meters/yr), for "peace"
treaties. Is Israel sovereign or not? Now look what Jordan
did with the polluted Yarmuk River water? Did it ship it to
water treatment facilities? Of course not;
He also assured the public that none of the contaminated
water was pumped to consumers. Instead, the polluted waters
were discarded into valleys that pour into the Jordan River,
which flows to the Dead Sea. To me this is still a cause of
concern, however, because the Jordan River is already
extremely polluted, and the Dead Sea is a fragile, shrinking
ecosystem.
Add to this:
Another cause for concern is that Israel will be pumping
even more water out of the Kinneret. As further evidence
of the severity of Israel’s water crisis, the water level of
the Kinneret is at an all-time low. This past summer,
the level reached the black line, where pumping the
water can cause permanent danger to the entire lake. So is
it really a feasible solution for Israel to promise Jordan
more water from the Kinneret, especially during the hot
summer months? And if Israel can’t provide the water it
promised, how will this impact Jordan, whose own water
crisis is even more severe?
And me concluding:
It is 2002. I had given a lecture on the real
Rabin assassination at a Golan Heights village. On the way
home, I stopped at an eastern Kinneret kibbutz and threw in
my line below the pier which once held its fishing boats. It
soared 15 feet above me and the ancient and recent lake
level. From what I had learned in my profession, I thought,
this lake is doomed. Knowing not how climate change and
resulting drought will hurry the process along, I knew that
draining the Sea of Galilee for peace had already murdered
it.
And now it's gone, ecologically, for good.
end
**
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