Hezbollah’s Death Valley
In a small enclave between Syria and Israel, Hezbollah is preparing for what it says will be its biggest war ever.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/03/hezbollahs-death-valley/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=*Mideast%20Brief
From Chuck Spinney:
ReplyDeleteRe: Hezbollah’s Death Valley: This article, like most analyses in the US thinktank/MSM milieu, is deficient in that it makes no mention of water, yet access to water resources has always been a major part to the Shebaa Farms conflict. A good example of reportage illustrating the importance of water to the Shebaa Farms issue can be found at this link. The news source, IRIN, an independent news agency specializing in humanitarian issues. Also, the statement of the Zionist delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference shows that access to water, including especially the areas around the watersheds of Mt Herman that now include Shebaa Farms was central to the original Zionist design of the Jewish National Home. Interested readers can find a map of the Zionist Proposal at this link and its full text at this link. I urge readers to do a word search of the Zionist Proposal on the word “water,” and the centrality of the access issue to the design of the Jewish National Home becomes clear. Israel’s conquests (and attempted conquests like S. Lebanon) since 1948 can all linked to water access issues in some way. To be sure, there is more to the conflict than water, and I am not implying that access to water is the only cause of the Arab the Arab-Israeli conflict, but I do believe a political solution of the water issue (hydro-diplomacy aimed at equitable access) is a necessary condition to any larger durable diplomatic solution. Yet this hydro-diplomacy issue was relegated to secondary status in the Oslo process and was ignored completely in the so-called Road Map process. Moreover control of the aquifers under the West Bank has been one of the strategic aims of Israel’s settlement expansion policies. Can anyone be surprised by the utter failure of peace efforts, when one of the necessary conditions for a fair and equitable solution has studiously ignored since Eisenhower’s Johnston Commission accurately laid out the basic water issues in the early 1955. The failure to even mention water in "Hezbollah’s Death Valley” in the Shebaa Farms Dispute is but one more small but revealing example illustrating the cumulative point.