Israel from the Inside was always meant not to focus on war or politics, but instead, fo focus on the issues, challenges, people, culture, music and more that make up the mosaic of Israeli life—a mosaic that often doesn’t make it into the English press.
Hamas, of course, has diverted this plans a bit, but now that we are five months into the war and war is becoming the “new normal,” we’re can finally begin revsitting some of the issues on which we’d hoped to focus.
We recorded this conversation with Nathan Japhet in the first week of October, and planned to run it the following week. But then came October 7.
We’re sharing with you Nathan’s explanation of what is happening to one of Israel’s great natural treasures, and what he and some others are doing to try to save it.
This clip, more on which below, is a stark illustration of beauty that we’re losing:
First, our schedule for the rest of the week:
FRIDAY (3/15): There is a new series being posted to YouTube in Israel, called “240 Seconds.” These are four-minute videos about political matters in Israel, Today we share, with subtitles added, a brief look at Israeli history and how David Ben-Gurion handled crisese that were not entirely different from ours. This is is by Professor Anita Shipira, one of Israel’s truly great, world-class historians.
The Dead Sea has been in the news of late not because of nature, but because of the war. The Royal Dead Sea Hotel and Spa is hosting about 1,200 residents of Sderot, and other evacuees are nearby.
But there’s a story about the Dead Sea itself that requires telling, and in our conversation today, we let Nathan Japhet do exactly that. Others are undertaking additional projects to bring attention to the Dead Sea, including the Dead Sea Marathon that took place not long ago:
You can read the Israel21C story about the marathon here.
Now, some images of the Dead Sea and our conversation with Nathan.
Nathan Japhet works as a business development manager at IQVIA Israel and was previously a business development analyst at Agrematch. Nathan plays a huge role in business development and fundraising for Dead Sea Guardians. He also manages their social media and communications in English.
Nathan has a deep love and passion to preserve Israeli nature, specifically the Dead Sea, fueled by his desire to save it for future generations, particularly his son and second child on the way.
The reel above, by Moshe Berenstein, shows Dead Sea sinkholes near Mineral Beach, which was shut down in 2015 after a sinkhole opened in the beach’s parking lot. We posted the video itself above … here it is in its original Instagram context.
Dead Sea Guardians has made it their mission to ensure that the Israeli government adopts and implements policies to save the Dead Sea and rehabilitate the Lower Jordan River.
You can donate here.
Here is a link to watch the trailer of the documentary, ‘Dead Sea Guardians’.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below is a transcript for those who prefer to read, available specially for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Over the course of time that we have been recording with guests as part of Israel from the Inside, we've looked at a whole array of issues. We look at some politics and some history and literature and art. We've spoken to Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, left wingers, right wingers, religious, secular, natives, immigrants, you name it. I don't think, if my memory serves me correctly, though, that we have actually ever dedicated an episode to nature or to the natural environment or to a specific issue in Israel's, ecoculture and so forth. And if that's the case, if we haven't done it, it is long overdue. And we are going to fix that problem, at least with the first step today by interviewing Nathan Japhet. Nathan is a volunteer with a group called the Dead Sea Guardians. You can probably pretty much figure out from the name of the organization what the organization is committed to. But we're going to go in this order, first, we're going to hear what's wrong with the Dead Sea, like, why does it need guardians? Then we're going to find out, how did that get to be wrong with the Dead Sea? Then we'll find out from Nathan a little bit how a guy that grows up in America ends up coming to Israel and taking on a huge responsibility with others, of course, for the Dead Sea. And then finally we're going to hear if any of this can be fixed and how. And you have to promise me that you're going to end that this can be fixed because so many other issues, people say, well, I don't know what we should do. But anyway, so first of all, Nathan, thanks very much for joining. Give us a couple of brief sentences about yourself, your background and all that.
Sure. So, thank you so much for having me. My name is Nathan. I work in business development. So, nothing related to the Dead Sea in my day-to-day job. Married with a child under two, with one on the way. And yeah, living in Jerusalem now for the past three years.
Great. Well, b'hatzlacha and b'sha'ah tova with the one on the way.
Thank you, thank you.
And good luck with the one that's about two. Everybody does live through it, but they sort of wonder in the middle. Anyway, we will hear about how you got involved with the Dead Sea stuff a little bit later, but just talk to us now, either as Israeli citizens or people who come and visit, or people who have never been here and who are not going to come but are interested in Israel. What's wrong with the Dead Sea?
Sure. So, the Dead Sea is facing an existential, or we can call it an environmental catastrophe. Over the past decades, one third of the surface area of the Dead Sea has completely evaporated, and the Dead Sea is shrinking. So, it shrinks by about 1 to 3cm each day. I forget the exact number, but it's over a meter in depth each year. And that's just in the height…
How deep is it at its deepest point?
It's quite deep, if I remember correctly, it's hundreds of meters deep.
But the reason the surface area constricts is because obviously it's less deep around the sides. And so, like anything else, as the water level goes down, more becomes shore and less is water.
Correct. And as you've mentioned, we'll get to the reasons why, but the Death Sea is shrinking. And so not only it shrinks in depth, but as you mentioned, it recedes. In addition, as it recedes, what happens is, and I'm sure many people who've driven along the Dead Sea on the highway know sinkholes start developing. So, sinkholes are basically a situation where as the salty water recedes, the freshwater ground table comes in. So, the ground on top looks like it's very stable. But actually, what's happening is that water underneath the ground is dissolving lots of salt. These chambers form and at any moment sinkholes can develop. There's anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 sinkholes that have developed along the beach of the Dead Sea.
Approximately what size are these things? Some of them are small, right?
Some of them are small, some of them are massive. If maybe some of your guests or listeners on this podcast, remember Hof Mineral, the Mineral beach, used to be the biggest tourist destination in the Dead Sea. There a sinkhole completely devoured the entire site. If you've ever been there, you can see the parking lot literally just fell into a sinkhole and they had to close the beach. So, some of these can be hundreds of meters of wide.
And they go down pretty deep when they fall, they fall.
They go down, yeah, they fall. Absolutely, obviously varying depths. But yes, so extremely dangerous too, because you don't know…
Does it endanger the actual highway? Is the highway in danger?
So, if anyone has recently driven on the highway, if you know, as you come close to Ein Gedi, it used to be that you could drive straight. Now you make a big loop. That's because a massive sinkhole developed on the highway itself and Israel had to spend millions of dollars basically to reroute that highway because that's the only highway in the area.
That's fascinating. We just drove down there last year to go away for a few days in the Negev and we did the loop, and I had no idea why there was a loop because the road used to be straight. What was the problem with that now? Oh, wow. And my wife, actually, who was a tour guide before COVID but isn't completely up to date anymore, also had no idea why they had built that. So, okay, so it's affecting the highway.
Absolutely.
It’s destroying the sea. It's destroying the areas around the sea.
And don't forget, of course, we also have local communities who live there. There lots of kibbutzim. There are two regional councils, Megilot and Tamar. Not the most populous of regions in Israel, of course, but many people whose livelihoods depend on the Dead Sea. So, we're not talking just an environmental catastrophe. We're talking about affecting tourism, people's livelihoods. And of course, the Dead Sea is very important to us on religious and cultural levels. For Jews, it's where God split the water for Joshua and the children of Israel went in. For Christians, it’s where John baptized Jesus. It's where King David hid in Ein Gedi. So really important historical and cultural significance.
And the lowest place on Earth.
The lowest place on earth, you know we almost forget to mention, but the Dead Sea is this incredible resource, right? You can float on it. It has healing powers. People with psoriasis and skin conditions come. And of course, if you've been there, it's beautiful.
And no tourist comes and does not hold the paper up and read on their back…
100% or the picture with all the mud on them.
Right. So, it's a standard part of Israeli lore and you're saying it's disappearing in front of our eyes.
Disappearing in front of our eyes. And as I mentioned, one third of the surface areas has already disappeared. One third.
When did it start disappearing at a significant rate?
So since about the 70s. We can get to it. In the 60s if we want to move to the part about why this happened, basically, but in the 60s, Israel or maybe it was the 50s, honestly, I don't remember the exact date, but Israel built a dam in Kibbutz Deganya…
Way up north.
Way up north. Yes. So, the state was young, and we didn't have water resources. So, at that time, the Kinneret was the major source, the Sea of Galilee was the major source of water for the country. So, the country decided to dam the lower Jordan River, where it leaves the Kinneret at Kibbutz Deganya. And since then, we can also talk about the factories, but since then, the river, which used to carry over a billion cubic liters of water each year into the Dead Sea carries less than 10% of that. And today it's mainly treated wastewater/ raw sewage from the lower Jordan River. So, in addition to the Dead Sea, the lower Jordan River in itself is an entire catastrophe as well. But that's the major reason. About 60% of the reason for the sea's decline is the fact that we've dammed the Jordan River. We're not the only ones. The Jordanians dammed Nahal Arnon in the southern part of the Dead Sea…
And the Syrians also. Didn't they have an issue with water up in the north with us?
Yeah, we fought with them in the 60s, but we control most of the water sources in the north. But for example, they say that Hezbollah dammed the Hatzbani [or Snir] in Lebanon. So, we're not the only ones, but we are the major reason because… and it's funny, but you can understand why the state was young and we needed water.
Now, do we still need the water from the dam? Do we still depend on that water for our drinking water?
So, this is where it gets interesting, and this is where we feel that there's a historic opportunity. Up until the 90s the answer was yes. But ever since the 90s, Israel took a strategic decision, basically to desalinate most of its drinking water. So nowadays, I believe something close to like 90% of our drinking water, or getting close to that, is coming from desalination, which means…
From the Mediterranean primarily?
Yes, from the Mediterranean. And I believe a new one is planning to be built in the north as well, which will significantly add to Israel's capabilities. So nowadays the Kinneret is actually a strategic source of water in the case of God forbid, that the desalination plants go offline because of a war, because of some issue. It's kept there as a strategic source of water, but it's not actually needed in the sense that it was needed back in the early decades of the state for drinking and also for irrigation. Nowadays, Israel treats, that's the other aspect of this, Israel treats over 90% of our wastewater, and we then irrigate that. We irrigate our crops with treated wastewater.
Is that called gray water?
Gray water, treated wastewater, TWW, different names, but it's the same idea. So, when it's treated, we can then use it on the crops, and Israel is the world leader in doing so. So, all of these aspects combined now means that there is an availability of water to be let into the lower Jordan. We'll get to that. That's part of the solution.
Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about how we got here. So, we understand that the sea is shrinking. It's creating dangers along the side because of the ginormous sinkholes, people can get killed in this stuff very easily. It's potentially going to destroy the communities that live around it. It's obviously an internationally recognized natural wonder. So, it's an actual wonder. So, all of that's in danger, and for those of us, I grew up for a few years here when I was a kid and actually floated across, and it was the only place you can't drown, right? So, my parents were actually not even looking at my brother and I were on a little flotation thing, and we actually went out very far, and they actually two guys in the Navy actually came out, picked us up, and pulled us back in. But my parents were totally… they were like, the kids can't drown. They didn't think about the problem of going to Jordan. But, I mean, it was much huger back then. We're talking the late 60s. It was a whole different ballgame and the north and the southern part of the sea we’re on sea. It was all contiguous, and the map looked radically different than it does now. So, everything has really changed, and everything is still really changing. So, you've told us already that part of the problem is as a result of our damming it, we dammed it up at Deganya, the Jordanians dammed it, Hezbollah's dammed it, everybody's contributed to the lessening of the flow of water from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea via the Jordan River. And you said it's a 10th of the water going in. So that's obviously unbelievable.
And of course, that's the major reason for the decline.
That's the major reason?
Yes, about 60%.
60%. Okay. But that leaves another big chunk. 40% of anything is a not insignificant chunk. And so, what's the other 40% contributing and how does that work?
So, the other 40% comes basically from two factories. One Israeli, one Jordanian that we would call the Dead Sea factories. The Israeli one is owned by Israel Chemicals which is one of the biggest corporations here in Israel. And the Jordanian one I believe is called the Jordanian Potash Works. But the major one, at least the one we have more, let's say, influence over is the Israeli side.
This is on the southern end or not what you would call the southern sea?
Yes, this is in the southern basin. And in fact, this used to be government-controlled industry. So, this was back even pre state was when we first started working and realizing that there's a huge economic potential here.
And what is it? What's there?
So, there's lots of minerals in the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea, aside from the salt content, is the saltiest deep-water body on the planet but it's also incredibly mineral rich. Of those, potash is probably the most well-known. There's lots of other salts and bromine in high quantities, but potash is used in fertilizer. Now, most other places in the world, when you take out fertilizer requires you to have massive mines, very expensive to maintain. Here, in the case of the Dead Sea, you just need to evaporate some water and there the mineral is for you…
Well, it’s got salt in it though, no?
Yes. So, it's a lot more complicated than just simple evaporation, but at the same time…
It’s much cheaper…
It’s much cheaper than mining somewhere else.
And the majority of this potash, I assume is real exports.
100%. So, as I mentioned in pre- state and the beginning of the state this was government owned industry and the state actually gave out a tender called the Zikayon that allowed for the operator of these factories. It literally says in the language of the tender to do whatever they want to the extent to even lifgoah, to harm or laharos, if I'm not mistaken, is written… which it means to destroy is written in the wording of the tender
Which is from what year now?
So, the original tender, I believe was written in the 50s. It was then updated or renewed for another 30 years. It's 30-year terms. So that took us to the 80s and then the current tender is actually going to expire in 2030, which we'll get to about in terms of the solution.
So that's like what? Six, seven years away.
Yeah, quite soon.
So, this is the time to try to influence what happens.
Correct. But basically, as I mentioned, it was government owned, but sometime in the 90s Israel actually privatized this.
Just to give people background that was part of Israel's, privatizing everything, under Bibi Netanyahu, more or less as Minister of Finance, a lot of this. So, he privatized the electric company, privatized the phone company and they became much more efficient and much better service. The Post office now is getting privatized, or so they say. And I was at the Post office this week and I can tell you the service couldn't get worse. There was one bomb scare, one sick dog, a lot of angry people. And I thought to myself, my God, I'm back in Israel of the 1960s, 70s. So, the Post office has not yet been privatized, but that's in the process and most of these companies that were privatized became much more efficient. El Al was privatized and became much more efficient, much better. How did it affect ICL Israel chemical…?
So ICL is a private corporation. So, in the end, as when Israel went in the process of privatization, as you correctly pointed out, these industries were sold. And at the end of the day, Israel Chemicals, which is owned by these billionaire brothers, the Ofer brothers, bought these industries, bought these factories. And yes, they're incredibly profitable, they do incredibly well. But we have an absurd situation where a public resource that belongs to everyone, specifically as an Israeli citizen, it's something that we should be able to visit, et cetera, is being run by a private company whose profits are not being in any way, shape or form being put back in Israel. There's been lots of different reports showing how ICL has almost never paid any royalties that they're really required to by law. But the more absurd situation of course is that due to this tender they can basically destroy the sea and exploit the sea without having any economic or environmental incentives to do so in a more sustainable fashion.
Now, when they take this stuff out of the sea, I just want to try to understand the very, very basic sort of Dead Sea mining for dummies here. When they take this stuff out of the sea, it's minerals and salt and water, right? And then the water doesn't make it back into the ocean as part of the process.
Part of it does. So, if you've ever been to the Dead Sea, and I think listeners will find this interesting, the southern part of the Dead Sea is actually a series of evaporation pools. And what happens is that the southernmost point is the highest in altitude. So, the ICL and the factories, they pump water from the northern part of the Dead Sea, they pump it to the highest point of the southern part, and the water starts slowly trickling down through the evaporation pools. At each stage, a certain amount of water evaporates, and minerals are extracted. So, I believe something like 400 million in a year, about 400 million cubic liters of water is pumped, and about 200 or 250 make it back into the sea. So, you might have seen there were some news reports that there's this hidden river where this stuff going flowing back, right. And it's on ICL territory, so no one can actually even hike there. And they call it Israel's Grand Canyon, which is funny because there's nothing natural about it. But yes, so water does make it back, but of course not nearly as much water is pumped up.
Okay. So, we have the damming, which is taking a huge part, 60%. And it's this process that's taking the other 40%. Or is this part of the other 40?
No, this is the other 40. So, you can imagine, right. So, if you imagine a puddle that starts shrinking, so as it shrinks, just due to cohesion and adhesion, as the puddle gets smaller, it actually shrinks at a lower rate. Right, because the water is held more tightly. But in this situation, because they keep on pumping water from, let's say, that puddle, which is the northern part, to where the evaporation pools are, in the southern part…
The shrinkage does not slow down.
It doesn't slow down, exactly. And in fact, it gets sped up because the evaporation pools are shallow, so the evaporation is even more accelerated. And of course, people can argue about the exact percentages, but it's about 60 - 40.
Okay. Now, let's fast forward to today. But before we go to the Dead Sea and how we're going to try to fix it as a country, how does a nice Jewish boy from the east coast of the United States who comes here, gets married, has kids, works in business, how does he end up taking on this major charge of trying to save the Dead Sea?
It's a great question. So, I actually studied biology. It's funny. I work in business development, but my majors are in the sciences. I studied biology before I made Aliyah. And after I did the army, I decided I would go on for my master's. So, I decided to get a master's in environmental science from Hebrew University campus in Rehovot. So, it's called the Faculty of Agriculture, and I was doing my master's there. So, when you do your masters, you have to do a seminar. That year they decided to do a seminar dedicated to the Dead Sea. It was the first time I was exposed to all of the various and it's very complicated, as you can imagine, but all the various players, you know, the factories, the local councils, the geological survey, the Water Authority, the Drainage Authority and they did an amazing job, I have to say, where we really got exposed to all the various viewpoints. And since then, I've been hooked. So, at a certain point after I finished the masters, I started working and had a tiny bit amount of spare time of free time, and I said, you know, I really wonder that there has to be someone doing something about this. So, I basically just did a Google search, stumbled across this organization, The Dead Sea Guardians, and the rest is history.
Okay, so now we're going to talk mostly about the Dead Sea Guardians because you are one of the major players and you would like to see yourself as the clearinghouse or the central mothership around which lots of other organizations that might have some involvement would go so, it can be coordinated. But just to give us a sense of the lay of the Israeli ecological organizational land, who are the other players to lesser degrees because you're the only ones focused only on the Dead Sea, right?
Yes.
So, there are other organizations who care about all kinds of eco issues which are perfectly important, critically important, and this is one of their issues. But who are the major other players that people who are interested in this might Google when they're done listening?
Yeah, it's a great question. And by the way, there are other organizations that are, let's say, focused on the Dead Sea. There's actually another guy who has Anglo background, Noam Bedin, and he has a whole project where he documents the decline of the Dead Sea via photography, and he actually does give boats tours. A great guy. But we're the only organization that's solely dedicated to saving the Dead Sea. And we would even say we're not just an environmental organization, we're an organization for the Dead Sea.
It's got environmental, political, economics…
You name it. All kinds of different… But there are other organizations. And, in fact, one of the major accomplishments that we had in the past year was setting up a coalition of organizations spearheaded by us and EcoPeace as well, Lobby 99, which is, I guess, for good governance here in Israel, Zalul, which is dedicated to water resources I'm forgetting and other ones off the top of my head. EcoPeace, as I mentioned, which is a very well-known environmental organization that brings Israelis and Jordanians and Palestinians together. So, we have, I think it's almost nine or ten organizations and it was the first time that there was an alliance of different organizations all under one umbrella, working to really raise awareness and start pushing for a solution.
Okay, now of course comes the fix. Now we're going to talk about the fix. I was just reading somewhere oh, I know why because of the whole Yom Kippur war which was the 50th anniversary in October and there was lots of discussion of the Suez Canal because the Suez Canal played obviously an incredibly important role in Israel's encircling the Egyptian Third Army and all that. So, I started to end up reading a lot of these articles that appeared about the Suez Canal. And one of the things that I did not know is that when you connect the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, what you do because the water flows for some reason from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and not the other way around. You basically destroy the eco structure of the Red Sea because all of the animals and whatever else that are in the Mediterranean which should not be in the Red Sea have now been introduced into it. So, it seems like the Suez Canal was a great thing for shipping and this and that, I never really realized that when you connect two bodies of water you can do tremendous damage. It's not just like putting a pipe in between two sinks in your kitchen. So, I only mentioned that because it would seem like well, maybe one of the obvious ways to do it would be just build a gigantic pipe from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea, let the water flood in. You're not going to drain the Mediterranean because it's connected to the Atlantic, I mean it's pretty lot of water there, but that would probably kill the Dead Sea?
Well, it's a good question. Our take, and this is what I believe as well is that yes, it probably would in the sense that we don't know, I mean the Dead Sea is incredibly unique with a very high salt concentration. Funnily enough, by the way, the salt is from evaporation over time. The Dead Sea is actually a lake, right? It's a hyper saline lake, has no outlet. It's not like a river flows out of the Dead Sea, it's just there's incredible amounts evaporation, that's why it's so salty. But the source of water for the Dead Sea is actually fresh water and there's always been fresh water so no one knows what would happen if you were to pump in massive quantities of salt water. Stands to reason that it would very much harm the unique characteristics of the Dead Sea and we don't know what it could be that it would ruin the Dead Sea forever.
Nothing lives in there, right? No plants or animals live in there or is that wrong?
I believe there are actually some very unique microorganisms that can live only on salt. But yes, there's definitely no fish or anything.
No fish, obviously, but I mean, sort of I don't know… So basically, it’s not that it would kill the plant or animal life, of which there was either none…
But the receding of the Dead Sea is so, there are the pools in Ein Feshkha, if you've been in that area so, they're all under threat, because what happens is, as the Dead Sea recedes, the water kind of chases after it. And this can really affect the flora and the fauna in the area, which are quite unique to the Dead Sea. So that is definitely something that needs to be addressed. But to your point so actually, over the years, there have been lots of different proposals, what they call the Med Dead or the Red Dead, as you mentioned. In addition, if you take a canal from the Mediterranean Sea to the Dead Sea, you can generate electricity due to the difference in height. So, there's been lots of proposals. So, yes, that would be one potential way of solving it.
But potentially very dangerous?
Potentially very dangerous. Another issue that you have to take into consideration is that to do this would require enormous amounts of money, enormous amounts of cooperation between all the various governmental organizations, both within Israel. But of course, with our neighbors, with the Kingdom of Jordan, the Palestinians are in the West Bank, it requires so much to go right and even then, it would still take 10, 20, 30 years before anything gets off the ground. And in the meantime, the Dead Sea keeps receding…
Okay, so that's not the answer.
That's not our take.
That's not your take, according to your worldview of the world that's not the answer.
That's not the answer.
So how are we going to fix this?
Okay, so it's a great question. And up until now, and I marked that because really up until now, it hasn't been possible. But we believe that there's a historic opportunity where basically we know that there are two major problems, right? Which is the damming of the river and the factories. So, there are two aspects in terms of the solution. In terms of water flow down the lower Jordan River, due to the fact that now Israel has desalination plants, and due to the fact that Israel uses treated wastewater for irrigation. For the first time really in Israel's history, we have the potential to actually allow water flow from the Sea of Galilee through the lower Jordan. Now, just to make it clear, it doesn't necessarily have to be all freshwater, because we know that the Kingdom of Jordan is going under incredible shortages of fresh water. They desperately need water. I'm not sure if your listeners are aware, but actually, in 2021, Jordan, Israel and the UAE signed a memorandum of understanding, MoU, where basically Jordan would build these massive solar plants in its desert, provide Israel with renewable energy. In return, Israel will provide Jordan with some desalinated water from its desalination plants.
Already, Israel actually pumps desalinated water from the coast into the Kinneret. It already does this. Basically, our solution is calling to increase that, increase the amount of desalinated water that gets pumped in the Kinneret. Allow a corresponding amount of water flow out of the Sea of Galilee into the lower Jordan. At some point, if Jordan needs the fresh water, they can take it. But the treated wastewater afterwards, after the use of the water, as long as it's treated to high enough standard, can then be put back into the river. So, we both would rehabilitate the lower Jordan, which is facing its own catastrophe, and we can then allow for flow into the Dead Sea. Now, to make clear, that means what we're talking about is stabilizing the level, our vision is that there should be a thriving Dead Sea for future generations. Does that mean that we're going to pump back the 20, 30 meters that the Dead Sea has lost? No, but we will stabilize it so that we can keep what we have for future generations. That's one aspect. Second aspect of the solution is, as I mentioned, the tender for the Israel side at least of the factories, is due for renewal in 2030.
Which means now is the time to and this is what we call for, to pass a law in the Knesset to radically or reshape the way that the tender is provided so that the factories have to use Dead Sea water in a sustainable fashion, pay royalties. Basically, to take it from a concept of we can do whatever we want with this water to this is a public resource, and we believe that the combination of those two things will be able to stabilize the Dead Sea. And that's kind of where we're coming from. And this is the historic opportunity. Now is the time. That's what we believe.
There would be significant political pushback. Right? I'm assuming the Ofer brothers know quite a few people and have some influence. So, this is not going to be a cakewalk.
Absolutely not.
And who are your major allies in this politically?
So, we are an apolitical organization on purpose…
But when it gets to the door that Knesset it’s no longer apolitical.
So, in fact, we actually are coming up in building a lobby in the Knesset because funnily enough, when you talk about the Dead Sea and I'm not going to get involved in politics right now, but it's pretty much one of the consensus issues in Israel. Everyone wants there to be a Dead Sea, right? There are very few people with a vested interest to not. But what we're saying is that we need to have a movement where the awareness gets pushed, that it gets pushed to the top of the priority list. And that's where we think things have up until now have not really been happening. There's always something going on. There's a war, there's judicial reform, whatever it is. And the Dead Sea is always kind of pushed down to the bottom of the list. So, our goal is to really have raise public awareness and that's where we need people both within Israel and around the world to join the movement.
That was exactly what I was going to ask you. People who are listening are saying, I want to actually be involved in something in Israel which is not divisive. It's a consensus issue. It's not this group versus that group. I'm not even sure who's right or who's wrong, but I know that saving the Dead Sea is right. What can they do?
So, first of all, I would say for sure they should follow us, and they should also read up, you know, we're not the only source of knowledge…
And there are links, by the way, on the page where this is being published. There are links and people are really more than invited and encouraged to take a look at that.
Absolutely. So that you definitely follow us on LinkedIn, on Facebook, etc. You know, at the end of the day, what we need is really PR campaigns, public pressure campaigns, where the decision makers at the end of the day realize that this is something that is on the top of the priority list, and that's the work that we're trying to do. So, preparing public policy content, writing opinion pieces, being in the media. We have a documentary that I highly recommend, if groups would like to screen our documentary, that they should reach out to us. All the details are on the website.
Just tell everybody what it's called though.
The documentary is the same name as the organization called the Dead Sea Guardians. It's about our founder, Oded’s historic swim, it was the first time any group of swimmers has swum across the Dead Sea, to raise awareness about this issue. I highly recommend that you host a screening if anyone is listening who would be interested in hosting a screening in their shul, organization, et cetera. Yeah, and of course, we're looking for people to partner with us as well, but we mainly want people to be part of this movement, to be involved and to really raise the awareness and push this to be at the top of the priority list.
Wow. It's both very distressing, obviously, given I mean, as somebody who drives by on the 90 and goes north and south, you see the sinkholes. I didn't realize why I was taking that long loop on the highway. I thought, oh, wow, a new highway. I didn't realize, like, okay, for a really bad problem that we should have foreseen. But it's obviously much deeper than that, and it's much more problematic and foreboding than that. But what's also great about this country is that there are amazing people doing amazing things to try to reverse trends. Some of them are beyond our control, and some of them, like this one, are in our control. And it's just kind of a classic Israeli story. You know, a guy comes from America, builds a family, gets a job, but in addition gives a tremendous amount of time to making sure that we bequeath to our grandchildren and even to their children something that we took for granted when we were kids. And we want them to take it for granted just as much. So, for filling us in, for teaching about this and for all the work that you're doing, my thanks.
Thank you very much.
And I know you have one on the way, so and b'sha'ah tova, look forward to hearing good news.
Thank you so much.
Impossible Takes Longer is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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Striking in its beauty, the Dead Sea is actually drying up and disappearing