Beirut on the Bayou by Shwayri Raif;

Beirut on the Bayou by Shwayri Raif;

Author:Shwayri, Raif; [Shwayri, Raif;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438460956
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2016-07-15T05:00:00+00:00


8

On true resilience

Nadim Shwayri

Nadim was twenty-one when Alfred, his father, passed away. He was still in college, completing a thesis in economics for the master’s degree he would earn a year later. He chose to study the Litani River for his thesis, the one tributary that was of vital importance for the Bekaa plateau, the main agricultural region of Lebanon. It was of such importance that during the days when the French and British were drawing the borders for the states they created, the British pushed the northern borders of Palestine to encompass the Litani itself, which is twenty-five miles into Lebanese territory to the lowest stretch and twice that much to the valley, where the Qaraoun Dam now lies. This border was advocated by the British at the urging of the Zionist Organization, whose leadership understood the importance of water in the region.(The Zionist Organization’s president, Chaim Weizmann, said: “[We] consider it essential that the Northern Frontier of Palestine should include the Valley of the Litani, for a distance of 25 miles above the bend.”) Along with the Jordan River, the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Litani was a main confluent that configured the Fertile Crescent–shaped region of the Near East, from the Sinai to the mouth of Shatt al-Arab on the Persian Gulf.

With his understanding of regional economics, Nadim saw the Litani River, with its yearly flow of nine hundred million cubic meters of water, as a cause for conflict in the region. The important waterway, which has its source in the northern Bekaa, runs south and then arcs westward before it empties into the Mediterranean, north of the ancient city of Tyre. Nadim was proven right when, in 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and took control of the Wazzani River, a fresh water stream feeding the Jordan River, as well as the Hasbani River, where it installed pumps and pipes to divert the waters into Israel. In 1982, the Israeli army went back to annex the south of Lebanon on the pretext of establishing a buffer-zone free of fedayin, the Palestinian vigilante combatants who made armed incursions into northern Israel. While occupying the south of Lebanon for eighteen years and giving the Shi’a populations living there reason to organize into a liberation army (as in the case of Hezbollah), the Israelis tapped into the Litani River at the level of the Qaraoun dam and continued to access Lebanon’s water resources until their evacuation in 2000, despite Security Council Resolution 425 (fulfilling, three decades later, the recommendations of Weizmann). The National Water Carrier of Israel, the country’s largest water project, did not wait that long to lay hands on the water and funnel it to irrigate the waterless Negev: it had started early on, since 1948, to drain lakes (as in Huleh) and tap Syrian and Jordanian resources (Banias and Yarmouk to name but two large tributaries), despite the incessant UN resolutions (as in Security Council Resolution 92, in 1951). When you visit Jordan today and walk along



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