What do we lose if we lose Israel?
Here\’s one of the many answers, excerpted from Emily Harris\’ article at npr.org:
Israel has long sought solutions to the threat of drought. Commercial desalination began in the 1970s in the city of Eilat, on the Red Sea. The first desalination technology used there, in a short-lived pilot project, froze water to remove the salt, then melted it to make fresh water.
But Israel seriously embraced desalination in the late 1990s, after a particularly bad drought. The government decided to build five new plants along the Mediterranean, as fast as it could.
With four of those up and running and the fifth about to open, more than one-quarter of Israel\’s fresh water is now created through desalination.
An Israeli company is building a desalination plant near San Diego, to aid in California\’s historic drought.
It\’s been an “incredible game-changer,” Gilron says. “What it means is that, even in a year where we don\’t get enough rain, that difference can be made up from desalination.”
I certainly hope that San Diego – and then many other cities in the future – utilize Israel\’s desalinization technology to lessen, maybe end, their water shortages.
This is another example of what we lose if we lose Israel.
Let\’s don\’t.
Oh, one other thing: To the Boycott Divest Sanction crowd: Try not to drink any of that water. A boycott\’s a boycott, right?
