If today you tried to cross the holy and powerful River Jordan – the river that both connects and separates Israel and Palestine from Jordan; the river through which the Jews entered the Promised Land; the river in which John the Baptist baptized Jesus; a river of Biblical, but also existential importance in the dry, hot, dehydrated Middle East – you could, in places, jump across it. And you would feel disgusted stepping into it.
The river that once flowed abundantly into and out of the Sea of Galilee before disappearing into the Dead Sea has today lost around 70 percent of its flow. In some stretches even more. In others, it is heavily polluted.
First, in the 1960s, Israel built a dam redirecting water from the Sea of Galilee into its national reserves. Then the Syrians followed suit, siphoning off and drying up the Yarmouk River – a tributary of the Jordan. And where everyone goes, Jordan follows: canals began to multiply.
While Jewish settlers in the West Bank build homes with swimming pools, water reaches Palestinians in jerrycans a few times a month, rationed and scarce. They have no access to water resources on their own land. Water access in Israel-Palestine is one of the most tightly controlled and politically charged resources in the region.
Of course, we would be hypocrites to recline in front of our screens, beer in hand, sneering at the feuding “savages,” Arabs and Jews who – imagine! – exploit natural resources. We are simply luckier to have more of them. Stone and sand in the East are meager, and the struggle for resources is brutal. Man does not live by bread alone…
We are no better than they are, because the Jordan is not the only river, nor the only body of water, threatened by depletion and pollution. But the story of the Jordan is just another drop (no pun intended) in a sea of irony: this source of life, this sacred site for believers of all three major religions, is being destroyed by those who need it most.
There is something deeply symbolic in how a potential point of unity in an increasingly thirsty Holy Land is vanishing before our eyes.
Hope survives among the few who remain reasonable — young people, activists, ecologists, and scientists from Palestine, Israel, and Jordan, united by a common goal: saving the river before it becomes a biblical-scale disgrace.
