The other great Zionists?

Forget them too.

None of them can hold a candle to Israel Kligler. Without Kligler there would be no Israel.

He defeated the biggest enemy that Israel ever faced, and he did it quietly, in the background. But, even though he never sought fame or recognition for his work, it is still a travesty that few know of his vital role in the creation and survival of Israel.

What enemy was he responsible for defeating?

The mosquito.

More importantly, it was the anopheles mosquito – the one that carries malaria. And yes, malaria was the single greatest enemy. It killed thousands every year and made what was then called Palestine a place of terrible devastation and poverty.

In fact, it appears that the mosquito was a part of God’s judgment on Israel:

And yes, scientists do consider the mosquito to be in the same family as the fly.

Could it be that Israel Kligler helped end a curse on the Land of Israel?

Who knows.

But, one thing is clear. There is absolutely no way that Israel could exist today without malaria having been defeated first. Let me repeat that in a different way.

Without Israel Kligler there would be no Israel.

And, no one knows.

The man who battled Israel’s most formidable enemy — the mosquito

Israel Kligler is one of the reasons Israel exists. So why have you never heard of him?

By Matti Friedman, April 25, 2012, Times of Israel

Ninety-two years ago, a diminutive and determined young scientist stepped from a boat onto a “notoriously malarious” patch of Levantine land and into the middle of a losing war against a tiny, deadly enemy ravaging the population.

Israel Kligler – university professor, Zionist and public health pioneer – played an outsize role in defeating malaria in Palestine beginning in the 1920s. Countering the mosquito-borne disease was not a minor medical success but a crucial victory that paved the way for the growth of Jewish settlement and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, Kligler and his role in Israel’s history have been forgotten. April 25 is a fitting date to remember him: This year, it happens to be both the eve of Israel’s Independence Day and World Malaria Day, marked every year by the UN’s World Health Organization. Thanks in large part to Kligler’s efforts, malaria was eradicated in Israel, but the global battle against the disease has been remarkably unsuccessful: Every year, according to the WHO, malaria infects 216 million people and kills 655,000.

Kligler has a small number of vocal boosters, and they believe his success should both earn him a place in the Zionist pantheon and be studied anew as the world continues to grapple with the disease he confronted nearly a century ago.

Born in what is now Ukraine in 1888, Kligler moved with his parents to New York City when he was 9. In 1920, having completed a doctorate in microbiology in New York and research on yellow fever in South America, he gave up a promising academic career in the US and arrived instead in British-ruled Palestine, committed to putting his scientific knowledge at the service of the Zionist project.

He found a land devastated by malaria. The illness was, a British report said in 1921, “by far the most important disease in Palestine.” Much of the territory Jews had purchased for settlement was in lowlands infested with malaria — that was one of the main reasons it was available — and the disease was decimating the ranks of the Zionist pioneers and the country’s other inhabitants. Some settlements had been abandoned altogether as a result.

One visitor in 1902 remarked that the Turkish soldiers at one border garrison had to be replaced monthly because all would contract malaria in little over a week. A report from 1917, the year the British arrived, noted that Palestine was “notoriously malarious,” and an estimated 90 percent of British soldiers at the town of Beisan — today’s Beit She’an, in the Jordan Valley — were ill within 10 days.

“There is little doubt that the static condition of Palestine during the last several centuries is due almost entirely to malaria,” Kligler himself wrote a decade after his arrival.

“The once famous city of Beth Shan, standing in the midst of an intensively irrigated plan, was in the course of time completely surrounded by water-logged marshes, became one of the most malarious points in a highly malarious area, and dwindled to a small village,” he wrote.

Describing the coastal plain, he wrote: “One sees large stretches of richly watered, potentially cultivable land inhabited only by a few Bedouin tribes, all infected with malaria, and eking out a precarious existence from the proceeds of baskets made of marsh reeds, and from the milk of buffaloes which wallow in the marshes.”

If the Zionist project was to succeed, this had to change.

Read the rest of the article here.

My Dad is a retired water pollution specialist and has rubbed shoulders with Palestinian environmentalists in many different settings. Unfortunately, these environmentalists are forced to deal with village chiefs that are ignorant of the risks of untreated sewage and ignorant of the ways to handle those risks.

Furthermore, when equipment is set up to handle their sewage problem, it is routinely damaged and rendered inoperable because of mismanagement.

Are the Palestinians doing this on purpose?

No.

But, it is these kinds of divisions that help fuel the conflict.

Samaria in a sewage stalemate

By SHARON UDASIN 02/03/2012, The Jerusalem Post

All but one of 22 Palestinian villages refuse connection to sewage line, Environmental Protection Ministry says.

Gilad Erdan tours Samarian communities By Courtesy Environmental Protection Ministry
Swirling in the strikingly green valley below the southern Samaria community of Nofim is a rambling stream amid grass and trees – filled with dangerous quantities of sewage.

A subterranean sewage pipe connects to the underbellies of four of the five surrounding settlements – Nofim, Yakir, Etz Ephraim and Sha’arei Tikva – and will within a few months also connect to that of Ma’aleh Shomron, bringing all of the effluent to a treatment facility in Eliyahu.

Despite Israeli offers to connect the 22 surrounding Palestinian villages to the same pipe, all but one of them refused the proposal, Environmental Protection Ministry and Shomron Regional Council officials explained during an exclusive tour of the area on Thursday.

Instead, their sewage flows into the aquifer below and ends up directly in the stream, according to the officials.

“That’s a testament to the fact that we are doing everything we can to prevent pollution in Judea and Samaria, but nevertheless, the Palestinians refuse to cooperate,” Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan told The Jerusalem Post during the tour.

Read the rest of the article here.

Such as the five percent rule for drug smuggling. The rule is that you only catch five percent of all the drugs smuggled across your border. Sometimes you get more. Sometimes you get less, but generally you only get five percent.

In other countries, like Russia, it’s actually worse.

What prompted this Little stream of consciousness is a bit of BBC reporting on the IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) attempts to secure radioactive materials and suppress the smuggling of those materials.

Why is the IAEA attempting to get a hold of radioactive materials? Materials that cannot be made into an atom bomb?

Because these materials can be made into a radiological bomb – a bomb that uses conventional explosive to shower radioactive materials over a wide area. A wide area such as downtown New York, or Washington D.C.

Can you imagine the terror that would result? Just two or three of those bombs could shut down the commercial capital of the US, for days or weeks - and send the economy of the US (and even the world) into a tail spin.

Or, they could choose the top financial cities of the world, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London and paralyze them simultaneously. Can you imagine the result?

If you could paralyze the financial districts of these cities for one week, the economic system of the world would totally collapse – especially if you added Frankfurt, Milan, and Paris. Just pack a few bombs with easy-to-get radioactive materials and place them on top of a few tall buildings. You could literally destroy the world economy.

So, why did I start with a discussion of drug smuggling?

Well, there is a HUGE amount of HIGHLY radioactive material floating around the former USSR, and there is this one, tiny little team of experts from the IAEA attempting to get it. Unfortunately, they are in a race with other teams that aren’t so small. However, the IAEA is attempting to allay our fears by claiming that they are catching this radioactive material at the border.

What the IAEA is not telling you is that security at these borders is lousy, and easily circumvented. And, they also aren’t telling you about the five percent rule for drug smuggling.

So, remember this. The more that the IAEA claims that they are intercepting… well, at least 20 to a 100 times more than that is getting through.

Now, tell me that this isn’t an obscure fact. 

Deserts are harsh and unforgiving. Deserts consume the weak. Deserts demand everything that you have, and then a little more.

When you live in the desert, you live by desert rules, and if you forget those rules… you die.

However, desert rules don’t apply everywhere. It’s not necessary to live by desert rules in the rain forests of Africa and Southeast Asia. Desert rules don’t make sense in the fertile plains of the American Midwest.

In fact, Desert Rules only apply… in the desert.

So, what do you think happens when you bind up Desert Rules into a religion and spread it around the world? What happens when you take a people who have been forged by the harsh realities of the desert, and point them at the soft underbelly of ‘softer’ peoples? What happens when you apply Desert Rules to unwinnable conflicts?

Hatred. Violence. Death. Destruction. Famine. Pain. Suffering.

Let me put it this way, rabbits are cute furry little creatures. I love rabbits. My cats love rabbits. Almost everyone loves rabbits.

But, in 1859, some idiot (Thomas Austin) released 24 wild European rabbits in Australia. Those rabbits went on to multiply into millions and cause the extinction of 1/8th of all mamalian species in Australia. They created serious erosion problems by eating plants necessary for soil integrity. And, who knows how many plant species became extinct?

The Rabbit is an animal that conforms to European Rules, but when introduced to an environment that operates under Australian Rules… there is disaster.

Islam is a religion conceived under the hot sun of the desert – by the Arabs, a people forged by the harsh rules of that same desert.

What happens when a religion and people of harsh rules spread into a different system? History provides an answer to that one.

Hatred. Violence. Death. Destruction. Famine. Pain. Suffering.

(Think also of the Viking invasions of Britain. The Germanic invasions of Europe. The Mongol invasions of China.)

What happens when this people comes into conflict with a people that operates under a Judeo-European set of rules?

Hatred. Violence. Death. Destruction. Famine. Pain. Suffering.

I see that you have the picture.

That’s why I’ve been so spotty with my blogging. However, I should be entering a quiet patch in November which should allow me to be more consistant.

Why November?

Well, I’m running around like a crazy person, trying to get everything ready for a major trip to the US. Some things are going smoothly. Some things aren’t.

When it rains, it pours.

Of course in Israel, that is both true and a blessing.

Rain is a life and death issue in Israel, so when it rains we feel better. There’s nothing like the pitter patter of rain on the roof to give you that nice warm fuzzy feeling. Just like there’s nothing like reports that the Kinneret (Sea of Galilea) is rising. Or, that we’ve exceeded the yearly rainfall averages.

It’s that important.

In Israel, when it rains on your parade, you’ve been blessed.