Headline News
Why Is Israel, One of the World’s Driest Countries, Now Overflowing With Drinking Water?
Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of a water shortage catastrophe, today Israel has more water than it needs
“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God.” Isaiah 35:1,2 (KJV)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Prophetically, the verses from Isaiah 35 will be fulfilled during the Millennial Reign of Jesus Christ from Jerusalem on the Throne of David. But even now, we continue to see God’s blessing on Israel above that of all the other nations around them. Tiny, little Israel holds an amazing amount of patents for technology, farming, and water purification.
Article written by Rowan Jacobsen
Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.
“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.
We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.
Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.
IDE’s Ashkelon Plant
The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”
That water stress has been a major factor in the turmoil tearing apart the Middle East, but Bar-Zeev believes that Israel’s solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.
Bar-Zeev acknowledges that water will likely be a source of conflict in the Middle East in the future. “But I believe water can be a bridge, through joint ventures,” he says. “And one of those ventures is desalination.”
Driven to desperation
In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops.
Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.
And that, according to the authors of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria,” they wrote, “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”
Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.
More water than needs
Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.
But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.
The country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?
Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.
The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel’s farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?
Water diplomacy
Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.
Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most US cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).
The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.
What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it. Bar-Zeev has ambitious plans for a Water Knows No Boundaries conference in 2018, which will bring together water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a meeting of the minds.
Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.
On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.
The contrasts couldn’t be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule. source
Headline News
Shocked Airline Passenger Sees UFO Flying Outside Her Plane And Snaps What Just May Be The Clearest Image Yet Of An Unidentified Flying Object
An airplane passenger took flying saucer speculation to new heights when she spotted a possible UFO soaring above the Big Apple — baffling experts and sending federal aviation officials on a fact-finding mission Thursday.
Back in March, airline passenger Michelle Reyes was coming home from a trip, and she started filming the impressive panoramic view outside her window when she was stunned to see a UFO hurtling past her. She immediately contacted the FAA who had no response, and then she posted it to her Facebook page. Now weeks later, people are talking about the UFO outside her window, and not coming up with any other explanation for what she saw that day.
“Then I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll.” Zechariah 5:1 (KJB)
The UFO flies in and out of frame very quickly, taking up a mere 5 frames of camera time. But when those frames were analyzed, they revealed one of the clearest UFO images ever captured. Are we on the cusp of making contact with the beings driving these ships? I say not only yes, but we are overdue for this type of activity. The US government switched positions back in 2019 when they acknowledged UFOs are in the skies with Navy pilots on a regular basis. They are coming down as we prepare to go up on Flight #777!
Possible UFO over NYC baffles passenger flying into LaGuardia
FROM THE NY POST: Michelle Reyes was on a commercial airline flight above LaGuardia Airport on March 25 when she captured video footage of a mysterious “flying cylinder” out of her plane window, she said on Facebook.
“The first thing I did was email the FAA to let them know what I saw,” she told NewsNation Wednesday. “Maybe it was a safety hazard, but unfortunately I haven’t heard back from them, they didn’t acknowledge my email.”
Michelle Reyes caught a video of a mysterious “flying cylinder.”
She said another person on the flight saw the out-of-this-world object and was stunned.
“It’s a little nerve-wracking that someone else saw what I saw,” she said.
Thomas Wertman, the state director of the Mutual UFO Network in Ohio, reviewed the footage for The Post and said the dark object was traveling at roughly 2,500 feet and was “relatively close” to the plane as it prepared for landing. The object’s altitude, shape and location — near a major commercial flight path — appears to rule out that it could be a news helicopter, a drone or a military-operated aircraft, Wertman said.
The unusual round shape of the object struck him as “intriguing” because it debunks the theory that it was a second plane filmed at an odd angle.
“It does not appear to be a commercial aircraft because I don’t see features like wings or a tail,” he said.
The plane Reyes was aboard was roughly 15 minutes away from LaGuardia Airport likely traveling 230 mph when the video was shot, he said. READ MORE
Caught on camera: Possible UFO reported over New York’s LaGuardia Airport
Michelle Reyes caught an image of a mysterious “flying cylinder,” possibly a UFO, from her airplane window above LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Reyes joins “Banfield” to discuss. Ben Hansen, UFO investigator, also weighs in.
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
antisemitism
The Pro-Hamas And Anti-Israel Protest Groups Roiling College Campuses Across America Right Now Are Funded By George Soros And His Far-Left BDS Buddies
Far left BDS groups supporting the Columbia students’ sit-in include a group that supported the Hamas attack of October 7 and a George Soros fund.
It’s an amazing thing to see how all these college campuses across America are now hosting massive anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations that feature professionally designed and printed signage, pop-up tents, and an endless bevy of transportational vehicles to ferry people to and from the protests. Why, it’s almost as if these ‘organic student-led protests’ had professional backers feeding them money and materials. As it turns out, they do and George Soros is leading the pack.
“The copy of the writing for a commandment to be given in every province was published unto all people, and that the Jews should be ready against that day to avenge themselves on their enemies.” Esther 8:13 (KJB)
You might not have heard of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement, BDS for short, but it is a very powerful group of people working to put pressure on Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies and colleges and universities to pull investments and endowments connected with Israel to cripple them financially. George Soros and his Leftist buddies are funding all of what you are watching unfold on the news with the college protests happening right now, just like they funded the furor surrounding the George Floyd event in 2020. George Soros might be biologically Jewish, but he is very much against the state of Israel and the Zionist Movement. You remember he started his career as a teenager in WWII, ratting out his Jewish friends and neighbors to the Nazis who then seized their property and took them away to the camps. In 2024, nothing has changed, Soros is just doing his dirty work globally instead of locally.
The far-left groups funding Columbia’s student sit-in including a group that supported Hamas Oct 7 attack and a George Soros fund
FROM THE DAILY MAIL UK: Tensions continue to escalate at the Ivy League school where hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters are demanding that the institution divest from companies with ties to Israel. So far, more than 100 demonstrators have been arrested at the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’, which is comprised of a coalition of 116 groups under the umbrella organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
Now it has emerged that several of the groups in the coalition have received backing from left wing donors, including one group currently under investigation for allegedly fundraising for terrorist organizations.
One of the key players in the coalition is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which the Gazette reports came out in support of the October 7 attack which killed 1,200 Israelis. SJP receives funding from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), according to the Anti Defamation League, which describes AMP as holding ‘extreme anti-Israel views’.
Pro-Hamas protests at the University of Texas spiraling out of control, George Soros money has been very well spent. #Protests #Texas pic.twitter.com/ZyvFGinWH6
— Now The End Begins (@NowTheEndBegins) April 25, 2024
Last year, Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares announced his office was investigating AMP over allegations they may have been fundraising for terrorist organizations. SJP is also an offshoot of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition which supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the Green New Deal, and other left-wing initiatives. WESPAC is named as a ‘fiscal sponsor’ of SJP, according to NGO Watch and has assets over $1,000,000. Several of the groups members are among those who have been barred for participating in the sit in.
Another central player in the encampment is Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received millions from various donors including George Soros’s Open Society Network. Since 2016 the group has netted at least $650,000 from Soros-backed organizations.
Other donors have included the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose director, Nicholas Burns, resigned in 2017 over its support for JVP. Both JVP and SJP have been involved in solidarity protests across other universities including NYU, Yale, MIT and Harvard.
Columbia canceled in-person classes, dozens of protesters were arrested at New York University and Yale, and the gates to Harvard Yard were closed to the public Monday as some of the most prestigious U.S. universities sought to defuse campus tensions over Israel’s war with Hamas.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest states on its website that it represents thousands of students across nine schools.
Other groups which make up the coalition include Young Democratic Socialists of America, Columbia Queer and Asian, the African Students Association, Columbia University Students for Human Rights and the Teachers College Abolition Collective.
The coalition began the sit in following Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. The stunt entered its seventh day today and has already seen billionaire donors including Robert Kraft pull their funding and earned condemnation from the White House.
The coalition’s three demands center around divestment all of Columbia’s finances, including that profit from ‘Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine’, severing all ties with Israeli universities and an opposition to ‘to land grabs, whether in Harlem, Lenapehoking, or Palestine’. The group is seeking a ceasefire on Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in retaliatory strikes by Israel. READ MORE
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
Free Bible Program
We Just Sent One Bible For Every Detainee At The 1,400 Bed Karnes County Facility As Chaplain Segunda Tells Us 53 People Just Got Saved
This month we have sent out nearly 5,000 pounds of Bibles, New Testaments and scripture portions to jails, prisons and detention centers across America
Chaplain Segunda wrote to tell us two things the other day. The first was that she was very grateful to have received the 1,400 Bibles we sent to the Karnes County Detention Center last week, the second thing she wrote to tell us was that 53 people had prayed to get saved, and they were overjoyed to receive those Bibles from us. An equal amount of Bibles went out to the South Texas Immigration Detention Center, and 750 King James Bibles were sent to the Floyd County Jail in Georgia.
“But the word of God grew and multiplied.” Acts 12:24 (KJB)
I got a letter yesterday Mark & Margie Beamer who attend the Wooster Bible Church in Ohio, they were writing to send a donation for Bibles Behind Bars and to tell us that the Bibles we sent to that church last year for their jail ministry at the Richland County Jail are still being given out, and that they were excited to help give them out. What a blessing that is for the giver and the receiver!
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
Christian, your prayers and donations are fueling an amazing boots-on-the-ground offensive to put the word of God into as many jails and prisons as the Lord will allow. New requests come in on a daily basis, please keep us in your prayers. And if God has prospered you, please take a moment to click on the donate button to send is a generous financial contribution to keep the supply line of King James Bibles, News Testaments, scripture portions and gospel tracts wide open. Thank you so much…TO THE FIGHT!!!
Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church
- HOW TO DONATE: Click here to view our WayGiver Funding page
When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.
But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORT…TO THE FIGHT!!!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)
“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB
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END TIMES
CHRISLAM
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