New Book: Kreiger, The Dead Sea and the Jordan River

Kreiger, Barbara. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

 

 

For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region which is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging and readable book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present. She conveys the blend of spiritual, touristic, and scientific motivations that have driven exploration and describes the modern exploitation of the lake and the surrounding area through mineral extraction and agriculture. Today, both lake and river are in crisis, and stewardship of these water resources is bound up with political conflicts in the region. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River combines history, literature, travelogue, and natural history in a way that makes it hard to put down.

 

Table of Contents

• Part I. This Strange Water
  1. Some Early History, Travellers, Myths
• Part II. Nineteenth-Century Exploration
  2. Three Sailors, and a River
  3. Along the Briny Strand
• Part III. Origins and Evolution
  4. The Life of a Lake
• Part IV. Further Exploration
  5. Gentleman from Siberia
  6. A Lake Divided
• Part V. The Twenty-First Century
  7. The River and Lake in Distress
  8. Reclamation, and a Vision of the Future
• Afterword

 

BARBARA KREIGER is Creative Writing Concentration Chair and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College. Her other publications include Divine Expectations: An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.

Reviews: Kislev, Water Economy of Israel

Kislev, Yoav. The Water Economy of Israel. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014.

 

 
Reviews

• Becker, Nir.”Review.” Water Economics and Policy 1.3 (2015).

 

 

Thesis: Lippert, Detection of a Submarine Aquifer Offshore of Israel using LOTEM (in German)

Lippert, Klaus. Detektion eines submarinen Aquifers vor der Küste Israels mittels mariner Long Offset Transient-elektromagnetischer Messung, PhD Thesis, Universität zu Köln, 2015.

 
URL: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/6351/ [PDF]

 

Abstract

The importance of offshore submarine fresh groundwater bodies as well as of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) became commonly recognized in the recent years for groundwater management. The existence of submarine fresh groundwater bodies extending offshore to distances between a few meters to several tens of kilometers was reported all over the world and SGD was detected and studied also in the eastern Mediterranean, offshore Israel. The Mediterranean coastal aquifer of Israel is one of the main groundwater resources of the country. It has been exploited heavily and, as a result, the quality of water is gradually deteriorating. It is well known that the aquifer is grouped into four subaquifers, which were managed separately. The upper two sub-aquifers are known to be subjected to lateral seawater intrusion and to pollution from above whereas the lower ones are assumed to be, in places, blocked to the sea. For a long time, geoelectric and, particularly, geoelectromagnetic methods were leading geophysical techniques in solving various hydrogeological problems related to the characterization of groundwater salinity. This is due to a very close relationship, which exists between the salinity and electrical resistivity measured by the methods. In order to explore fresh groundwater below the sea the Long Offset Electromagnetic (LOTEM) method, which uses grounded lines (electric dipoles) as both transmitter and receiver antennae, is applied in the marine environment. The presented work is part of a Joint German-Israeli project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space (MOST). The LOTEM measuring system from the Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne is applied for the first time in the marine environment. Although marine Time Domain electromagnetic methods with a horizontal transmitter dipol are used by the oil-industry or other university working groups for similar targets, it was never reported, besides by the Israeli project partner Geophysical Institute of Israel, to be applied to such shallow waterdepths up to a maximum of 50 m. The main goal of this thesis is to detect the submarine aquifer and to examine its lateral dimension.

 

 
 

Cite: Fröhlich, The Israeli–Palestinian Water Conflict

Fröhlich, Christiane J. “Security and Discourse: the Israeli–Palestinian Water Conflict.” Conflict, Security & Development 12.2 (2012): 123-148.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14678802.2012.688290

 

Abstract

When conflictive viewpoints are discursively strengthened, they develop into a ‘conflict discourse’ with a specific discursive structure which perpetuates conflict, like the discursive securitisation of an issue for varying audiences. When they are weakened, however, societal discourse can potentially change so that agreement becomes possible again, thus achieving discursive conflict transformation. This article analyses the Israeli and the Palestinian water discourse. On both sides, the dominant discourse structures underscore the conflictive issues regarding the distribution of water between Israelis and Palestinians, thus making communication, let alone negotiation, downright impossible. While Palestinians regard the natural water resources as sufficient in principle and the existing scarcity as entirely politically induced, Israelis perceive the natural water resources as absolutely scarce while receiving major de-securitisation impulses from the possibility of desalination. In the respective (minor) counter-discourses, however, possible starting points for dialogue and conflict resolution are visible.