The ABC Foreign Correspondent program has used the plight of the Dead Sea as a lead-in to an anti-Israel propaganda exercise.

Something is Sinking, and It’s Not Just the Dead Sea

  • The Palestinian Authority (PA) uses European funding to cultivate more and bigger tracts of Israeli state land every year, a well-known… loophole in the Ottoman Land Law (still in force in these territories) that grants rights to anyone who uses land for agricultural purposes for a period of several years, whether they own it or not.
  • [T]he question should be, how was this water allocation determined, and how are the actual water needs of this population determined? …. [H]ow much water does each Palestinian in this region need, and how many people are we talking about?
  • The PA invests untold millions of European taxpayer-funded “humanitarian aid” to initiate massive, unsustainable agricultural projects in desert areas under Israeli jurisdiction… to take control, physically, of ever-expanding swaths of territory. It goes to tremendous lengths to pad “population statistics” — allowing people born abroad who have never set foot in the Middle East to register as residents… failing to remove deceased persons from the rolls, and double-counting people who live in other areas.
  • The allocation of water to Palestinian residents under Israeli jurisdiction was determined in the framework of the Oslo Accords according to population size. Simply put, there would be no water crisis if Europe and the PA would not have orchestrated a large-scale migration of people…. for political purposes.
  • Israel provides approximately 70 million cubic meters (MCM) per year of water to the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) alone… even though the Water Agreement signed in the Oslo framework allocates a much smaller quantity of only 23.6 MCM/year…. If the PA so desired, the residents of the “village” of Kardala could easily be living in Bardala and enjoying sufficient water supplies.
  • Similarly, the housing needs of all Palestinians currently living in illegal structures on Israeli state land throughout Area C [under Israeli jurisdiction] could easily be met if the PA invested its resources in development and construction in [the Arab jurisdiction] areas A and B — where there is no threat of demolition, confiscation of equipment or materials, and no need for Israeli permits.
  • [O]ver 60% of land resources under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction remain available. Rather than using its resources to improve the lives of its people, the PA instead chooses to divert all its resources into illegal, politically motivated projects that are designed to wrest control of as much land as possible away from Israeli jurisdiction.
  • Agenda-driven journalism is not journalism. It is propaganda….

Read the article by Naomi Linder-Kahn at The Gatestone Institute.

[Editor: Despite the fact that this article has not been published in our Australian media it is important that we are aware of the continuing anti-Israel behaviour by the ABC, this time with this episode that was screened on the ABC Foreign Correspondent program on June 10.]