RUTHFULLY YOURS

This post by Rowan Jacobsen was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement.

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 throughnational 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.

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.”

Those who wear compassion on their sleeves have no monopoly on concern for the poor. The only contention is about how best they can be helped. And whatever help is provided must be detached from any illusion that society can be rid of poverty.
A little enquiry shows that though a great many people are dissatisfied with the existing pattern of distribution, none of them has really any clear idea of what pattern he would regard as just. —Friedrich Hayek, “The Atavism of Social Justice”

Prosperity and poverty do not sit well together. The contrast is confronting. Take this comment for example:

Everywhere in the world there are gross inequities of income and wealth. They offend most of us. Few can fail to be moved by the contrast between the luxury enjoyed by some and the grinding poverty suffered by others.

You are probably wrong about its provenance. It is neither from a papal encyclical nor an utterance of Justin Welby, Thomas Piketty, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. It is from Free to Choose (1980) by Milton and Rose Friedman.

Those who wear compassion on their sleeves have no monopoly on concern for the poor. The only contention is about how best they can be helped. And whatever help is provided must be detached from any illusion of ever ridding society of poverty. It will always be around, confirmed for those biblically minded by Deuteronomy 15:11 and Matthew 26:11. Moreover, there will always be wide disparities between the rich and the poor. Anything approaching equality of income or wealth is unachievable. Even those on the fringe of the distant Left who might extol its desirability will admit of that. As explicitly does the Catholic Church: “unequal distribution [‘in physical and mental abilities, wealth, etc.’] is part of God’s plan, so that man can share his blessings with those in need” (from the “Simplified” version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1936 and 1937).

There is no question. Inequality is an inherent characteristic of all complex human societies. This means that claims of there being excessive inequality is a judgment call. It is based, presumably, on the prevailing economic system, whatever it is, being flawed or broken in one way or another. This has to be the argument.

Unsurprisingly, as the system underlying all successful economies, capitalism is in the firing line. Inequality in, say, socialist Venezuela is not a headline issue. Inequality is just one of many problems in a typical socialist society and not the major one when the lights go out. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I intend addressing is how the values inherent in capitalism bear on “distributive justice” compared with Christian values and, as a subsidiary reference point, with those inherent in socialism. I am squarely in the First World. At root, the Third World’s problems have nothing to do with economics. They have everything to do with dysfunctional cultures and can only be solved though political and social reform by the societies concerned.

John O’Sullivan, in The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister (2006), points out that papal encyclicals “rightly warn against greed and materialism as dangerous sins”. The latest encyclical, issued on May 24, 2015, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home) carries on the theme. Capitalism is again the culprit, as it must be. No other system, whether it was feudal or mercantilist before the rise of capitalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or the experiments with socialism-cum-communism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has produced enough material goods to sustain widespread materialism.

Greed and materialism, to which can be added “individualism” (interpreted as meaning a lack of solidarity with others), underscore the Catholic Church’s discomfort with capitalism. Other Christian denominations undoubtedly share this discomfort. And, certainly, it is difficult to see how greed, materialism and individualism, which undoubtedly at times characterise capitalism in practice, are reconcilable with Christian values.

SEOUL—North Korea fired a submarine-launched missile that traveled much further than previous similar tests, a fresh sign of progress in Pyongyang’s program to develop nuclear-tipped missiles that are difficult to detect before launch.

The missile was launched from near the port of Sinpo on North Korea’s eastern coast at around 5:30 a.m. Seoul time on Wednesday. It traveled about 300 miles (482 kilometers), according to the U.S. military, before falling into the sea.

North Korea began testing submarine-launched missiles in late 2014 but flight distances have been limited to a few miles at most. The previous most recent missile launched from a submarine in July of this year failed in the early stage of flight, according to South Korea’s defense ministry.

The latest launch showed “progress” compared with previous tests, according to a statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The apparent successful launch of a missile from a submarine comes after North Korea also held its first successful launch of a missile from a land-based mobile carrier in June.

Both missile types represent a new threat because they are harder to identify and destroy before launch. They also have the potential to give North Korea a “second-strike” capability to retaliate to an initial major attack on its military bases.

South Korea and the U.S. quickly condemned the latest test, one of a string of ballistic missile launches by North Korea this year in violation of a United Nations’ ban. CONTINUE AT SITE

Religious programming is popular throughout the Middle East. Television viewers call in or send questions via email or social media to ask scholars of Islamic law about all manner of things. Most questions relate to their personal lives, from the mundane—can Muslims listen to pop music?—to such issues as inheritance, alimony and contraception.

Every once in a while, however, a viewer raises an issue of political consequence. Such was the case with a 2015 episode of the Al Jazeera talk-show “Al-Sharia wa Al-Hayat” (Shariah and Life), which has recently become the subject of intense debate. The following question was asked: “Is it permissible—in the Syrian context—for an individual to blow himself up to target a group that owes allegiance to the Syrian regime, even if this causes casualties among civilians?”

This was the response:

“Generally, individuals should fight and die in combat. . . . However, if the need arises, individuals should only blow themselves up if a group (jamaa) decides that it is necessary for those individuals to blow themselves up. . . . These are matters that are not to be left to individuals. . . . Individuals should surrender themselves to the jamaa, and it is the jamaa that determines how to utilize individuals according to its needs.”

The speaker was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the intellectual force behind the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups. He has written more than a hundred tomes on theological and jurisprudential issues that have attracted many adherents and numerous detractors. In addition to his scholarship, he has devoted a lifetime to religious political activism. Through his many writings, sermons, speeches and religious edicts, al-Qaradawi has become recognized as a progenitor of radicalism in the Middle East and beyond.

His answer regarding suicide bombings is typical of his extremism. By failing to reject the premise of the question, al-Qaradawi accepted suicide bombings as a legitimate weapon of warfare. This openly contradicts the prohibition in Islamic law on committing suicide.

Al-Qaradawi also fails to uphold the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, a cardinal principle of modern international humanitarian law and Islamic laws of war. The Holy Quran and various Prophetic sayings, otherwise known as the Hadith, establish an unquestionable prohibition on targeting noncombatants.

More alarmingly, al-Qaradawi entrusts the so-called jamaa—a term that can mean “the group” or “the community” and was left undefined—with the authority to order young women and men to become suicide bombers. He finds no religious compulsion or moral imperative to condemn the heinous practice of transforming human beings into indiscriminate instruments of death. He fails to denounce the evil of exploiting young women and men to advance the cause of terror. CONTINUE AT SITE