First cause is an agricultural industry which scarcely breaks even in Israel but which drinks up water - at subsidised prices massively below the market level - in a region where it is the most precious resource of all. Israel, Syria, and Jordan and even the Palestinian Authority are all to blame for this unfolding catastrophe. A few metres to the south, one open pipe is illegally pumping out from the banks brown, frothing raw sewage totalling around three million cubic metres a year; and a larger pipe still is pumping out some 20 million cubic metres a year of concentrated salt waters diverted from the springs feeding the Galilee which should never have flowed undiluted into the river in the first place. To the north, the waters are low - thanks to the huge green pipes sucking out what the neighbouring kibbutzes and moshavs to irrigate their farming land - but crystal clear. To understand why, you have to drive some 100 km north by road - "the lower Jordan itself, the crookedest river that ever was," Admiral Lynch called it - to the low Israeli earth-dam at Alumot, where the river as history has known it simply stops, 3km south of the Sea of Galilee.
For the Jordan itself it means, in the blunt words of Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli Director of FoE Middle East, that the famous river has become little more than a "mere sewage canal". It is threatening the extinction of an already vulnerable wildlife population, from gazelles and the now- rare leopards that historically roamed the Jordan valley to the birds which stop here on their way to and from Africa and Europe. The depletion,as well as the systematic pollution of the river ,is the major factor in the catastrophic reduction in the level of the Dead Sea. Even that pitifully low volume is threatened with further dramatric reduction - of up to 70m cubic metres - by the reported completion of the "Unity Dam", a joint Syrian-Jordanian project inside Syrian territory on the Yarmuk river, the biggest tributary of the Jordan, which will catch the winter floodwaters that flow into the river on its way to the Dead Sea. The flora and fauna inherent in freshwater rivers are nowhere to be found." What has made this even worse, since Israel started sucking out the waters of the Jordan for the water carrier it built in the 1960s, is the man-created depletion of the river which has reduced it from a level of 1.3bn cubic metres a year to what is by comparison a trickle of some 100 million cubic metres. In laymen's terms, says Hillel Glazman of the Parks Authority: "These results reflect the untreated sewage and salt water from springs diverted from the Sea of Galilee being dumped into the river." This pollution has long ago damaged the ecosystem of the river. " Conductivity" - thanks to the abnormally high level of salts - is three times as high as the Galilee waters from which it comes.
Just how much of a disaster we know thanks to the results published yesterday - World Water Monitoring Day - after joint testing by the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority and Friends of the Earth of Middle East which shows oxygen levels are almost half of what they should be. For the Jordan, the "one more river to cross" in the great black American spiritual, is fast becoming an environmental disaster. Any danger of being swept away has long gone; the main risk now is an unpleasant rash from the raw sewage and fish-farm waste which accounts for so much of its sadly depleted volume. He recorded seeing a pilgrim being swept away by the currents; one of his boats broke up in the rapids. Today, when the Israeli military opens up Kasr al Yahud on the great Christian festivals a few times a year, pilgrims are sensibly forbidden to plunge into the water. A mere century and half ago - a blink of the eye in the millennias of history of this river which occupies a numinous place in the imagination even of those millions of adherents of the three great monotheistic religions who will never see it - US Admiral Lynch led an intrepid expedition down the river. PC Teresa Milburn, who was shot in the chest immediately after PC Beshenivsky was hit, was giving evidence at Newcastle Crown Court, where five men are standing trial accused of involvement in the murder. The court heard that PC Milburn told police just days after the shooting: "There was an almighty bang I can see her head [PC Beshenivsky] It goes to the right, then to the left, and flops Her arms flop to the side.
