(Article Excerpt:) “In the fall of 2017, Minister Ariel sent his […] Shlomo Ben Eliyahu (son of the late Rav Mordechai Eliyahu […], to Beijing to finalize the *details and make sure the genocidal maniacs got all they wanted, which included the aforementioned *240,000 acres (one million dunams), even though —
- The deal greatly impinges on Israeli food security, particularly wheat production;
- It cuts deeply into our ability to produce silage (feed) for our dairy sector, a development that could cause severe inflationary repercussions for milk products;
- It makes for wholesale changes to the land-lease regimen of the state, bumping from three-year maximum terms for kibbutzim and moshavim in the area, to 21 years (!) for the savage Chinese — with an opportunity to renew for ANOTHER 21-year term after the lease expires. Lost in the process, of course, is the flexibility that shorter lease terms afford farmers to address local shortages.
- Though the Chinese will finance the irrigation of what’s purported to be avocado groves, the move will also necessitate the building of two huge desalination facilities in the Mediterranean, which all parties agree would raise production costs, perhaps to a level that renders the entire project financially unviable.
- Moeover, desalination is known to damage shorelines and fisheries, as the process dumps massive quantities of salt back into the sea. Almost nothing can survive the extreme salt saturation that results — as anyone familiar with the Dead Sea can attest. Efforts to build a new desalination plant in the Western Galilee have met with fierce opposition from local residents, fishermen and environmentalists aware of the massive pollution also caused by these facilities.”
