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The Wonder List with Bill Weir
The Dead Sea is Dying. Aired 10:00-11p ET
Aired March 29, 2015 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:05] BILL WEIR, CNN HOST: Flashlight's on.
(voice-over): This is a bunker dug into a land of miracles and wonders. The year I was born, it was crawling with Israeli soldiers fighting a war that began partly over water.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just put your head down.
WEIR: After six days, they won. And now this former soldier is eager to show me who moved in since they left. He gives no clues to what's down waiting in the smothering darkness. And I won't figure it out until I hear the chirp and feel the flutter.
(on camera): Wow.
(LAUGHTER)
My gosh. Look at that.
(voice-over): I came to the Middle East looking for glimmers of hope, and I never thought I'd find one surrounded by bats beneath salty earth near the banks of the dying Dead Sea.
(on camera): Amazing.
(voice-over): My name is Bill Weir, and I'm a storyteller. I have reported from all over the world, and I have seen so much change. So I made a list of the most wonderful places to explore right before they change forever. This is THE WONDER LIST.
This is a story about man versus man versus nature, a story about sand and blood, salt and rain, Moses, Muhammad and Jesus. And this is a quest for a one-of-a-kind dip in the most bizarre swimming hole while anyone still can because Dead Sea and the holy river Jordan that feeds it are going away. And the earth is swallowing up the footprints of prophets and saints.
But this is also a story about redemption and how maybe, just maybe, the path to peace is over water.
(SHOUTING)
WEIR: What is your favorite water? Is there a pond that brings you peace, some river of joy, perhaps, some ocean of wonder?
(SHOUTING) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I couldn't hold on anymore.
WEIR: Well, if I had to choose, I would go with this perfect little lake. After a very fun, very dry summer, the waterline got alarmingly low. But we can't imagine that it won't come back. In fact, if our neighbors and Mother Nature can keep a good thing going, this place should remain blissfully unchanged the rest of my kids' life.
But the same cannot be said for another lake in a part of the world you've probably heard about, a church or synagogue, at the mosque, or on the evening news, a lake in the center of the Holy Land. Now, a couple things strike me about this place every time, things preachers and news anchors just can't convey. First is the heat, knee-buckling, soul-crushing heat coming from a sun that just seems angry. Since I am naturally pink as a newborn squirrel, I brought a gigantic hat. Honestly, I was going for Indiana Jones, but the crew now calls me Audrey Hepburn, which is a small price to pay for sweet, sweet shade. The second thing is the size. So much smaller than the epic stories imply. And if my Sunday school memory serves, you can see it all from Jordan's Mt. Nebo.
(on camera): But this is something no Sunday school class could ever convey.
Hearing this wind, smelling this air, imagining Moses after 40 years of wandering through the wilderness, drawing his final breaths right here within sight of this, the Promised Land. The Sea of Galilee is over there. Jericho straight ahead. Got the Jordan River, the Dead Sea. Bethlehem in the distance. And look, the holiest of cities silhouetted against a setting sun. Jerusalem.
There is no oil under this land. There are no diamonds, no gold. And yet it is without doubt the most fought-over piece of real estate on the planet.
(voice-over): As we drive down, down, down below sea level, ears a popping, we see a liquid victim of all that conflict, a lake unlike any other, smooth as blueberry yogurt. Just imagine the elation of ancient travelers seeing it for the first time. Water in the desert! But then they got close and crunched across a bizzaro beach of salt and found a thick mineral soup that stings the eyes and burns the tongue. No wonder that for centuries the Dead Sea filled visitors with dread.
[22:06:24] BARBARA KREIGER, AUTHOR: Early Christian pilgrims said that, well, we believe that the Dead Sea is a mouth of hell, the actual mouth of hell.
WEIR: While others saw it and fell madly in love. Romantic types like Barbara Kreiger.
KREIGER: You could see the wrinkles of age and conflict in the very lines of the mountain ranges. And then to have this intense blue, I had never seen anything like it.
WEIR: Barbara wrote one of the definitive histories of the Dead Sea. And like any good guide, she has to start our quest by checking a map. And long before Google, there was the floor of St. George's Cathedral in Jordan.
KREIGER: This is to the north. The Jordan River flowing into the Dead Sea.
WEIR: 1,500 years ago, Greek Orthodox artists used tiny pieces of tile to create this strikingly accurate map of the Middle East.
KREIGER: The famous fish who's high-tailing it back up the Jordan River. He's tasted the Dead Sea water. He knows it's a mistake. And it looks like he's trying to warn his friend to turn around as well.
WEIR (on camera): Swim away!
(voice-over): This floor turned out to be a lot more reliable than all the Christian pilgrims who spread Dead Sea horror stories through the ages, like the tales of serpents so deadly, if they bit a horse, it would kill the rider.
KREIGER: Maybe this was, in fact, intended to keep you away because this was, after all, the site of Sodom and Gomorrah. And who knows if the cities were not still contagious.
WEIR (on camera): Right. Yeah, you don't want to get any of that sin in the bloodstream.
(voice-over): Yes, for so many, for so long, the Dead Sea was proof of an angry god. A god who cleaned up the neighborhood by burning it to the ground and turning the defiant into salt, including Lot's wife who just couldn't obey the order to get out of town and not look back.
But over time, fear was replaced by fascination and spas and hotels and massive mining operations. And just as the Dead Sea became recognized as a unique source of health and wealth, it began to disappear. If we use satellites to modernize that church floor mosaic, this is what the Dead Sea looked like as recently as 1970. And here it is today. In just a few generations, one-third of this massive ancient lake has vanished. And unless something is done, it will keep going down at the rate of three feet per year.
Oh, and instead of salt pillars, a new and hellish natural phenomenon is spreading modern dread, the frightening result of a different kind of sin.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(SINGING)
[22:13:07] WEIR (voice-over): In virtually every religion, water is a symbol of purification and redemption and eternal life. And to a huge chunk of humanity, this water is holier than most. Cleanse my soul in healing waters
(SINGING) WEIR: Muslims know that friends of Muhammad were buried on the banks of the Jordan. And for Christians, this is the river where John baptized Jesus. The Bible doesn't say where exactly, but these days, there's only one road through the fields of land mines where pilgrims can pass, only one place on this particular stretch where the soldiers will allow you to wade. This is border, after all, Israel on this side, Jordan over there. So for the busloads of pilgrims on both sides, this will have to do.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is the baptism site.
WEIR (on camera): This is the spot, they say, right?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. This is very special for us to be here.
WEIR (voice-over): Ray and Barbara are Mormons from Utah.
(on camera): Would you believe me if I told you that the Jordan is slowly dying, it's going away?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Things are changing. There's a lot of signs. I don't think it will be too long before the savior comes again.
[22:14:28] WEIR (voice-over): You don't need faith to believe that change is happening. You just need eyeballs. The signs are literally everywhere. Every decade or so, they put up another one to mark where the waterline used to be. Or for a more sweeping view, there Masada at dawn, a fortress synonymous with defiant Jewish resistance against Roman oppressors. Herod the Great built it as protection against Cleopatra and his own disgruntled subjects.
(on camera): Oh, wow.
GADAN BROHMBERG, FOUNDER, ECO PEACE MIDDLE EAST: The view was so different for them and so much more beautiful than what it is now.
WEIR (voice-over): With two tricked-out palaces up here, it was Herod's seaside retreat. Now, well, sorry, King, your seaside has retreated.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, this is the Aleto Hotel, built on the shores of the Dead Sea.
WEIR: But the more recent ruins are much more dramatic. No one was around to see the king's view, but many middle-aged Israelis remember walking through this once swank lobby and right into the waves.
(on camera): The Dead Sea is way, way down there. My goodness. Are you serious? So the waterline was where?
BROHMBERG: The waterline was actually right at the steps.
WEIR (voice-over): This is Gadan Brohmberg, the Israeli founder of Eco Peace Middle East.
BROHMBERG: The demise of the Dead Sea is completely manmade. This is not climate change. This is not an act of nature. The demise of the Dead Sea is taking place under government license.
WEIR: He shows me a mural of an old crusader map of the Jordan valley. And it's a great way to get our bearings to understand that it all begins in the Sea of Galilee where Jesus took that famous walk across the waves. That is the main source of the river Jordan. And for centuries, it flowed into the Dead Sea with enough force to keep up with rapid evaporation under that scalding sun. But in the last 50 years, warring neighbors began draining the Jordan.
BROHMBERG: Israel took half of the river Jordan, another quarter from Syria and another quarter from Jordan.
WEIR: So there is no one villain in this manmade disaster. It is a simple equation of too many people and not enough cooperation. For decades, neighboring countries diverted tributaries feeding the Jordan, directing the flow to crops and populations that have exploded in the past century.
YURI SHANI (ph), FORMER ISRAELI WATER COMMISSIONER: The difference is about 30 million people in the desert area. Each of these people is using and consuming water. So the water is needed simply for to live.
WEIR: Yuri Shani (ph) is Israel's former water commissioner and advises the current government.
SHANI (ph): If you want to use the water for civilian any kind of assumption, you need to use it. That's what you do everywhere in the world. Every water use in the world starts with damning and using waters you get. And this is true for each of the countries around. It starts with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestinian Authority. That's it.
WEIR (on camera): This could not be a more perfect metaphor, the hole in this wall because the Dead Sea is disappearing because the Jordan River is broken.
(voice-over): But the problem is, not merely enough people can see that damage for themselves.
(on camera): Anywhere else in the world if a major and beloved waterway starts to disappear, people notice. But here it's almost impossible for the general public to notice because they can't get to it. Between them and the Jordan River, there are literally tens of thousands of land mines.
(voice-over): But up near the Sea of Galilee, there is one stretch where the Jordan is deep and wide enough to carry a canoe. The first explorer to chart this trip was actually another American, a navy man and fervent Christian named William Lynch. Before the Civil War, he convinced his commanders that exploring the Holy Land was in the U.S. national interest.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He knew there was going to be a dangerous journey, because the river was a fast-flowing body of water.
WEIR (on camera): This river? BROHMBERG: This river.
WEIR: This bathtub we're in right now.
BROHMBERG: This bathtub that we're in today was a fast-flowing river.
WEIR (voice-over): Hard to believe now. But Lynch and his men braved 27 different rapids, lost one of his two boats, and described the banks of the Jordan as lush jungles with countless weeping willows shading their journey.
(on camera): And how many are there now?
BROHMBERG: The willow tree is extinct.
WEIR (voice-over): But when you were young, you don't know what you never had. And for these kids, this is heaven enough.
(on camera): Look at this right here, this is amazing.
BROHMBERG: This is what a river should do. It should provide recreation and entertainment.
WEIR: If I was a kid growing up here, this is where I'd be all day long. But Jordanian and Palestinian kids will never experience this.
BROHMBERG: Well, we're determined that they will.
# (voice-over): But first, he has to convince the Israeli government to tear down this dam.
BROHMBERG: And, again, just a few kilometers south, this becomes the border. This is the last stretch where the Jordan River is in Israel on both sides. It's a mentality of conflict. It's a mentality of my enemy is further south. Literally, right in front of us.
[22:20:02] WEIR (on camera): This is it.
CLIVE LIPCHIN, MIDDLE EAST WATER EXPERT: It's the dam wall that holds back the Jordan River.
WEIR (voice-over): As Gadan condemns the governments responsible, including his own, our Israeli canoe guide can't sit in silence any longer.
LIPCHIN: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).
WEIR: His name is Roman. He's a former Israeli paratrooper who insists the water we've been enjoying rightfully belongs to Israel. And he's passionate that he's on the right side in a violent clash of cultures.
LIPCHIN: A journalist in Israel come and we give him trip in heaven. In Syria, they cut your throat. I want to tell the Americans, OK, and we are not the problem. You need to understand, we are not the problem. WEIR (voice-over): Environmentalists can point to a dam like this and
blame Israel, or stand on a dam like this and blame Jordan.
(on camera): How high is this supposed to be?
LIPCHIN: You see that waterscape?
WEIR: That's where the water --
LIPCHIN: That's where the water is supposed to be.
WEIR (voice-over): Meanwhile, the river doesn't pick sides. It just disappears.
Since there is no way to float all the way down, we convinced Jordanian soldiers to let us hike across their DMZ for a rare up-close glimpse of the mouth.
WEIR (on camera): There's nothing to it. There's nothing to it. It's ankle deep. It's a muddy little trickle.
(voice-over): Here we see that a small percentage that leaves the Sea of Galilee now enters the Dead Sea. But in Israel, most people didn't pay much attention to that until someone fell into one of these.
(on camera): Oh, my gosh.
LIPCHIN: Yep.
WEIR: This is huge. I was expecting a little pothole. This is a canyon.
WEIR (voice-over): Actually, it's a sink hole. A decade ago, there were two dozen. Now, over 2,000.
LIPCHIN: They're just going to get bigger and bigger. There's no stopping this phenomenon.
Clive Lipchin is a Middle East water expert who explains that as the lick evaporates, giant blocks of underground salts are being eaten away by fresh ground water. Now the earth is so unstable, everything from date orchards to army camps have been abandoned.
LIPCHIN: The future economic development of the entire area of the Dead Sea is now basically under threat because of the sink holes. Nobody thought about this when we began to extract huge amounts of water upstream.
WEIR: But they are sure thinking about it now. And Clive is not the only one who thinks solving this whole mess could actually mean a better future for the Middle East.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:26:54] WEIR (voice-over): When we launched THE WONDER LIST, this was the very first thing we recorded. Ever since, from the Aegean Sea to the Gallipolis Islands, it's tradition to do the wonder flop in every destination.
(on camera): But not here. No, this is the one, one place we don't want to flop, because they say that splashing any of the Dead Sea in your face is a sensation not unlike being pepper sprayed. More salt than pepper spray, I suppose.
(voice-over): And so, one must ease into the warm and viscous water, which feels like 90 degrees and almost slimy. But the floating, amazing. You need a bit of core muscle to keep from flipping over, but otherwise, if not for the blowtorch sun, you could almost nap out here. Now, getting out brings the instant urge to shower. So for most, this is a "been there, done that" kind of experience. But for hundreds of thousands of people a year, this is not entertainment. It is medicine.
DR. MARCO HARARI, DIRECTOR, DMZ CLINIC: You are most welcome. So we are going to see what are the secrets of the Dead Sea.
WEIR (on camera): The medical secrets?
HARARI: The medical wonders.
WEIR (voice-over): Dr. Marco Harari runs the DMZ Clinic in Israel. His practice is hands-down the most bizarre I've ever seen.
(on camera): So this is your surgery, where you make your rounds?
HARARI: Exactly.
WEIR: And you don't administer any medicine?
HARARI: No, no medicine.
WEIR: So you come out and tell people to turn over?
(LAUGHTER)
That's the greatest medical practice I've ever seen.
HARARI: Yes, a nice way to explain the things. But indeed, we have no medicine here.
WEIR (voice-over): He says it's all in the water and the air. The Dead Sea's unique concentration of magnesium, potassium and salt is a natural remedy for skin diseases like eczema. While the sun, filtered through dense oxygen 1300 feet below sea level, is a natural remedy for psoriasis.
(on camera): Don't listen to this part. Why do you need him?
(LAUGHTER)
Why can't you just check into a hotel and lay on the beach? What does he give you that you couldn't get elsewhere?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's the security, the security to do it right. WEIR (voice-over): Herbert said that a few weeks here makes his
painful eczema go away for months at a time back in Austria.
And then there's Morela, a judge from Croatia, who came in a last- ditch attempt to help her vitiligo, the incurable condition most associated with Michael Jackson.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can see the color around my eyes.
HARARI: Yes.
[22:30:00] BILL WEIR, CNN HOST: She says hers was brought on by the stress that came after the death of her mother, and the stress of constant embarrassment since. She says the worse part is when some unknowing stranger treats you like a leper.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They are looking on my skin and ask me, can this disease for me --
WEIR (on camera): Is it contagious.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. And it is awful.
WEIR: But something happened to you, obviously --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
WEIR: -- where you don't mind you not wearing any makeup.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
WEIR: You're filled with self-confidence.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, yes.
WEIR: What was it?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Dead Sea.
WEIR: The Dead Sea?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Dead Sea and coming here.
WEIR (voice-over): She says her skin color has dramatically improved with a simple treatment of 15 minutes in the water and 40 minutes out in this blazing sun.
(on camera): But that scares me because --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
WEIR: -- because you know that the hazards of skin cancer. Aren't you worried?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You will not get cancer on Dead Sea. DR. MARCO HARARI, DMZ CLINIC: The sun exposure that you are going to
receive here, if you are a patient here, it is exactly the same that you will receive in an artificial UVB treatment, even less.
WEIR (voice-over): Truth is exposure to this sun, like any sun, can be dangerous in high doses. But Dr. Harari says this place is a source of what may be a huge breakthrough in finding a cure for skin cancer. It's here they discovered that vitiligo patients like Morela carry a special blood protein that protects against melanoma.
HARARI: And we can say that in the next years, we will have more and more publications about a lot of other diseases, not only the skin diseases, but all of them which are connected to the human system.
WEIR: But here's the kicker, while this is technically Dead Sea water, most of these folks have no clue they're floating in a manufactured illusion. The beach sand, trucked in. The water, pumped in from a deeper part of the lake. Yes, they're floating in the evaporation ponds of two huge chemical companies, one Israeli, one Jordanian, which made billions of dollars by pumping that precious water out and scooping up the minerals left behind. Next to the choking Jordan River, many say these plants are another reason the Dead Sea is dying. But are they?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:36:18] This is a land of contrasts, a place where scorching days vanish to sublime nights, a place of simmering resentment and warm hospitality, a place where the fate of the Dead Sea impacts businesses, big and small. At one end of the lake, in the Palestinian territories, there is the tiny West Bank salt company, owned by a Chicago-born Palestinian named Sam Hallack.
(on camera): This is the only Palestinian address on the Dead Sea.
SAM HALLACK, SALT COMPANY OWNER: That's right. We are the last of the Mohicans.
WEIR (voice-over): At the other end of the lake is the massive fertilizer factories of Dead Sea Works. These are part of a $7 billion Israeli chemicals empire run by Noam Goldstein.
(on camera): How would you characterize the profitability of an operation this big?
NOAM GOLDSTEIN, DIRECTOR, DEAD SEA WORKS: This is a perfect plant.
WEIR (voice-over): Every year his operation pumps 42 billion gallons of water out of the deeper sections of the Dead Sea into 60 square miles of shallow ponds. After that water evaporates, they vacuum up the millions of tons of minerals that go into everything from fertilizer and pesticide to soda cans and car engines.
(on camera): So there are little bits of the Dead Sea in cars and soda cans and --
GOLDSTEIN: Exactly.
WEIR: So you got, what, 20 employees?
HALLACK: 20 employees work here.
WEIR (voice-over): Meanwhile, at the other end of the lake, Sam would love to expand the company his dad built. He says he's got a great product.
HALLACK: It's pure. It has 21 different minerals that you don't see in other salts.
WEIR (on camera): Oh, yeah. Oh, that's nice.
HALLACK: I love my salt, man.
WEIR: Me, too.
WEIR (voice-over): And since he took his product to the fancy food show, he says he has plenty of demand.
HALLACK: I have a bowl of tomatoes and all the sea salt I brought with me to the Dead Sea and I couldn't get enough away. The following year I went and it's the same feedback. And that's when we got the whole gourmet line.
WEIR: His only problem, complicated local politics.
HALLACK: Let these guys go past.
WEIR (on camera): Is that military going by? What is that?
HALLACK: Those are our neighbors.
(LAUGHTER)
Just saying hello. It's a military area. But we like to keep the peace. We're here to make a living.
WEIR: But, man, there are easier places to make a living. You know that.
What was the reaction when you told people you were going to leave Chicago --
HALLACK: Oh, god.
WEIR: -- to come run a salt company?
HALLACK: I think people thought I was crazy.
(LAUGHTER)
And you know, I think it's the best thing I did.
WEIR: So this is not an act of defiance, this is an act of -- HALLACK: It's an act of resilience and continuity.
WEIR (voice-over): Sam says he would love to improve this place, but it is in an Israeli military zone, a task that's easier said than done.
HALLACK: You haven't seen this, have you?
WEIR (on camera): No.
(voice-over): And every time Hamas fires a rocket at Israel, his supply chain into Gaza is shut down and business there grinds to a halt. Through it all, Sam tries to stay upbeat.
HALLACK: This used to be a docking --
WEIR (on camera): That was a dock?
HALLACK: Yeah.
WEIR: Oh, my gosh.
(LAUGHTER)
HALLACK: So you can see the disaster here.
[22:39:56] WEIR (voice-over): But the optimism runs thin as the Dead Sea runs away.
Like Sam, the big boys down south, both Jordanians and Israelis put the majority of the water back, but for him, it is a question of scale.
HALLACK: And it goes back to the sea. We're living off of it.
GOLDSTEIN: The main reason for the water level to go down off the Dead Sea is because there is no water entering into the Dead Sea. This is why. This is because of too many people. Lot of people around, they want to drink. They want industry.
WEIR (voice-over): So you blame the farmers, the water management systems up in the north?
GOLDSTEIN: No, we are not blaming anyone. This is the fact which was published by the government. But you can say that our contribution to the reduction of the level of the Dead Sea is about 9 percent. We are not the biggest one.
WEIR: Even if you're only responsible for 10 percent of the drying of the Dead Sea and all the sink holes and the result of that, you're still contributing to a very serious problem, right?
GOLDSTEIN: All the authorities in Israel have the same attitude. The pros are much, much larger than the cons here.
WEIR (voice-over): He's got a point. The fertilizer and pesticide they mine here helps feed countless people from Africa to India. Instead of burning fossil fuels, their process is powered most lie by the sun. And if they weren't pumping all that water, the south basin would be a Dust Bowl. 4,000 hotel rooms would be swallowed by those sink holes, and tourists would have nowhere to float.
GOLDSTEIN: When they are swimming in the Dead Sea, it's good, but you are swimming in the same water.
WEIR (on camera): Right.
(CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
WEIR: They don't really put that in the brochure, though.
(LAUGHTER)
Come relax in an evaporation pond of a giant potassium mind.
GOLDSTEIN: This is the water of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea used to be there.
WEIR: Would you be willing to take home less of a profit if it meant saving this body of water for an extra century or two?
GOLDSTEIN: I think that government should look for long-term always.
WEIR: You'd pay more for that concession, if they asked?
GOLDSTEIN: I didn't say that.
(LAUGHTER)
You're asking me one thing, now asking a different thing.
WEIR (voice-over): Back up north, Sam just wants everyone taking water from the Dead Sea to be mindful of the collective impacts.
HALLACK: It's OK to have great businesses and be prosperous, but at the same time, you're not creating a situation where you're going to destroy the whole thing.
WEIR (on camera): Yeah.
HALLACK: It's frustrating, but at the same time, I think humanity eventually wins. You know, I hope so. That's my -- that's my hope that it will overcome.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:46:50] WEIR (voice-over): I'm riding into the valley of the shadow of death on a donkey named Apricot. We're riding to find St. George's Monastery, a place where men were so desperate to get away from the madness of society they somehow built this into the side of a cliff.
As the flute of a goat herder echoes off the rock, it's hard to believe this is the site of deadly violence between Arabs and Israelis as recently as the '90s. But then Apricot's owner provides a more hopeful perspective.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I see some tourists are afraid about Arab or some Arab of Americans. The Americans are good.
WEIR: He's known is Fati (ph), and he's a Bedouin, a tribe of borderless nomads know for their toughness, hospitality and fierce independence. And he proves that when you know no borders, you have the luxury of common sense.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You see in Jerusalem, the church here. Where's the problem? And the mosque here. No problem. Here together, Holy Land. You're human. I'm human.
WEIR: It sounds quaint, but that attitude is the only way to fix this unnatural disaster.
And this group thinks the most unifying force in this bloody, dusty place is water.
(on camera): From just pure news value, we have a Jew surrounded by two Arabs. Let us know when the fighting is going to break out.
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Put him in the middle, huh?
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No fighting here, we're together, we're a team.
WEIR (voice-over): Gadan, from our Jordan River canoe trip, is the Israeli in this trio. And with Munkat (ph), from Jordan, Nader in the Palestinian territories, they run Eco Peace Middle East. They've been together through countless conflicts when working with the other side can get you killed.
(on camera): You were shot at, is that true, because you were working with?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They mixed me up for collaborators and all that. But, yeah thank god it's something that's behind us.
WEIR: Didn't stop you?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course, not. No, no, no. I refuse to shut down the office.
WEIR: There's a saying in the American West that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good old (INAUDIBLE). WEIR: Exactly.
You know, that Arabs and Israelis can't agree on 2,000-year-old stories. How are you going to agree on how to divide up such a precious resource?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This cannot create a single drop of fresh water.
(CROSSTALK)
WEIR: But I can take yours. I can use my armies to take your water.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's still -- if you use the resources, in the army, you will turn to the other technologies, you can create much more water and in a peaceful way.
[22:49:45] WEIR (voice-over): Their solution is a mixture of diplomacy and technology, and it starts here in Tel Aviv. No, not the bikinis, the ocean behind the bikinis. Israel is now the world's leader in research into desalination, turning seawater into drinking water. They could one day be able to pull enough water out of the Mediterranean to supply the entire nation, so they may not need to drink from the Sea of Galilee anymore. The dams could come down. The Jordan River, it could flow.
(on camera): Literally, just a few weeks ago, raw sewage was coming out of this pipeline.
WEIR (voice-over): Here's proof that a new mind-set has taken hold. Back where we paddled, Israel has just completed a $30 million sewage treatment plant, and for the first time in 50 years, is allowing fresh water to flow into the Jordan.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is, by Middle East standards, a miracle.
WEIR: Another possible fix is the so-called Red Dead Project, involving building a massive canal to bring ocean water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. While unpopular with some environmentalists, it's the one idea, Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians can all agree on.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It doesn't make sense for your neighbor to go thirsty. If your neighbor's thirsty, he's desperate. Even under the current fighting with Israel and Hamas, Israel supplies and continues to supply Gaza with water. We never shut that water off and why would we? It's only going to impact us.
WEIR (on camera): It's only going to make them angrier and more desperate.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You cannot deny people their basic rights. Just like a human right, water is a human right. You cannot deny, even if it's your enemy, water. We don't do that. Can we use water as a vehicle for peace, not for conflicts?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I believe it is feasible. I believe that we can reach an agreement between Israel and Jordan, between Israel and the Palestinian on these issues of water, and I hope that if we reach this kind of agreement, we'll be closer to peace.
WEIR (voice-over): Sigalit Landau has a more creative way to test this idea.
SIGALIT LANDAU, ARTIST: This is not water.
WEIR: It's not?
(LAUGHTER)
LANDAU: It's something between fire and water.
(LAUGHTER)
And land.
WEIR (voice-over): She is one of Israel's most accomplished young artists. She creates salt sculptures by plunging various objects in the Dead Sea and letting the crystals do their thing.
Now, she wants to build a salt bridge across the Dead Sea.
LANDAU: I think if I work with the people who understand art and the power that culture can bring, and also can be a tourist attraction, but can show we're one step toward hope and understanding that nature is, in the end, what really is here. It seems logical, but I'm the artist, so.
(LAUGHTER)
WEIR: On a map, a border line divides the Dead Sea. But floating out here, you almost forget that border conflicts even exist.
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[22:56:57] There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the Middle East these days. But from now on, with every grim headline, I'm going to try to remember the bats.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These guys seem to have faulty sonar. They keep bumping into me.
WEIR: Avia is the soldier-turned park ranger who found them here a few years back, dozens of migrating species from Europe to Africa. Creepy or not, these little guys in this place are a symbol of peace.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, it's a kitchen.
WEIR: You see, this bunker was used to fight the Six Day War, a fight that partly began over water. But in the '90s, Israel signed a treaty with Jordan, a peace that also partly began over water. And now the only reason soldiers have to come back here is to take care of the bats.
(on camera): Proof that human conflict eventually turns to rubble and nature takes over.
(voice-over): So maybe it's just a matter of time before the land mines can all come out, the barbed wire can all come down, and the people of Israel and the Palestinian territories and Jordan can stroll down to the river and see what they've been missing.
(on camera): Whoa, look at that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, yeah.
WEIR: Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
So do you think there's any chance that Jordan can come back?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course.
WEIR: Really?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I believe. I believe.
(LAUGHTER)
I'm not a religious man, but I believe it will come.
WEIR: In your lifetime?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In my life. In 1985, I've been for one year in Berlin, and I said this wall will fall down. It's not normal to have a wall in the city of Berlin. Four years later, it happened. Here, it will take, I don't know, not four years, but come again in 10 years, you will see a difference.
[22:59:12] WEIR: From your lips to Yahweh's ears.
(LAUGHTER)
And who knows, if Avia is right and they can figure out water here, then they can figure out water anywhere. All those other places plagued by drought and political gridlock, like California. Places where there are so many towns and cities, farms, and orchards, lawns and golf courses and just not enough water for all of them. And maybe they could come up with a model to help us preserve our own favorite water hole, wherever it may be.
Hey, it's an idea worth rooting for, because you've got to have faith in something.
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