Thursday, October 18, 2012

Mideast Peace Drip By Drip


Sometimes It Takes Only One Man

His name Daniel Hillel. A Jew born in Los Angeles who moved to what later became Israel in 1931. The Wall Street Journal had an interview on 10/15/2012 with this soil scientist who developed micro-irrigation techniques (better known as drip irrigation) since the 1950s.


Thus, he contributed to turn Israeli’s deserts into productive agricultural farms. Israel thanks to him and others is a world leader in agricultural technologies and exporter of agricultural goods.

Helping The Arab & Muslim People

Mr. Hillel helped numerous Arab and Muslim countries to improve their agricultural output by using water more efficiently like Jordan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan and Palestine.

Such individual contributions to peace and prosperity are more valuable than many of these foolish high level peace talks or sophisticated diplomacy that are often more photo op for politicians than anything else.

Indispensable Plastics

In the above interview, Mr. Hillel made the point that it was the plastics boom in the 1960s that made among other things low-cost weather-resistant plastics available. Without plastics, micro-irrigation would likely not have taken off.

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