The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, January 2, 2026

Notably: Two years ago there were a few–certainly not enough–reports about the death of the Aral Sea, what had once been one of the world’s largest inland sea, a body of water the size of West Virginia (or 15 percent larger than Lake Michigan, according to the Times) locked between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and drained since the 1950s by Soviet disingenuity that continued after the fall of the empire. It is now the Aralkum Desert. “The really scary thing about the Aral Sea is that environmental catastrophes like it are being replicated across the world,” the Times’s  Jacob Dreyer wrote in November 2023. “In the United States, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are shrinking, and cities like Los Angeles are racing to balance their water needs with a changing climate. Agriculture, fracking, lawn maintenance and other activities are rapidly depleting groundwater aquifers across America. Can we live with the possibility that other places are headed for a fate similar to the Aral Sea’s?” He doesn’t mention the Dead Sea, but the Dead Sea, in Occupied Palestine, is also dying. Once the size of Lake Geneva, or more than half the size of Flagler County, it is now going the way of the Aral Sea. Israel and Jordan are playing the role of Soviets there. “The water level is dropping close to 4 feet every year. The main part of the lake is now around 950 feet deep — about 15% shallower, and a third of the surface area, compared to its shape half a century ago,” NPR reported three years ago. “Israel, Jordan and Syria in the last several decades have diverted the freshwater sources that feed the Dead Sea, for drinking water and irrigation. Plus, Israeli and Jordanian companies evaporate Dead Sea water to harvest its rich minerals for export.” National Geographic, ever the imperial falsifier, blames only Jordan: “Jordan’s need for water has caused the Jordan River (feeding the Sea) to be diverted for irrigation.  This diversion affected the Sea so dramatically that the water level fell 22 meters between 1970 and 2006!” Note the year: 1970, three years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, when its water theft raced with theft of Palestinian land as Israel started building, then overbuilding, colonies in the West Bank. 

I turned to look at the crystal-clear sea below the escarpment where I stood. I could not help recalling that it is one of those great marvels of the world that is in danger of disappearing. Over the years it has been shrinking at an alarming rate. Fifty thousand years ago its surface was at least 650 feet above the present level, which would mean that, standing on this promontory near the ruins of the Qumran settlement, the sea would be lapping at my feet instead of where it is now, a little more than a half mile away. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century the sea was thirty-nine feet higher than it is now. More recently the water has been declining by about three feet every year owing to Israel’s diversion of the River Jordan and the tributaries that used to flow into it, and to the use of the seawater by factories in Israel and Jordan. Our precious land was slipping from under our feet as the Dead Sea was receding from its salty shores.

–From Raja Shehade’s Palestinian Walks (2007).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.