Word: negeb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...supported 30 million people; Bagdad had a population of 2,000,000, and 30,000 public baths. Today, all Iraq barely supports 5,000,000 people, and last week a New York Times reporter described much of Bagdad as "a festering slum." An entire civilization once flourished in the Negeb, with terraced lands, inns for wayfarers and broad-avenued cities. The cities have crumbled, and the Negeb is now a dust bowl, with rare patches of green painstakingly watered by dedicated Israelis...
...pounding of warriors and nomads, the ancients' brilliantly intricate system of water conservation disintegrated. Hulagu Khan- and his Mongol hordes rode out of Central Asia, smashed Mesopotamia's elaborate crisscross of canals and dehydrated the Garden of Eden. The waiting Bedouin nomads advanced into the Sinai and Negeb like locusts when Roman and Byzantine authority declined. They demolished vaults, run-off canals and 300-ft. reservoirs. Their goats and camels pushed over terraces, broke fencing, ate the water-hugging groves of trees and stunted tamarisk, and sent the area back to desert. Silt choked the irrigation canals, sand...
...cooperate "directly or indirectly" with the Israelis. Iraq sent word to Johnston not to bother to come (but later shamefacedly invited him). Only the Israelis were polite to President Eisenhower's emissary. They did not much like his scheme either (since it would bring no water to the Negeb), but decided they might as well let the Arabs bear the onus of saying...
...wanted to cut Israel's share of Jordan water from one-third to one-fifth.) The Israelis proposed to double the amount of available water by piping Lebanon's Litani River (which skirts Israel) into the scheme, and give all the increase to Israel to irrigate the Negeb...
...give-and-take agreement with the Arabs. The Arabs abandoned their alternative proposal. Johnston, in return, agreed to: 1) their demand for additional dams on the Yarmuk, and 2) their insistence that the Jordan waters be used "only within the Jordan basin" (which rules out irrigating Israel's Negeb...