Tsunami
I knew the mediterrenean can suffer from Tsunamis like every other sea; I also knew about some historic Tsunamis (for example, it is believed that the Mikenic culture of Crete was demolished by a huge Tsunami); I also know about the geologically active zones near Israel - the northeastern mediterrenean (north of Cyprus, from Turkey through Greece all the way to Italy) is an active reduction zone, and the Jordan valley (the drift) is an active openning zone; but the economics paper today gave Tsunami data in a way that seems to try manipulating the readers.
It claims that at least 10 Tsunamis hit Israel in the past 2 millenia. As exmples it gives 5 events: 1856 - an earthquake from Greece caused floods in Haifa; 1759 - an earthquake in northern Israel/southern Lebanon caused floods in Acre (water level reached 2.5 meters above street level); 1546 - an earthquake in the Jordan Valley caused Gaza to drawn; 1303 - Cyprus caused floods in Haifa; and 1202 - flood at the Galilee’s coast were caused by earthquakes in southern Lebanon.
Now: what is a Tsunami? If you refer to every wave which is induced by an earthquake as a Tsunami, then the paper is probably right (and probably there are much more Tsunamis around then they claim). For every practical reason, though, I think this is misleading. You should refer to the magnitude and the potential damage of these waves, and then you would get a much lesser amount. This is also impied by the name - the word Tsunami comes from Japanese, if I am not mistaken, where it means “huge wave”.
None of the events that were mentioned in the paper was even close to the recent deadly Tsunamis of the Indian and Paicific oceans - the one that hit Indonesia in 2005, and the one that hit Thailand and India a year earlier; this is a crucial point, and the paper didn’t include a paragraph to emphasize it. They were just saying that some comitee prepared a plan for a case of a Tsunami and now needs some money to implement it.
The way I see it, the paper was just exhagarating. Making this thing bigger, probably campaigning for more money to deal with the threat - which exists, but at a low probability: I think, speaking of natural disasters, that the threat from an earthquake in the dead sea is much more imminent.
Once again, I was disappointed to discover that you must be critical and read everything with your mind open, and not accept anything - certainly not from the papers - as a given. Yes, there will certainly be Tsunamis in Israel. No, I would not spend right now a lot of money preparing for them. Bigger disasters are more likely to occur, before the Tsunami. And no, you can’t figure this out from what the papers say. You need to think for your own.
