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‘You know why they call this the Holy Land?’ asked Arie Issar, peering
out across the wastes of the Negev desert. ‘Because we dig so many holes!’
They tell that joke a lot in Israel, where a third year of drought has left
many of these holes without water and the nation’s politicians talking about
a water crisis.

But many of the country’s hydrologists say it was political ineptitude
that created the crisis by allowing farmers almost unlimited supplies of
subsidised water. Meanwhile, they say, political leaders, such as the right-wing
agriculture minister Rafael Eitan, use fears of a water shortage to manipulate
public opinion in favour of Israel hanging onto the West Bank, the Golan
Heights and the Gaza Strip, occupied since 1967.

‘The agriculture people,’ says Issar, who is professor of water resources
at the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, ‘believe that we can’t
let the Arabs have control of our water.’ His view is that the future of
water use in this region of the Middle East lies in cooperation between
Arabs and Jews rather than con-flict. ‘Rivers such as the Jordan, as well
as underground water resources, have to be shared.’

For thousands of years, people have survived in the Negev desert of
southern Israel by channelling scarce rainwater from hillsides onto fields
and into cisterns dug in solid rock. Farther north, in the hills of the
West Bank, tunnels dug into the rocks 2000 years ago release underground
waters to irrigate fields on the terraced hillsides. In the past 40 years,
the Israeli government has dug hundreds of wells to reach the water in sandstone
rocks beneath the coastal plain, before digging deeper (sometimes as much
as 800 metres down) to find water that flows underground towards the Mediterranean
from the West Bank.

‘The idea that we could make the desert of Palestine bloom was one of
the founding pillars of the Zionist movement,’ says Issar. Palestinians
protest that they had a healthy agricultural export industry long before
the Israelis arrived , but the new arrivals have undoubtedly used much more
of the available water. Too much, it now seems.

The first settlers pumped water from the shallow coastal aquifer with
such intensity that, within a few years of independence in 1948, coastal
marshes had dried up. Ze’ev Golani, chief hydrologist at Tahal, the state
hydrological consulting company, drilled many of the wells himself 40 years
ago. He remembers that in the 1950s many of them began to yield salty water
as a natural underground flow of fresh water to the sea was replaced by
a reverse flow of salty sea water into the rocks, a process known as saline
intrusion.

But as plantations of water-guzzling crops such as cotton, tomatoes,
avocados and the ubiquitous Jaffa oranges proliferated along the coast between
Tel Aviv and Haifa, water demand continued to grow. Two large underground
springs, known as Yarkon and Taninim, were tapped. They were the main western
outlets for a large underground reservoir known as the mountain aquifer,
lying predominantly in the dolomite and limestone hills of the West Bank
(which was then within Jordan). Israel quickly dug new wells nearby and
by the early 1960s, says Golani, more water was being taken from the mountain
aquifer than was added by rainfall.

Before the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel won control of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, it was already abstracting 300 million cubic metres
of water a year from the aquifer. The Arabs of the West Bank took only a
fraction of this amount, pumping just 20 million cubic metres from wells
and capturing perhaps as much again from natural springs. This remains roughly
the position today. While the aquifer provides about a fifth of Israel’s
water, Arabs have been prevented by the Israeli authorities from increasing
their abstractions. The Israelis have dug some more wells to supply new
settlements on the West Bank, but most of the aquifer’s water continues
to be taken from wells outside the West Bank.

In the early 1960s, the Israelis also decided to tap the waters of the
Sea of Galilee, a giant natural holding reservoir on the River Jordan. The
sea gathers rain falling in the north of Israel, Lebanon and Syria before
sending an increasingly saline residue south to the Dead Sea. The Israelis
built a giant pipeline, 3 metres in diameter and known as the National Water
Carrier, that can transport more than 1 million cubic metres of water a
day from the Sea of Galilee, across country, down the coast and on into
the Negev. For Israel, one important result of the Six Day War was to bring
most of the Jordan and its catchment, including the Golan Heights, under
Israeli control.

In effect, Israel has re-created the River Jordan as a pipeline within
its own territory. The old river is now a mere trickle passing down the
Jordan valley to the Dead Sea, which is itself contracting. Most of the
River Jordan’s flow is made up of saline water from springs round the banks
of the Sea of Galilee that Israeli engineers pipe directly into the river
to prevent it contaminating Israel’s water. Back in the 1960s, Jordanian
and Israeli hydrologists had agreed that Jordan should be allowed an annual
guaranteed release, said to have been 100 million cubic metres a year, from
the Sea of Galilee into the Jordan valley. This would have allowed Jordan
to irrigate its fields along the valley, but would have been less than a
quarter of the normal annual flow in Israel’s National Water Carrier. Both
governments refused the deal, however, and Jordan has never received anything
like that flow.

The National Water Carrier does have one drawback for Israel. The Sea
of Galilee is more than 200 metres below sea level and the cost of pumping
so much water so far uphill to coastal farms has been prodigious, using
a fifth of all Israel’s electricity. Even so, the National Water Carrier
has brought huge benefits to Israel. In summer, water from the Sea of Galilee
irrigates crops from Haifa to Beersheba and the Egyptian border. And in
winter, surplus water that would otherwise, as the Israelis view it, spill
wasted down the Jordan is pumped through the carrier and into wells to recharge
the coastal and mountain aquifers. In this way it increases the amount of
water that these underground reservoirs can provide the following summer.
At least that is what happened until last winter.

In March this year, the Israeli press was full of stories that the country
had run out of water. There had been so little rainfall in the north of
Israel during the winter rainy season that the level of the Sea of Galilee
had reached an all-time low, and summer evaporation would take it below
the level where pumping had to stop.

The Jerusalem Post warned that ‘the National Water Carrier is to virtually
shut down this year’. In fact, it was worse than that. When the headlines
first appeared, the carrier had been as good as shut down for six months.
As a result, during last winter there was virtually no recharge of the aquifers.

Until mid-March, in the final days of the rainy season, Israel’s rainfall
for the previous 12 months amounted to an estimated 1.3 billion cubic metres,
compared with an average rainfall of 1.7 billion and with water consumption
that peaked at 2.1 billion in 1988 and averages 1.9 billion.

Golani, Issar and others had been predicting this crisis for some years
(‘A saline solution to Israel’s drought’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 10 July 1986).
‘We gave the politicians the figures about their overuse of water,’ says
Golani. But the water commissioner, who is appointed by the ministry of
agriculture, carried on giving permission for extra uses. ‘They said we
were crying wolf.’ For most of the past 10 years, he says, the commissioner
has been giving out 200 million cubic metres more water than has gone into
the aquifers and reservoirs. So there has been an accumulated overpumping
from the aquifers of 2 billion cubic metres – one whole year’s supply.

Now the hydrological crisis has become a political crisis. A recent
report by the state comptroller-general accused the government of ’25 years
of mismanagement’ of the nation’s water, pandering to the farmers’ whims
and subsidising the national dream of greening the deserts. Meanwhile angry
farmers, who use two-thirds of Israel’s water, are to bear the brunt of
a ‘parched earth policy’, with their water allocations cut by 50 per cent
this summer and water prices sharply raised. The shock tactics could sound
the death knell for some of the more heavily subsidised sectors of agribusiness,
such as the Jaffa orange orchards.

These conservation measures also reduce the widespread use of irrigation
systems to water parks and gardens throughout the country. Ronit Nativ,
a hydrogeologist at the Rehovot campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
shrugged in exasperation as she watched gardeners dig up the lawn outside
her office to install a new network of irrigation pipes. The water will
come from Israel’s coastal aquifer, which because of overpumping now suffers
permanent saline intrusion and is contaminated by sewage and agricultural
chemicals. In its natural state, the water table of the coastal aquifer
is 3 to 5 metres above sea level and there is a continuous flow of fresh
water to the sea, which flushes out any contamination. But 30 years of overpumping
has left huge areas of the water table below sea level.

Pollutants cannot be flushed to the sea because there is no longer any
flow of water. They accumulate within the aquifer. ‘Already wells are being
shut down because they contain too much salt, or nitrates from fertilisers
or heavy metals from sewage,’ Nativ says. ‘Even if we could restore water
levels, it would take many years for contaminants to be flushed out.’ Some
damage may be irreversible. Saline intrusion destroys the matrix of the
sandstone rocks that make up the aquifer, causing fine particles to break
loose and clog the pores in which water is stored. The capacity of the aquifer
is reduced and the speed of flushing is impaired.

Already about 10 per cent of water in the coastal aquifer exceeds the
national limit for chloride salts. ‘By 2010, if we carry on pumping, I predict
that 22 per cent will exceed the limit,’ says Nativ. She also expects a
20 per cent breach of nitrate limits by that date, and fears that greater
use of treated sewage for irrigation may rob the aquifers of oxygen and
cause metals present as salts in the rocks to enter the water. This would
make the water toxic for many crops. ‘In my view water quality is the major
problem today, not water quantity, and it is being completely overlooked,’
says Nativ.

Hydrologists considering the future of Israel’s water resources fall
into two camps: those who stress the need to reduce demand and those who
call for the further development of resources. Both are optimistic about
the potential. Among the former is Arnon Soffer, a geographer from the University
of Haifa who is currently at work on a study of water politics in the Middle
East for the Israeli foreign office. He says: ‘Although Israel has difficulties
with water shortages, we have flexibility. We can decide ‘no more orange
orchards’ if we need to, and re-employ people in industry. Our neighbour
Jordan, which has even greater water problems than us, has no such options.’
In the long run, Soffer believes, all countries in the Middle East will
need to forget their ambitions of agricultural self-sufficiency. Israel,
he says, is likely to be the first nation in the region to decide to cut
its water use.

Expansionists, still straining to make their country green, do not see
current rainfall as the ultimate limit on water use. One way to obtain a
quart of irrigation water from a pint of rainfall is to recycle more waste
water. A third of Israel’s sewage, 180 million cubic metres a year, is already
treated and distributed on a dedicated pipe network to farmers and parks.
Government policy is to double that figure by the end of the decade. Other
optimists look to cloud seeding, water imports by tanker or pipeline from
Turkey, or desalination plants to purify sea water as ways to ensure plentiful
supplies.

Salt of the earth

Issar trumpets the huge potential of underground salty aquifers that
he has discovered in the Nubian sandstones beneath the Negev desert. Many
plants can tolerate moderately salty water and much of the Negev water is
fit for direct use in agriculture. This ‘fossil water’ was laid down when
the Negev received much more rainfall than it does today. Issar has no compunction
about using a water source that nature will not replace. ‘We need a psychological
breakthrough to approach water like any other commodity that can be mined
– such as coal or oil,’ he says. ‘By the time it runs out, we will have
other sources.’

While his old friend Golani believes that these brackish ground waters
will cost too much to develop on a large scale, Issar has pinned to his
office wall a map of the pipeline he would like to see connecting a string
of wells tapping saline water beneath the Negev and taking it north, where
it could provide a large new source of water for irrigating crops. Already
some 30 million cubic metres of these waters are used annually by desert
farmers and mining companies. But this figure could be increased many times
over. Out in the desert, Issar takes visitors to see the Ramat Negev experimental
station, which already pumps up saline ground water to irrigate everything
from pear trees to cherry tomatoes that are shipped to Britain for sale
in Marks & Spencer stores.

Many Israeli water scientists are alarmed at the continued desire of
some politicians to underpin territorial claims by exploiting the country’s
water needs. This bellicose attitude to water rights is seen on the border
with southern Lebanon, where Israel is widely reported to be diverting the
flow of the River Litani south into Israel. And one reason for hanging onto
the Golan Heights, part of Syria, is that they form part of the catchment
for the Sea of Galilee, the largest single element in the Israeli water
supply system. But it is seen most obviously on the West Bank, in the country’s
relations with the Palestinian inhabitants of the region and with Jordan.

A decade ago, prime minister Menachem Begin insisted on three conditions
before he would consider autonomy for the Palestinians on the West Bank.
One was that the Israelis retain control of West Bank water resources. Late
last year, agriculture minister Rafael Eitan, whose responsibilities include
both water and the new settlements on the West Bank, warned that water was
so important that the West Bank could never be returned. In a classic study,
Water in the Middle East, published in 1984, Thomas Naff from the University
of Pennsylvania argued that water, while not itself a cause of the Six Day
War in 1967, seems to have been the dominant factor behind Israel’s determination
to retain the West Bank once the territory had been taken.

The ruling right-wing Likud Party, in its desire to bolster support
for retaining the occupied territories, habitually overstates the importance
of West Bank water to Israel. A recent party manifesto reiterated the claim
that the area ‘boasts 40 per cent of Israel’s available fresh water reserve’,
when official statistics show that, even when heavily overpumped, the mountain
aquifer provides just 22 per cent of the nation’s water. The manifesto also
ignores the fact that Israel does not need the land itself in order to tap
its water.

Beneath the rhetoric, the fear is that if Israel handed back the land
either to Jordan or to a Palestinian state the inhabitants, boosted by returning
refugees, would immediately increase their use of the aquifer by sinking
new wells. This could threaten Israeli supplies, which currently account
for almost 90 per cent of the water abstracted from the aquifer.

Golani, a veteran of West Bank water politics who was himself water
commissioner for the region from 1970 to 1978, dismisses this argument.
He notes that Arab wells on the West Bank abstract only about 1 per cent
of the total quantity of water used in Israel and the territories it occupies.
He adds that it would take the Arabs 10 years to double that figure. ‘We
should be able to make arrangements to allow them to pump the water they
need,’ he says. ‘Between neighbours, these are normal things.’ He says the
best comparison is between the aquifer and a large river supplying water
to several countries. International agreements are commonly struck to ensure
that the downstream nation has sufficient supply.

There is a similar disagreement between politicians and scientists about
current Jordanian plans to build a dam, to be called the Unity Dam, with
the Syrians on the River Yarmuk. The Yarmuk, a tributary of the River Jordan,
follows the border between the two countries before reaching the Jordan
in Israeli-occupied territory. Israel at present takes a small amount of
water from the Yarmuk to top up the Sea of Galilee, and asserts a right
to veto the project (though it offers Jordan no similar right to veto its
own use of the River Jordan). In the past, Israeli leaders have vowed to
destroy the Unity Dam if it is ever built.

These threats have effectively prevented international aid agencies,
including the World Bank, from funding the construction of the dam. Soffer
decries such belligerent tactics. No dove, he was whisked home from a sabbatical
in Britain by the Israeli establishment during the Gulf War earlier this
year to advise on water issues.

However he says: ‘Jordan is desperately short of water, despite having
imported highly efficient irrigation technology.’ Israel currently uses
around five times as much water per head of population as its neighbour.
‘In my view,’ says Soffer, ‘we could give 50 million cubic metres of water
to Jordan without difficulty. The water is not worth fighting about.’

If such a view prevails within the Israeli government, then the chances
for an outbreak of peace in the region will be that much greater. A settlement
about water would have to be at the heart of a resolution of the ‘Palestinian
question’ and the return of the territories occupied by Israel. The broad
outline seems clear. Israel would agree to negotiate with its neighbours
on the future use of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers. It would marginally reduce
its pumping of water from the mountain aquifer and perhaps provide water
from its National Water Carrier to recharge the depleted aquifer beneath
the Gaza Strip. In return it would win an international agreement on the
mountain aquifer that would provide it with a long-term (albeit reduced)
entitlement to water, in return for living in peace with its neighbours.

Close to Issar’s desert campus at Sede Boker, is the tomb of the founder
of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion. The surrounding national park
is filled with plants that, a notice declares, are ‘drought resistant’.
But that does not stop the authorities copiously watering them every morning
and evening, even as the newspapers are filled with dire warnings of water
shortages. It would be a small price to pay for peace if the sprinklers
were turned off and the zealotry for greening the desert doused.

Fred Pearce is an environmental journalist. He is currently writing
a book on the politics of water.

* * *

A confusion of rights to water supplies

Access to water is one of the most explosive issues between Palestinians
and Israelis on the West Bank. Since 1967, when the Israeli forces moved
in, Palestinians have been prevented from sinking more wells in the region,
or increasing output from existing wells for agriculture.

Ze’ev Golani, who was water commissioner for the occupied West Bank
territories from 1970 to 1978, says the aquifer was already being overpumped
then, largely by the Israelis. ‘So I gave no permission for either Jewish
or Arab settlements to drill into the aquifer.’

At about this time, however, Israeli geologists found a new source of
fresh water at a deeper level, flowing east into the Dead Sea. Only Israelis
benefited. ‘We said that if people want to tap this new water they could,’
remembers Golani. ‘Because drilling was expensive, only governments could
afford it. That is why Israelis did it, whereas the Arabs had no body to
organise it.’

This new source yields 36 million cubic metres of water a year, practically
all going to Israeli settlements. In the past decade, Arab organisations
such as the Nablus municipal water authority, which supplies 130 000 people,
have been refused permission to tap into the deep aquifer. ‘They were refused
because the aquifer was by then also being fully utilised,’ Golani says.

In places, boreholes dug to this deep aquifer have disrupted shallow
wells supplying Palestinian communities. This happened at Jiftlik in the
Jordan valley, and at Bardala, where large shallow wells supply water for
the town of Nablus, says Golani. ‘We arranged that the affected people got
back as much water as they had had before.’ This cuts little ice with Ibrahim
Matar, a Palestinian who has spent many years organising water resources
for other Palestinians living there. He says ‘when that happens, (the Israelis)
land up controlling the tap.’ Last summer, villagers in Jiftlik complained
that their water was cut off for several days in retaliation for an outbreak
of stone-throwing at cars on the nearby main road.

Matar names other villages on the West Bank that have lost their water
supplies, allegedly as a result of abstractions by Jewish settlements. In
the politically charged atmosphere on the West Bank it is impossible to
be sure about such accusations. But the central fact is that, even if their
springs and wells are drying up naturally, the Palestinians are prevented
by Israeli restrictions from finding alternative sources of water for their
fields. They are allowed only to dig wells for tap water. The unequal politics
of water on the West Bank is one reason why Arab villages are emptying while
new Israeli settlements expand.

‘At least 100 villages are without a water supply on the West Bank now,’
says Matar. ‘Many collect rainfall in cisterns and rely on tankers. When
I worked in the area, we had a programme of linking villages with networks
of pipes.’

Matar is busy trying to improve water supplies in the Gaza Strip, a
narrow piece of land abutting the border with Egypt that is bounded on one
side by the Mediterranean and on the other by desert. It has traditionally
been heavily populated because it is underlain by an aquifer. But the aquifer
is hopelessly overpumped and intruding sea water has made much of its water
undrinkable and useless for farming.

The overpumping is exacerbated by new wells dug for Israeli settlements
set up along the strip. ‘Only settlers are allowed to drill new wells,’
says Matar. His current project is to dig a system of canals in Gaza city
to collect winter rainwater and pump it into the aquifer to try to replenish
the supply. But the scheme is stalled because sewage from the city’s drains
is leaking into the canals. Meanwhile, the National Water Carrier passes
within 5 kilometres of the Gaza Strip, providing water for kibbutzim in
the Negev. But, as Matar complains, ‘not a drop of water from it reaches
Palestinian communities in Gaza.’