Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World by Seth M. Siegel, St. Martin’s Press, New York; ISBN 978-1-250-07395-2 ©2015, $27.99, p. 252, plus eight color photos, appendices and; an index
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
“Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
WINCHESTER, California — Thus spoke the ancient mariner, in Coleridge’s late 19th century poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as he lies aboard ship in the middle of a vast undrinkable ocean of salty water. The situation in Israel, although similar in nature, results from just the opposite condition—most of Israel’s land mass is desert and semi-desert terrain.
In the introduction to his book Let There Be Water, author Seth Siegel recounts the reasons for dire warnings of imminent world-wide water shortages, the outcome of which is predicted to be global “water wars.” Unlike climate change, whose solutions need international cooperation, water shortages can be mitigated locally, requiring something as simple as adopting water management laws and regulations.
Israel, beginning in 1955, passed a series of water-conservation laws eliminating individual ownership of water supplies: all water—above, below, and at surface level—belonged to the government irrespective of property ownership. Later, the all-embracing Water Law of 1959 requires, “every person to use water in an economical and efficient way, to maintain water equipment in good condition to avoid waste, and to ensure the prevention of clogging and the depletion of water sources.
Let There Be Water presents Israel’s water-focused culture in four parts. Part I focuses on the history leading to Israel’s water laws and its national water system beginning with the Palestinian riots occurring between 1936 and 1939, during the British Mandate. This turmoil led the British government to limit Jewish immigration to 15,000 persons per year, a number expected to maintain the Jewish population’s status quo.
In addition, the British government concluded that given the available water supply, Palestine could be home to no more than two million people. The Zionist leadership at that time, reaching the opposite conclusion, argued that the land had “great water potential, but which could be realized only with significant changes in the way water was then found and used.” This thinking led Israel, now home to more than eight million people, to establish its National Water Carrier in 1964, whose roots lay with water-engineer extraordinaire Simcha Blass and his water-saving ideas, which won the heart of the nascent Israeli government. So effective were the implementations of his concepts that Eisenhower’s special ambassador to the region Eric Johnson and others traveled to the Middle East to see “the greening of Israel.”
Over time, water regulations became Balkanized, different ministries setting prices and regulations for the diverse populations of users. Recognition of this unwieldy situation came to a head in the early 2000s, and in 2006 the Knesset, the unicameral parliament of Israel, amended the 1959 Water Law granting exclusive authority to the Israel Water Authority, which, over much protestation, raised the price of water by forty percent, the real price of water, “to maximize spending on water infrastructure.” Subsequently, the Water Authority worked with IBM and the Israeli tech firm Miltel to develop and deploy DMR, digital-meter reading by telemetry, which is now being used by many water authorities in America.
In Part Two, Siegel addresses Israel’s revolutionary water-conserving ideas initially developed to satisfy the needs of the country’s agrarian economy. Israel’s most well-known water innovation, drip irrigation, developed by Simcha Blass, was initially rejected by Israeli academia as impractical. Yet today, drip irrigation is among the most widely and successfully used methods of watering crops around the world. Siegel presents other innovations as well, including, the story of how Israel came to develop and use non-potable water, namely sewage, for farming; desalinization—turning seawater into fresh water; and renewing Israel’s natural water resources. According to Siegel, “No other country makes the reuse of its sewage a national priority…. Over 85 percent of the nation sewage is reused.”
Siegel also discusses Israel’s other transforming, but perhaps lesser-known water-conservation technologies, such as, sand aquifer treatments and reverse osmosis, and provides the convoluted history of the interaction between the Johnson Administration and the Ben-Gurion government as they worked off-and-on together to develop a desalinization process mutually desired by the two nations. Indeed, today, one of Israel’s desalinization facilities is “producing 165 million gallons per day.”
The third section examines Israel’s influence on the world’s water-conservation efforts, explaining how Israel, a Third-World nation in 1948 is now proudly considered a Start-Up nation, through new technologies leading to the globalization of its water-related industries. Starting with Israel’s own ambient environment, he notes, for instance, that Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War led to control of the West Bank and “a turning point for Palestinian access to underground water in the territory…. Today, about ninety-six percent of the West Bank’s approximately 2.4 million Palestinians—a four-hundred-percent population increase over 1967—have [high-quality] running water piped to their homes.” He examines the cooperation between Israel and Jordan, which share “fourteen billion gallons a year” through such common waterways as the Jordan River and Dead Sea. Beyond the Middle East, Siegel reviews Israel’s hydro-diplomacy, which creates successful relationships and partnerships throughout the world, from the country of China and the State of California, two economic powerhouses, to “more than one hundred less-developed countries.”
Siegel, pointing out that Iran’s greatest threat isn’t economic sanctions, but rather running out of water, describes how the shah, in the early to mid 1960s, brought in numerous Israeli hydrologists, water engineers, etc., so that “the majority of water projects in Iran from 1962 until 1979 Islamic Revolution were managed by Israelis.”
The final section, just one chapter long, succinctly summarizes Israel’s guiding water philosophy through a series of bullet-like points, including “Water Belongs to the Nation,” “Cheap Water is Expensive,” and “Create a Water-Respecting Culture.”
The New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount Jesus’ miracle of feeding five thousand of his followers with just five loaves of bread and two fish. Let There Be Water captures Israel’s modern-day miracle, providing pure water to more than eight million people day after day when the best estimates concluded that the land could support no more than two million, and then transporting that miracle around the world. Let There Be Water is the inspirational story of the meeting of politics, economics, creative thinking, and the will to thrive in one of the most arid places on earth.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ:From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com. For another review of Let There Be Water, click here.