Christopher Stuart Ward

Sandra Ruckstuhl

Isabelle Learmont

"Shared water resources in Israel and Palestine are often the site of political, economic, historical, legal and ethical contestation. In this, the first of two volumes on the subject, the authors look beyond the political tensions of the region, to argue for the need for shared water security and co-operative resource management. The History of Water in the Land Once Called Palestine, traces the history of water resources and security and their development from the Ottoman period until 2020, examining how the state of water security amongst Palestinians and Israelis has diverged, resulting in the current success of Israeli water security in contrast to the high water insecurity experienced by Palestinians. The authors assess water security in three parts: security of access to water resources, security of access to water services and finally, security against risks to and from water"--

Scarcity, Conflict and Loss in Middle East Water Resources

The History of Water in the Land Once Called Palestine

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In its early years, Israel overdrew on this resource and, because of the proximity of the sea, this caused saline water to flow into parts of the aquifer. Since the early 2000s, however, Israel has moderated its offtake and today extracts no more than the sustainable yield. By contrast the Palestinians in Gaza have no other natural water source. They have long heavily overdrawn the aquifer and continue to do so. In 2014 the Palestinians pumped out more than 170 million cubic metres, over three times the sustainable yield.28 As a result of continuous overdraft over a number of years, the quality of the water in the Gaza portion of the aquifer has been badly affected by seawater saline intrusion and also by pollution from sewage and agricultural chemicals.

In fact, there is considerable evidence of productive agriculture throughout this period. The most remarkable, as we shall see in what follows, is the development of citrus cultivation, but even in the dry south of the coastal plain there could be a buoyant agriculture when the rains were ample. In the 1880s, Edward Hull, who led the Palestine Exploration Fund survey of the geology of Palestine, describes how ‘the extent of the ground [near Beersheba] cultivated, as well as on the way to Gaza, is immense and the crops of wheat, barley and maize vastly exceed the requirements of the population’. W. M. Thomson, the American missionary who spent twenty-five years in the Levant, arrived in the Gaza area in the spring of 1859 and exclaimed ‘Wheat, wheat, an ocean of wheat’.9

Essentially the old Arab merchant classes now found themselves squeezed out of their former role as the operators of public works concessions and government development projects. And yet many of these businessman were as capable and had as much access to capital as any of the Jewish immigrants. It is likely that this preference for Jewish investment and entrepreneurship was also driven by a non dit that today would be called racist, a belief that European Jews were better suited to play the role of Palestine’s entrepreneurs, ‘acting as the catalyst for a new era of development and industrialization’ in the region.8

Money coming from abroad enabled the Jewish Agency to expand its purchases and development of land – three quarters of its investment budget went towards this goal. From 1919, Zionist officials toured the country, purchasing land largely from the absentee landlords who owned more than 20 per cent of the private land in Palestine – big landowners like the Damascus-based Abdul Rahman Pasha who owned 200,000 dunums (20,000 hectares). The Zionists also took over uncultivated lands – wastes and marshes. A key criterion was access to water and the possibility of irrigated farming which was essential to grow cash crops and generate sufficient revenue to keep the farms viable.

At first Jewish and Arab orange growers signed an agreement that, in case of hostilities, the groves should not be harmed and that harvest and exports should go ahead. However in April and May 1948, the Haganah militia started conducting random attacks and bombardments on Jaffa and most of the inhabitants fled the city by boat. By the middle of May, fewer than 5,000 of the 70,000 Palestinian Arabs who had lived in Jaffa, remained. The new state of Israel then confiscated Arab orange groves as ‘abandoned assets’

There began, too, a process of erasing old names and replacing them with new or even older ones. Between 1949 and 1951, Ben Gurion oversaw a huge project to ‘give Hebrew names to all the places, valleys, springs and roads’ in the country. Everything was renamed by a specialist committee. The part of Arab Palestine that had fallen to Israel began to disappear from the map and from memory through a deliberate policy of erasure.

As it was becoming clear that the interests of Israel and its Arab neighbours were hard to reconcile, and as broader political tensions persisted, the Bunger plan was designed to meet Jordanian and Syrian needs and to help the refugees without requiring the cooperation of Israel. It was expected that the dam would not attract opposition from that quarter as it did not apparently affect Israeli water rights and did not require cooperation over storage in Tiberias. Seeing the project as critical to refugee resettlement, the four sponsors – Jordan, Syria, UNRWA and the United States – agreed to go ahead. On 4 June 1953, Jordan and Syria signed a treaty on utilization of the Yarmouk that would allow implementation of the plan. Jordan was to pay most of the costs of the dam as it would be getting most of the water, while Syria would benefit from 75 per cent of the hydropower generated. Jordan and UNRWA endorsed the project, and in July 1953 Point 4 appropriated the necessary funds. However, quite unexpectedly this plan too met with Israeli objections. 

When Israel moved in February 1956 to renew its works at the B’Not Yacov Bridge, President Nasser of Egypt spoke46 for the Arab League to clarify that Arab governments would not accept the Johnston Plan because it was being taken as a licence for out-of-basin transfers. 47 In the event, the United States put pressure on Israel to postpone the development of its out-of-basin transfer. The month following Nasser’s statement, on 28 March 1956, Secretary of State Dulles urged Israel not to resume work at the bridge. Implicitly the Americans recognized that out-of-basin transfers were unacceptable to the Arabs, whatever Johnston had been induced to propose. Israel consented to put off the works for two years – but only if the United States granted a $75 million loan to finance other water resource development projects. The United States agreed to this arrangement as it would at least for the moment avoid new conflict over Israel’s diversion plans.

The United States proved hesitant initially to agree to Israel’s request to f inance the NWC. It appeared that the design would allow Israel to extract 100 million cubic metres more from the basin than was provided for in the Johnston Plan. However, in ‘technical talks’ in Washington DC in November 1959, Israel apparently persuaded the United States, and the United States ‘quietly approved’ a $15 million loan for the main conduit of the NWC. The US team requested ‘no publicity’ and specified that the money was to finance the part of the project that would carry surplus groundwater from the Coastal and Mountain Aquifers rather than Jordan River water. 

The NWC was also key to developing Israel’s agricultural economy. Just as Ben Gurion had dreamed, the NWC ‘made the desert bloom’. The extension of irrigated agriculture to the rainfed lands around Beersheba and into the Negev desert drove the rapid growth of high-value agriculture and the valuable export of fresh fruit and vegetables. This expansion of the economy also opened up the south to more extensive settlement – the population of the Beersheba metropolitan area today is nearly 400,000.64 Siegel goes further. His understanding is that the NWC was transformative for the Israeli nation. It provided a strong sense that challenges could be overcome and security strengthened, a feeling that the NWC was not just an infrastructure project successfully accomplished, unifying the country in terms of water infrastructure and services, but that it was also an inspiration that helped Israelis feel part of a larger common cause. The NWC helped to bind the country together and unify it.

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