The History of Water in the Land Once Called Palestine

Scarcity, Conflict and Loss in Middle East Water Resources

Christopher Ward, Sandra Ruckstuhl, Isabelle Learmont

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780755637201
• eBook ISBN:
  9780755618057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Ecología

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.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The divergence of two peoples

The story of water in the land that was once called Palestine is the story of two peoples who, a hundred years ago, set out from the same common point, from the same natural endowment, the same technology, the same level of economic development, the same level of water services – and who faced the same risks of drought and flood and insecurity.

It is the story of how the paths of these two peoples began to separate, first to run side by side, and then to diverge, and of how decisions and events in the larger arena started to sunder the two peoples, setting them apart and at odds with one another. Ideas, decisions and events changed the relations of power between these peoples in a profound way so that a state of enmity between them seemed to become rooted and to have an air of permanence.

A book about the history of water in the land first delineated as Palestine under the British Mandate is relevant for several reasons. One reason is memory, identity. The record of what has happened, even if it has no power to change the new reality in the future, is of value to a people – self-knowledge, a realistic sense of identity defined by knowledge of what is lost and of what remains. But another reason, forward looking and more optimistic, is that knowledge and acceptance of loss can drive thoughts of what might nonetheless be different. Amongst all the ‘facts on the ground’, where is the lever that might move change? In water there may just be such a lever. One new fact on the ground is the coming of desalination. A new possibility has arisen – that if we can now make water, then water need no longer be a reason for struggle. It may, instead, be part of a solution to struggle.

And an environmental window is opening, too. The Israelis have developed their natural resources to their limits. Nowadays they recognize the heavy toll taken on the environment. In their prosperity, they have the power to begin to act to correct these harms. And with this awareness and readiness for action comes the reality that their environment is shared with neighbours, and above all, with the Palestinians who live alongside them in the same land. This creates the possibility – and the need – for cooperation and for joint action. Along with this growing concern for the environment comes the menace of climate change, certainly bringing hotter, drier, more erratic weather and shrinking the water resource. Israelis and Palestinians are in this together, facing the same challenges. There is reasonable impulse that they should work to tackle the challenges together.

And that is the justification of both this book and its companion. If we can understand the long history of gain and loss, we can understand what may drive the parties towards a new understanding and a new compact. Israel now makes water from the sea. This relaxes the old zero-sum game. Already this has helped to bring better agreement between Jordan and Israel. The plundered and stressed environment and the reality of adverse climatic change create a logic of cooperative response.

So this first book is the story of loss, about how Palestinians come to be so dispossessed of water. And for Israelis it is the history of the step-by-step and successful consolidation of a water inventory and of the resulting water security of a nation.

The companion book Water Security for Palestinians and Israelis is, then, about hope. How can Israelis consolidate their hard-won water security – and how can Palestinians achieve the same? What are the conditions in which the water security of both peoples can be obtained in a framework of fairness and justice?

Trying to see it from the others’ point of view

In these two books we try our best to avoid dwelling on the vast and complex questions of geopolitics which dog debate on Israeli/Palestinian questions and which polarize opinion to the point where it seems that everybody is shouting and nobody is listening. We try to keep to the water question and to discuss that question in the neutral terms of ‘water security’. But we also try to understand what water means to either people beyond the simple functions of water security – beyond plain security of water resources, beyond the simple provision of top-notch water and sanitation services, and beyond the ability to manage the risks and protect the environment.

On the Israeli side, it is necessary to understand the deep, the essential connection between water and the Zionist vision. Ben Gurion, a man far-sighted and politically adept, saw from the outset that a continuous space of land and water was essential to the establishment of the Jewish state. He saw, too, what became policy from the establishment of the state, that water should be held and managed by the state for the common good. In his diary for July 1937, the founding father writes:

we achieve, for the first time in our history, a real Jewish state – an agricultural body of one or more million people, continuous, heavily populated, at one with the land which is completely its own. We achieve the possibility of a giant national settlement on a large area that is all in the hands of the state . . . the difficulties and defeats that preoccupied us until now . . . . [will vanish] . . . . [we will have] an organized economy, rational and pre-determined exploitation of the land and water.¹

In Israel’s story of conquest and redemption, land and the water that fructifies the land have an almost mystical status, beyond the mere platform on which to place a people and a state and to develop an economy. The land and its water are the embodiment of nationhood, both a collective asset and an imaginative symbol of the Jewish people coming home. It was the subordination of the individual to the collective memory of what it meant to be Jewish that drove the early virtues of Zionist pioneering and self-sacrifice, and the same virtues that supported the collective ownership of land and water and the institutions that managed them – the land agency, the water authority. As Israel has evolved into a highly successful modern state, water security has been wonderfully achieved by technology, infrastructure and effort – but to understand the extraordinary emotions and political commitment to that security, we need always to recall these old drivers and basic motives.

Trying to see it from the Palestinian point of view gives a very different perspective. Palestinians see the story of water as a story of d ispossession and loss as important as the loss of land, as something so central to a way of life, to a people, that it is not just a negotiable economic service but a central part of a whole struggle – for restitution, for justification, for identity even.

The Palestinians feel they are a people in constant recession, that their loss was not once and for all in 1948. It is understood as constant and still continuing, liberties reduced to a circumscribed home rule in fragments of their old homeland, administered more to the benefit of others than their own by a disempowered and often mistrusted home rule. In this view, identity and history are denied. To Palestinians, everything speaks oppression, disempowerment and loss of hope.

It seems to Palestinians like less for more. As with the Sibylline books, the portion that is being offered – of land, of water, of rights, of self-respect – is ever dwindling while the price rises, the price of accepting a humiliating settlement that values at nothing three generations of sacrifice and suffering.²

The Palestinians see how the pieces of land left to them in 1948 have largely gone. They consider that the very water that rains on them from the skies and seeps into a rock matrix beneath their feet has been appropriated. The Jordan that once flowed past their lands is now a dirty drain, the water sucked out by others upstream of the West Bank. And today, Palestinians may not even approach the river. Settlement agriculture, military posts and the iron architecture of Area C stand in their way. Even the sea, the vast resources and common culture of the mare nostrum, the Mediterranean, is barred to them.

The teen wrote that if she could have that alternative life, she would move to Acre, ‘live by the sea and go swimming. I have only been once – even if the water is only 30 kilometres from my house.’

Ahed Tamimi quoted in Haaretz, 7 October 2018

All else set aside, nobody would deny that the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the land – the Mandate land – are entitled to a fair share of the water resources of that land and to the right to develop those resources as they see fit for the benefit of the people and their economy.

In order to explore what a just and equitable finally agreed resolution on water might look like, we start this volume with a historical narrative, which opens in the twilight of the Ottoman era and traces the development and use of water resources through the Mandate and Independence periods, and through the Occupation up to Oslo and after.

Chapter 2

Land and water

In this chapter we describe the three main geographical and hydro-geographical regions of the territory covered by Mandate Palestine – the coastal plain with its underlying Coastal Aquifer and the springs and wadis that bring water from the hills; the highlands, underlain by three aquifers recharged by the considerable rains that fall on the higher elevations; and the Jordan Valley and its fabled river that carries water past five present-day riparians from the mountains of Lebanon down to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.

The land is dry and the water that is needed to fructify it is limited and relatively scarce. The population of the territory has multiplied rapidly – fifteen times as many people live there today as at the start of the Mandate after the First World War – and the water needs of a modern economy have led to full development, even to overdevelopment, of the resource. In the charged context of the region, both land and water have inevitably become a locus of competition and contention.

The land before the Mandate¹

The natural endowment of the land – its structure, geology, topography, physical geography, the climate and hydrology – has changed little in the hundred years since the end of Ottoman rule. Hills are hills, plains are plains, watercourses are watercourses. There are a few changes at the margin caused by the hand of man to the structure of some features – particularly to the vegetation and to the stock and flow of water – and these changes affect both the hydrology and the ecology. Most of the extensive wetlands have now been drained, many springs and wells have dried up, seasonal storm water flows are less in the streambeds, and the natural ‘seas’ of Galilee and the Dead Sea have shrunk. By contrast, tree cover has increased. But for the rest, beneath the cities and the roads and the irrigation schemes, the natural endowment is by and large unchanged.

So what was this land like a hundred years ago, at the end of Ottoman rule? From north to south, old Palestine runs ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ and from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The length is 201 kilometres (130 miles). The width is 145 kilometres (90 miles) in the south, from the Dead Sea to Gaza, narrowing to less than 40 miles in the north, from the Sea of Galilee to Akka. With the Mandate, Palestine extended another 190 kilometres (120 miles) south from Beersheba, to the Red Sea. In all, the area which Mandate Palestine took over was about 28,000 square kilometres (11,000 square miles). Like so many territories, Mandate Palestine was often said to be ‘the size of Wales’.²

Geology defines the land into three natural territories: the coastal plain from the River Litani in the north to Gaza and beyond in the south; the hill country; and the deep Jordan Valley between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The greatest cause of these geological variations is the massive series of fault lines in the earth’s crust that stretches from the Rift Valley in East Africa to the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.³ Secondary fracture lines, some running north and south parallel to the fault, and some running from east to west, have produced a great variety of soils and of climate.

The coastal plain

The coastal plain, of varying width, stretches between the central hills and the sea. The plain was made fertile over millennia by soil washed down from the hills in the heavy winter rains. Like Caesar’s Gaul, the plain can be divided into three parts: the Philistine plain, the plain of Sharon and the plains north of Carmel.

The Philistine plain The Philistine plain is the largest of the three. Here the climate is always temperate, with an average temperature of 18°C (65°F). The southern, drier part receives some winter rains from October to April, enough for pasture to grow. Its use in Ottoman times was to graze livestock. Around the level of Gaza there was annual cropping of cereals, as the vivid memoirs of the childhood of Salman Abu Sitta well attest.⁴ North of Gaza, the whole area, can be cultivated, and by late Ottoman times wells had been dug almost everywhere and there was intensive cultivation, largely of citrus fruit, irrigated orchards and fields of grain. All of this coast is sandy and in the past a widening belt of sand dunes formed over the years south of Jaffa and today’s Tel Aviv, between the sea and the plain.

The plain of Sharon At around the level of Jaffa/Tel Aviv, a spur of low hills approaches the coast and narrows a little. Here begins the plain of Sharon, the central section of the coastal plain, extending to Mount Carmel (Jabal al Karmil) in the north. This part of the plain is about 15 kilometres wide (9 miles) and about 90 kilometres (56 miles) from north to so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction The divergence of two peoples
• Chapter 2 Land and water
• Chapter 3 Modernization and water in the twilight of the Ottoman era, 1850–1918
• Chapter 4 Water in the era of the British Mandate, 1918–48
• Chapter 5 Building Israel’s water security, 1948–67
• Chapter 6 West Bank Palestinians under Occupation: Politics, power and water, 1967–93
• Chapter 7 Oslo and after
• Last Word: The divergence of two peoples – Israeli gain and Palestinian loss
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright