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The Quantity and Quality of Israel's Water Resources
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WATER PLANNING: WHO'S IN CHARGE?

There was a need for a coordinated national plan for water resource devel-opment, supported by a legislative framework that would enable the pro-fessional water managers to work effectively. Anarchy and duplication of efforts were undermining the single most critical resource of the new na-tion. But who would plan it? Bureaucratically, the cast of vested interests guaranteed a turf war.

For instance, the British Mandate had operated a hydrological service, whose job it was to measure and estimate water resources. It was run by a hydrogeologist, Dr. Martin Goldsmith, a British Jew. Nevertheless, the Yishuv's Jewish Agency did not trust him, so they set up their own hy-drology department. After the war, the Jewish Agency staffers had no in-tention of closing up shop. Blass had a grudging respect for Goldsmith's professional skills and kept him on as head of the Hydrological Service, which was to serve Blass's department at the Ministry of Agriculture. To this day, Israel's Hydrological Service generates most of the data and tech-nical information (qualitative and quantitative) about Israel's ground-and surfacewater resources.

Then there was Mekorot. When the State was created, controlling shares of the water utility were passed on to it and the Jewish Agency.[18] Naturally, Mekorot wished to continue in this capacity nationally and to expand its control. In 1959 the passage of Israel's Water Law catapulted Mekorot to official status as the national water utility, by appointment of the Minster of Agriculture (with approval by the Knesset and the Government).[19]

Yet another player in the water business was the Ministry of Health. In 1949 the Israeli Hebrew Language Academy created a new word for sani-tation: tavruah (until then, the Yishuv had just used a Hebraized form—hegeniah—of the English term “hygiene”[20]). Aaron Amrami was one of the few Israelis who had formally studied sanitary engineering at the


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graduate level; his mentor was Professor Walter Strauss, a German-trained hygienist. The Minister of Health was happy to put Amrami to work. He took the other Israeli with professional training in the field, Hillel Shuval, as his deputy. Shuval (see Figure 17) had just immigrated from the United States, arriving in July 1948 at the height of the War of Independence. He had served in an American engineering unit during World War II and re-ceived a sanitary engineering degree under the G.I. Bill. The nascent army asked Shuval what he could do for Israel's war effort, and he was put in charge of chlorinating drinking water in the new Engineering Corps.[21]

For the first few years, Amrami and Shuval were literally the Ministry of Health's Sanitation Department. They faced a daunting laundry list of responsibilities: sewage and water supply planning; oversight of drinking water and wastewater quality; monitoring of industrial effluent dis-charges; supervision of municipal solid-waste disposal; city cleanliness services; monitoring and grading of food production and services; assess-ment of milk quality; insect, rodent, and pest control; regulation of swim-ming pools and beaches; sanitary oversight of schools and summer camps; sanitation in ports; quarantine services for imports; health conditions in immigrant camps and villages; and air pollution control. With no one to take on the regulation of radiation, it was soon added to the list as well.[22] During the 1950s the Sanitation Department was the only Israeli institu-tion seriously concerned with water quality. Although it consistently sent its staff for advanced environmental training in the United States, the seven permanent sanitary engineers and technicians were simply spread too thin to stem the growing tide of contamination.[23]

In addition to the planning departments of the Health Ministry and Mekorot, the Jewish Agency had its own planning department. And of course, as Director of the Ministry of Agriculture's Water Department, Blass saw himself primarily as a planner. It was a mess. At the same time, Blass began to find the constraints imposed on Israeli civil servants un-bearable. More than his Spartan public-sector salary (which forced him to sell his ten-room house and move into a four-room flat[24]), he resented the never-ending haggling for reimbursements and the awkward personnel procedures that were impediments to attracting qualified professionals.[25] This frustration with the government bureaucracy, rather than any envi-ronmental logic per se, led in 1952 to the creation of Tahal, an acronym that stood for “Water Planning for Israel.”

Rather than just empowering one of the existing entities to centralize planning functions, this new corporation was to advise the government about water planning.[26] Blass happily took over as its director. As part of


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the restructuring, Blass's Water Department at the Ministry of Agriculture became the Water Administration, run by development guru Pinhas Sapir (also the chairman of Mekorot and Tahal).[27] Later this Administration became Israel's Water Commission.

Levi Eshkol, who held about four jobs at the time, including Minister of Agriculture and Director of the Jewish Agency's Settlement Department, did not like the arrangement. He saw the new agency as a Mekorot com-petitor. But after four years of suffocation, Blass refused to work out of a large bureaucracy. So Eshkol agreed to the creation of the new non-governmental institution and then appointed himself to be both the gov-ernmental and the Jewish Agency representative on Tahal's Board of Directors.[28] The JNF board representative did not bother to show up for the meetings, so, with Eshkol covering for him, Blass had all the latitude he needed. He inherited the staff members of the competing departments[29] and rolled up his sleeves.


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