TVA ON THE JORDAN

The final and most ambitious stage was the construction of the National Water Carrier. The list of people claiming patent rights to the project is

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long.^[42] In his 1902 novel, Altneuland, Theodor Herzl envisioned the Jordan River tributaries providing water for the drier half of the country. (He also envisioned water from the Mediterranean Sea driving electrical turbines as it dropped down through a canal system to the Dead Sea.) In his 1944 book, Palestine, Land of Promise, Walter Clay Lowdermilk, the American soil scientist, devoted an entire chapter to a proposal he called a “Jordan Valley Authority.”^[43] Lowdermilk based his model on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an American public-works agency that had successfully tapped rivers for irrigation and hydroelectricity.

Emanuel Neuman, an American Zionist leader, was inspired by Lowdermilk's idea and wanted to convince British authorities that it was not an unrealistic dream. With Chaim Weizmann's blessing, Neuman ap-proached James Benjamin Hayes, an internationally renowned water engi-neer from the TVA, and commissioned a more detailed blueprint for a Jordan River system.^[44] Hayes's 1949 report, TVA on the Jordan, projected a total water supply of 2.5 billion cubic meters by diverting Lebanon's Litani River, along with the Jordan tributaries and available groundwater sources.^[45] This would be sufficient to produce electricity, allow for the ir-rigation of 2.8 million dunams, and provide for the domestic needs of close to four million people.^[46]

It was Simcha Blass and the Tahal engineering staff, however, who would turn the vision into reality. In 1950, while still at the Ministry of Agriculture, Blass established a committee to oversee the planning of the National Water System. Composed of eighteen experts, this committee provided for scientific peer review, a rare and refreshing act of prudence for a young country in a hurry, with little time for formalities. Over six years the committee would hold seventy-five meetings, and its opinion was elicited at every important juncture.^[47]

“We asked a very simple question: ‘What information do you have on the quality of the water in the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret?’” recalls Hillel Shuval, the young sanitary engineer at the Ministry of Health who attended these meetings with his boss, Aaron Amrami. “The answer was that the only tests that had been done were for salinity, to see what crops could be irrigated. But it was clear that the National Carrier would provide drinking water as well, and they admitted that they had never conducted bacteriological or chemical testing.”^[48]

Blass was happy to leave water quality problems in the hands of the Ministry of Health. He had more pressing engineering problems of his own to contend with. For example, the Hayes plan would require a system of twenty-nine reservoirs to hold water until the summer months as well

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as to provide storage for drought years. It was not clear whether the porous local soils were sufficiently impermeable to adopt this American approach. Between 1953 and 1955, nine pilot reservoirs were built, at a va-riety of locations. The results were conclusive: A solution other than arti-ficial reservoirs for storage would have to be found.^[49]

Then there were financial problems. Blass demanded fifteen million dollars a year for eight years for the project—an astronomical sum for the young State, considering that its total foreign currency earnings for 1950 were eighteen million dollars.^[50] (The final price tag when the National Carrier was completed in 1964 reached 420 million lirot in 1964, or roughly 175 million dollars.^[51]) Yet Ben-Gurion's vision of a green Negev would not let him rest, and money was found.

The real challenges were technical in nature. Israel had never attempted an engineering job on this scale. Conceptually the plan was relatively sim-ple. The collective flow of the three main tributaries of the Jordan River was 520 million cubic meters of water a year. These tributaries met on the hills and plains of the Galilee, north of the Huleh swamp, before the river made its three-hundred-meter dive down to Lake Kinneret. The original plan took advantage of this height differential and diverted the waters for the National Carrier north of the lake, letting gravity lead them downhill to the south. On the way, the Netufah Valley would serve as a billion-cubic-meter reservoir, about a quarter the size of the Kinneret. Depending on the specific topographic conditions, the National Carrier was to utilize three different mechanisms to deliver the water across the country: canals, tunnels, and pipelines. Assuming that tunnels would constitute the bottleneck in the pro-gram, in 1952 Blass began excavations of Israel's first, the Ibon. The plan for a National Water Carrier itself would not be approved until four years later.