previous sub-section
The Quantity and Quality of Israel's Water Resources
next sub-section

SALINITY: THE POLLUTANT OF CHOICE

One consequence of the Six-Day War of 1967 was Israeli control over all of the Jordan River's tributaries. There had been at least a dozen water-related cease-fire violations in the Jordan River basin since 1951.[129] But, for the time being, the issue of the Kinneret's water supply seemed resolved—quite favorably, from Israel's perspective. (Transboundary water quality problems would not be recognized until thirty years later.[130]) The National Water Carrier was up and running. Water was even discovered in considerable quantities in the Arava, and subsequently a string of settle-ments was established.[131] With water quantity falling into place, sustain-able allocation and water quality should have at long last become the Water Commissioner's paramount issue. Yet this was not to be. Spurred on by the new resources liberated during the Six-Day War, Israel's political leaders were not yet ready to abandon a paradigm that had so successfully lubricated past development. Pollution would have to wait for government attention—but of course it did not.

Israel's water is naturally alkaline and hard, quickly coating the coun-try's electric teakettles with the chalky white residues of calcium carbon-ate. Salts are often added by industries and laundries to soften the water. Intensive human activities quickly upset the natural water chemistry, however. The Water Commission was well aware of a steady deterioration in water quality. Yet initially its experts did not fully grasp the scope of the problem. The only pollutant that garnered serious attention was salt. Salinity takes many forms, but is usually regulated according to chlorine concentration (salt is composed of sodium and chlorine atoms). It can also be roughly assessed by measuring electrical conductivity because the atoms are ionized. At high enough levels, salinity is associated with hy-pertension and elevated risk of heart disease.[132] Its negative impacts on crop yields has been apparent since the dawn of agriculture. Of course, its effect on taste is often what people notice first.

The fixation on salt makes sense, given the perspective of water man-agers who were obsessed with expanding access to water resources during Israel's early years. Salinity is a parameter directly linked to issues of groundwater mining and overpumping. Even today, former Commissioner Kantor speaks of no other environmental parameter.[133] This narrow water


224
quality orientation is reflected in the original text of the 1959 Water Law, purportedly the most modern water statute in the world at the time. Although the law did not include the terms “pollution,” “contaminant,” or “water quality,” it did prohibit activities causing salination.

During the 1950s and 1960s, scientists did not seem to fully grasp the contribution of surface pollutants. For instance, Israel's romance with wastewater reuse exacerbated the salinity levels in groundwater. Wastewater is saltier than freshwater, because conventional treatment does not really remove what is added during its original use, such as the leftover water softeners from industry. The salting of kosher meats makes slaughterhouses the single greatest contributor to Israel's effluent salin-ity.[134] Furthermore, effluents sit in storage ponds until farmers need them in the summer. The resulting evaporation raises salt concentrations even further.[135]

Dan Zaslavsky, a professor of engineering at the Technion, served as Israel's Water Commissioner during the 1990s. He describes the perils of the prevailing management strategy of the period:

Intuitively, water managers thought that the amount of water that you could pump should be equal to recharge. But they didn't consider two things: First, you are adding salts all the time from above, and you have to rinse them out. Second, you may be getting salts from lower geological strata. I still have to explain to hydrologists that if you don't allow water to flow to the sea, salts will concentrate indefinitely. The major problem for water managers in Israel and in fact in most arid and semiarid countries is to change the balance of solutes: to import less into the source and export more.[136]

It is little wonder that Zaslavsky has emerged as Israel's most outspoken promoter of tough, drinking-water-level treatment standards for sewage or discontinuation of wastewater reuse in Israel altogether. Yet he is quick to defend the conscientiousness of Israel's first generation of hydrologists, whose determination made the desert green.

The practical way to prevent overpumping was to set an optimal level of usage, beyond which no pumping of water would be allowed. Unfortunately, this required more hydrogeological knowledge than was available. Kantor explains the somewhat arbitrary origins of Israel's most famous environmental standard:

I thought we were dealing with 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year, and today I know that I'm a lot poorer. But I also knew from the first minute in the job that I had to establish a “red line” beneath which we wouldn't pump. This required a national consensus. Not


225
among citizens, but in academia. Almost all the Israeli academics were working for me already. We'd supplement them every five years by hosting a forum of international experts on hydrology. We'd send out materials, and they would prepare for the meeting. And that's how we established the red line in the early 1960s. It was in the concluding session of one of these meetings.[137]

The designation of red lines in Israel's three major sources of water was ultimately a somewhat arbitrary “guesstimate.” Once they were set, however, the Kinneret's and the aquifers' red lines assumed enormous significance and quickly entered the national consciousness. Weather broadcasts refer to them, informing the public about the practical importance of rainstorms. As Water Commissioner, Kantor took them very seriously.

But not everyone was as conscientious as Menahem Kantor. As Israel's Water Commissioner, Dan Zaslavsky took bold action to reduce allocation and bring water levels up above the red line. Zaslavsky remains furious at the lenient attitude towards red lines and the chronic overpumping that prevailed among previous Water Commissioners during the 1970s and 1980s, when agriculture received whatever it asked for, regardless of the available reserves.[138] Meir Ben-Meir, a lifelong advocate for agricultural interests, served as Water Commissioner twice, during the early 1980s and at the end of the 1990s. His cavalier attitude towards the red lines and al-location policies, which seemed to reflect a belief that overpumping could continue with hydrological impunity, made him a reviled figure among many in the environmental community.

At the end of 1990, State Comptroller Miriam Ben Porat prepared a scathing review of water allocation policy at the Water Commission. The collective deficit of the aquifers and the Kinneret had reached 1.6 billion cubic meters—an entire year's worth of water. The drop in water table lev-els caused by the overpumping allowed the seawater to encroach 1.5 kilo-meters inland.[139] Sixteen percent of the wells in Israel's largest Coastal Aquifer were deemed unusable, because of chlorine concentrations too high even for agriculture.[140] By then it was clear that pollutants other than salinity might be just as deleterious to Israel's water resources.


previous sub-section
The Quantity and Quality of Israel's Water Resources
next sub-section