THE WATER CYCLE
Change appeared to come in the form of Dan Zaslavsky, a bespectacled professor of agricultural engineering at the Technion given to wearing suspenders and exploring alternative energy sources. Zaslavsky was born into a family of engineers. Following the 1948 war, he started out his adult life on a kibbutz, but it proved too confining for a man of his considerable
Rafael “Raful” Eitan became Minister of Agriculture after the 1988 elec-tions and brought a reputation for honesty to the job. Soon recognizing that Israel's water resources were being cheated, Eitan wanted to fire the Water Commissioner, Zemach Yishai, immediately. But Yishai was active in Liberal Party politics and was close friends with Likud minister Moshe Nisim, who backed him. With the Labor Party tacitly supporting Yishai's proagricultural positions, Eitan was initially unable to muster the majority required in the Cabinet to throw him out. When the State Comptroller dropped her bomb about Israel's water management, he had the excuse he needed to replace Yishai with an expert.
Zaslavsky never learned from whom the Minister of Agriculture got his name. Originally Eitan offered Zaslavsky chairmanship of the Mekorot water utility, a position which did not interest him. So Eitan told him, “You know what, you'll be de facto Water Commissioner, and I'll work with you until Zemach Yishai leaves.”[208] In fact, the Water Law gave the Minister of Agriculture most of the key powers to make policy decisions. So until Yishai stepped down, Zaslavsky worked as “adviser to the Minister,” focusing on long-term planning after years of apparent neg-lect.[209] Once appointed Commissioner, he focused on the short term. The situation was considered critical: With the Coastal Aquifer and the Kinneret rapidly approaching the red lines, the threat of a drinking water shortage loomed for the first time in the country's history. There was no time for changes in price structures, deregulation schemes, or new laws.[210] Eitan heard Zaslavsky's remedy—drastic cuts in allocations—and decided to push the bitter pill on his constituents.
The State Comptroller's report had raised the profile of the water short-age, and the drought weighed heavily on the public consciousness. After the Iraqi Scuds stopped falling in the spring of 1991, Zaslavsky started to make his changes. He tried to use economic tools, cutting subsidies and raising water prices. But the Knesset grandstanded the changes, and his boss, the Minister, was powerless to help. Then Zaslavsky tried to cut allo-cations to the cities and to dry up grassy parklands he considered wasteful given the need for austerity. The nation's mayors called his regulations
Seventy percent of Israel's water was still going to the farmers, though, and here Zaslavsky was resolute. On the whole, farmers were extremely resentful of even minor cuts. One Friday morning, Zaslavsky was invited to speak in Tel Aviv, at a meeting chaired by former Water Commissioner Meir Ben Meir, who then headed the Agricultural Research Center. He never got a chance to talk. One after another, speakers launched into tirades. Part of the problem may have been Zaslavsky's presentation. It took little time for farmers to recognize that he was smarter than anyone else in the room and knew a lot more about water; some agricultural ad-vocates found this hard to take. Years later, one agricultural lobbyist would quip that three years of drought were not as destructive to Israel's agri-culture as two years of Dan Zaslavsky.
The cuts Zaslavsky spoke of were tantamount to a hydrological earth-quake. Ultimately the issue reached the government. But the Minister of Agriculture backed his man, and Zaslavsky got his way. Yitzhak Shamir, who was the Prime Minister, presided over a very heated debate:
I didn't need to be an expert in water. I had enough experts who were quite dedicated and serious about the subject. We heard Zaslavsky, who certainly had his own theories on the subject that seemed quite original. Then we heard from others who felt differently than him. It was hard to say who was correct. I didn't feel that I had to sit as a judge and decide between two views. In this case there was a Minister in whom I had confidence.[212]
With the government's blessing, Zaslavsky did what he had to do and issued reforms. After the Water Commissioner cut back, God did His part to get the nation's water balance sheet back in shape. The summer of 1991 was moderate, and the winter of 1991–1992 was astonishingly wet. Zvi Ortenberg, Chairman of the Lake Kinneret Administration, reported that a total of 1.2 billion cubic meters of water poured into the lake from December 1991 until May 1992. It rose over four meters, from an all-time low of 213 meters below sea level to an astonishing 208.9 meters below sea level, with a threat of flooding.[213] The aquifers also bounced back much faster than the most optimistic hydrological projections.[214]
But in the 1992 summer elections, the Labor Party reclaimed power. Yaakov Zur was appointed Minister of Agriculture. Zur was a kibbutznik with strong ties to the agricultural establishment. Getting rid of Zaslavsky was a priority, and he wasted no time.[215]
Zaslavsky never received his due for trying to change the course of Israel's water policy, and some farmers openly celebrated his unceremoni-ous dismissal. As is the case with Water Commissioners, the vast majority of Israelis have never heard of him. Gidon Zur (no relation to the Minister) was appointed in his stead. He was a career civil servant, and, while not quite the fighter that Zaslavsky was, he harbored environmen-tal sensitivities. As rainy years improved the water balance, however, water allocations slowly but surely began to resemble the agricultural “largesse” of the 1980s. Meir Ben-Meir, appointed for his second term in 1996, was unabashedly open in the priority and subsidies he brought the agricultural sector and dismissive of the “doomsday” criticism of the hydrological community. The Water Commission celebrated its fortieth year with a strategy that did not look altogether different from what had characterized the Menahem Kantor administration.
Given the climatic cycle of drought, and the steady growth in demand, Israel's water policy remained a far cry from sustainable.[216] Enthusiastic pumping and the generous ceding of water rights to Jordan during the wet years of the 1990s left little reserves for the inevitable dry span. Whether a result of global warming or not, rainfall during the winters of 1999, 2000, and 2001 fell far short of average, bringing Israel's water resources to their lowest recorded levels, far below the red lines.[217] The public was aghast at the frequent photos in the press of anomalous islands that now stuck out in the middle of the lake and the parched and exposed shoreline of the Kinneret on land where clear water had once glistened and children waded.
When Shimon Tal, the competent and congenial chief engineer from Mekorot, was appointed in Ben Meir's stead in 2000, he slashed agricul-tural allocations again. He could not, however, bring the Knesset to ap-prove the massive cuts in urban usage (including a ban on watering lawns) and the conservation policies that were needed to meet the growing hy-drological challenge. A special Knesset Commission of Inquiry began to investigate the issue during the summer of 2001, and the parade of witnesses—including former water commissioners, scientists, and politicians—was quick to point blame and bring historic citations to the legislators, documenting just when “I told you so.”[218] As the politicians considered who the scapegoats should be, real institutional reform once again became a common topic of speculation and discussion.
Tal, the new Water Commissioner, quickly came to support a revolution in management strategy that would cancel the old quota system entirely in favor of a market-based allocation system. In such a system, Water Commission personnel would no longer serve primarily as “allocation ref-erees” but begin to function as water quality regulators. “If someone is willing to pay the costs of desalinated water to wash their car, why should we impose restrictions?” he asked.[219] How Israel's thirsty streams, wet-lands, and other aquatic habitats might find the funds to compete in such a new system was not yet resolved. Nor was the ultimate effect on Israel's greenhouse gas emissions of this belated embracing of energy-intensive desalination. And of course, it wasn't clear that the beleaguered agricul-tural community was in fact ready to accept economic subsidies in areas beyond their water bill.