THE LAST DROP

The story of Israel's water resources reflects Zionism's finest hours and its most glaring deficiencies. A delivery infrastructure created by zealous politi-cians, bureaucrats, and engineers jump-started an economy and led to un-precedented achievements in semiarid cultivation. The development of water resources solidified a healthy national myth that glorified farming as the most honorable of Jewish occupations after a two-millennium exclusion from tilling the land. For most of its history, Israel was a net food exporter. But this hydrological “progress” also left rivers filthy and subjected aquifers to a contaminant bombardment from which they may never really recover.

Successes in protecting the Kinneret watershed or implementing drip or wastewater irrigation technologies confirm that history could have been different. After all, during years when water allocations were adjusted, agriculture did not vanish. And as the issue of competing water rights be-came a salient controversy in peace negotiations, government leaders were forced to think more realistically about Israel's long-term water manage-ment. But it remains unclear whether the policy has truly gone full cycle and whether politicians really want to rewrite the narrative. Even as the data continued to pour in about pollution and contamination, the old Zionist water quantity paradigm cast a powerful shadow. In the wake of the bureaucratic clamor that followed the 1996 elections, the link between the Water Commissioner and the Minister of Agriculture was finally sev-ered. But control of Israel's water resources was not passed over to an en-vironmental ministry, whose mission was preservation, but to a new Ministry of Infrastructure, responsible for development.