THE KINNERET SECRETARIAT: A RARE POINT OF LIGHT
The Kinneret Secretariat, in retrospect, is the closest thing to a water-quality success story from this period. Yet it too reflects the Water Commission's dubious commitment to water quality during the 1960s and 1970s. As the Kinneret's role as a national reservoir became clear, consid-erable energy went into limnological research in order to understand and protect it better. By 1968 over five hundred articles, books, and reports about the lake had been published, mostly during the preceding ten years.[189] The picture that emerged was not encouraging.
When the JNF drained the Huleh region, it removed an essential “nu-trient sink” that absorbed much of the nitrogen and phosphorus from the surface runoff into the Kinneret. In addition, the rich organic peat, newly exposed and nitrified, was washed down into the reservoir. The resulting 50 pecent increase in nutrient loadings threatened to induce eutrophica-tion.[190] Straightening segments of the Jordan River also increased the
It was a peculiar dynamic. Generally, a national Water Commissioner, charged with protecting Israel's water resources, should serve as the main promoter of water quality. The regulated utility is expected to take a more evasive role. In the Kinneret it was just the opposite. Perhaps the best thing about putting Mekorot in charge of operating the National Water Carrier was that it forced its managers to take a long-term look at water quality.
When Bob Davis, a South African limnologist, joined his son in Israel in 1971, Haim Gofer, the new Kinneret Committee head, asked him to prepare a comprehensive assessment of the lake.[192] Davis's report sug-gested that the Kinneret was in an advanced trophic state. He predicted that if immediate measures were not taken to reduce its nutrient loads, the lake would die.[193] The trouble was that the engineers at the Water Commission had never really taken into account the Kinneret's role as an aquatic habitat but rather saw it only as a reservoir.[194] When the Water Commissioner did not respond to Davis's recommendations, it was leaked to the press, creating quite a stir. (Kantor later claimed he never saw the report.) Yigael Alon met with Davis and created a special committee of Ministerial Directors General to field a Kinneret strategy. The Com-mittee banned all construction within fifty meters of the lake and also called for a new regional plan to protect the Kinneret. The Water Commissioner fired Gofer, apparently for insubordination.[195]
In all fairness, it should be said that the Kinneret Secretariat, declared in 1971 and formally authorized as a Regional Drainage Authority, made remarkable progress. Drainage authorities are created primarily to prevent flooding and to continue the job of land reclamation. They are not consid-ered to be environmental pit bulls. But, after thirty years, the Kinneret Secretariat has shown what a committed drainage agency can do if it has high-quality data, a cogent watershed orientation, and political support. The Secretariat's activities included developing and managing the shore-line, supervising fishing, and monitoring bacteria and pesticide residues, as well as launching environmental education initiatives. Perhaps most im-portant has been its policy of no effluent discharge, which led to upgraded sewage treatment and to improved solid waste management in sanitary landfills outside the watershed.[196]
Environmental indicators, for a change, reflect meaningful progress. During the past twenty years eutrophication has not advanced, and indi-cators such as primary production and chlorophyll did not rise between 1972 and 1993 (at the same time there has been an increase in total nitro-gen concentrations and algal biomass in the lake).[197] This remains a far cry from a fairytale ending. Today the Kinneret is still polluted by a variety of point sources, including drainage pipes and outfalls from industrial areas such as the Zemah complex.[198] Overpumping during the drought years of 2000 and 2001 shrank the lake's banks as never before. Yet, had the Coastal Aquifer been protected as energetically as the Kinneret was by the Secretariat, Israel's natural resource portfolio would be much richer today.