Andrew Harrod “LetThere be Water” shows how the once-parched startup nation Israel has developed technology solutions for an increasingly thirsty world.
https://philosproject.org/israels-promised-land-flowing-with-water/
“Israel is a water superpower.” So wrote Renaissance man and entrepreneur-commentator Seth M. Siegel in his recent bestselling book “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World.”
This fascinating volume analyzes the amazing pioneering story of how a once-poor, parched Israel became a prosperous, high-tech startup nation, offering solutions unto the countries of an increasingly water-starved world.
Siegel presented Israel as a laboratory for a growing global population endangered by impending socioeconomic and national security water crises examined by official top-secret American studies. “Sixty percent of Israel is desert, and the rest is semiarid,” he noted, adding that Israel’s “annual rainfall, not generous to begin with, has dropped by more than half.” Nonetheless, this former third-world country at its independence in 1948 “now has one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Middle-class life is the norm in Israel.”
Siegel said that “despite its challenging climate and unforgiving landscape, Israel not only doesn’t have a water crisis, it has a water surplus.” Prior to World War II, British economists gloomily predicted that the territory of the British Palestine Mandate on which a Jewish national home was to emerge could sustain no more than 2 million people. By contrast, the “geographic area of Palestine today is home to more than 12 million people” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Israel exports annually water-intensive produce worth billions of dollars.
Siegel examined in detail the various elements contributing to Israel’s life-giving liquidity in a once barren wilderness where pre-Israeli Zionist pioneers in the Yishuv depended upon simple wells. Completed in 1964, the National Water Carrier – which transports water in pipes from the Sea of Galilee in Israel’s north to the southern Negev Desert – symbolizes Israel’s national commitment to water infrastructure planning and development. Per capita, the NWC costs far more than American iconic public works like the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam or Panama Canal.
The author noted that unique Israeli mindsets concerning water complement material hardware, such as a rejection of water property rights common in other countries. In Israel, “all water ownership and usage is controlled by the government acting in the interest of the people. [Israelis] have surrendered private ownership and the benefits of a market economy in water for a system that offers universal access to high-quality water.”
On the other hand, this nationalized water system began charging real water prices in 2008, a dramatic contrast with enormous water subsidies enjoyed by consumers around the world. “The promise to the public was that water fees would henceforth be spent exclusively on the nation’s water needs “with nothing diverted to help balance other parts of municipal or national budgets,” Siegel said. This dedicated spending has procured modern water technology such as pipe-checking robotic cameras, reducing by 2013 Israel’s rate of lost municipal water to under 11 percent; by comparison, Chicago’s rate is about 25 percent.
Real water pricing caused an immediate decline in Israeli household water use by 16 percent, but Israelis have a longstanding national culture of water conservation. Signs reading “Every Drop Counts” in Hebrew permeate a country that was the first to make dual-flush toilets obligatory. Similarly, Israel treats and recycles more than 85 percent of its sewage for agricultural and other non-drinking uses, while the reclaimed water rate is under 10 percent for most developed countries like the United States.
Yet, as Siegel pointed out, farmers around the world – including in Israel – are the largest water consumers, making water savings in this sector especially significant. Israel has pioneered drip irrigation with pipes on or in the ground delivering water directly to plant roots, saving 40 percent of the water used in traditional irrigation methods, as well as doubling harvest yields. “Around the world today, only about 5 percent of the irrigated agricultural fields utilize drip irrigation or other micro-irrigation techniques,” he wrote, adding that 75 percent of Israel’s irrigated fields use drip irrigation. While approximately 80 percent of irrigated fields globally “still use some form of the ancient, and wasteful, flood-irrigation method,” usually wasting more than 50 percent of the used water, “not one farm in Israel has used flood irrigation in several decades.”
Israel has also exploited its global leadership plant research for water savings. New plant types thrive on diluted, brackish water that changes their cell structure, reducing water while releasing sugars to create sweeter produce with better texture. Because of Israel’s unique agricultural technological adaptations, the “best place in Israel to grow crops today is in the desert,” an Israeli scientist told Siegel.
Necessity has been the mother of invention domestically in Israel, and the country’s water technology has gone global in the marketplace. Siegel noted that 200 Israeli water-based startups in about the last decade constitute some 10 percent of such startups worldwide; Israeli firms helped build the Western hemisphere’s largest desalinization plant near San Diego. They drew upon Israel’s experience with the largest and most energy efficient desalinization plant in the world near Tel Aviv, along with four others on Israel’s short Mediterranean coast.
Water is good diplomacy as well as good business for Israel. Solving water problems helped improve Israel’s relations with once-unfriendly nations like China and India, while closer to home, Jordanians and Palestinians receive Israeli water exports often at discounted prices. “While it is still impossible to create new land or to return refugees to villages where cities or highways now stand, Israel has shown that it can produce new water,” Siegel wrote, about Israel’s conflicts with its Arab neighbors. Approximately 96 percent of some 2.4 million West Bank Palestinians access piped running water, thanks to Israeli infrastructure improvements following the 1967 war.
In his book, Siegel showed how this small Jewish state gives hope for gargantuan global water challenges, a modern David versus Goliath story. “Israel is the only country in the world which has less area covered by desert today than 50 years ago,” he noted. While often associated with conflict, Israel offers technological fountains of life.
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