Water Between A rabs and I sraelis: Researching Twice‐Promised Resources

Abstract

Abstract The majority of Israel's water resources are transboundary and are thus, in a sense, shared with her neighbors. The most contentious are the underground aquifers of the West Bank shared between Israel and the Palestinians and the tributaries to the Jordan River that originate in the occupied Golan Heights, which belonged to Syria prior to the 1967 Six‐Day War. Since 1948, Israel has embarked on an ambitious development program for the country. The drive behind this program was the Zionist ethos of developing the land to create an attachment between the Jew and the soil. Massive agricultural and water projects ensued in the mid‐1950s and 1960s in realizing the Zionist dream. The most significant was the National Water Carrier completed in 1964. The National Water Carrier is a complex system of pipes, pumps, and canals that transfers water from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the arid Negev Desert in the south for irrigation. The repercussions of this interbasin transfer have been the decline of the flow of the Jordan River that flows south from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Today, the Jordan River is a trickle of its former self, and the Dead Sea is at its lowest level ever.