Israel runs dry

July 8, 2008 - 2:59 PM by · 4 Comments
Filed under: General, Life, Politics 

Uh Oh. Israel’s in a water crisis. On Monday, the water level of Lake Kinneret, Israel’s main reservoir, fell below the red line, and today former head of the Water Commission, Dan Zaslavsky, warned that Israel’s faucets could run dry by mid-summer.

Sounds serious right? So why hasn’t anyone done anything about this up to now?

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As a Brit turned Israeli, this is something I find a little hard to understand.

Back when I lived in the rainy wet UK, not a summer used to go by without some kind of hosepipe ban. The rivers would be full, the reservoirs seemingly flush with water, but the government said there was a drought, so our hosepipe’s went off, and the grass would turn brown, and our gardens wilt. I remember summer after summer watering the garden with our bathwater.

Here in Israel, however, a country where it doesn’t rain for almost six months of the year, and where this year in particular, winter with its heavy rains just didn’t come, water conservation is a topic that seems to extend no further than the op-ed pages.

Israel is in a serious water crisis. Pumping from the Kinneret will have to stop soon, and we still have the worst of the summer to come. Water supplies will be cut to towns that receive water from the National Water carrier, agriculture will be badly hit, and damage could be substantial.

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Everyone saw this coming, but nothing significant was done to stop it. What about desalination plants, what about an education campaign for Israel’s public, what about a little forethought for heaven’s sake? Come on. This is the country that invented drip irrigation.

“We need to pray for a serious rainy winter,” Shuli Chen, the Water Commission official who has been measuring the Kinneret’s level for the last eight years (now there’s a job…), told a local Israeli paper. “An average winter won’t suffice. If there is not a serious flow of water into the Kinneret this winter, our situation will be very bad.”

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