Israel has two choices: Conserve resources and invest in new technology or stop drinking water altogether.
Professor Shaul Amir favors the former.
“I’ve read the statistics and there will not be sufficient water for the 12 million that are projected to live in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River,” said Amir, this year’s Helen Diller Family visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley.
“Whatever way we find to divide the resources, the water now is not sufficient for such a population. And if the Palestinians stabilize politically and the Palestinian state and Israel prosper economically, then, particularly on the Palestinian side, the demand for water will skyrocket.”
Amir, a faculty member at Technion Israel Institute of Technology for the past 35 years, predicts the Palestinians will follow the same course Israel has when it comes to water resources.
In the Jewish state, water usage is now balanced about 50-50 when it comes to agrarian and urban use; in the past farming consumed the lion’s share. The Palestinian territories feature less farmland and fewer farmers than Israel, so Amir foresees more and more urbanization and a greater demand for water.
And in the Middle East, less water equals more problems.
“The rainy parts of Israel, from Beersheva up to the Galilee, are some of the most densely populated areas in the world,” said the city and regional planning professor, who delivered a public lecture in Berkeley on Wednesday, April 27, regarding Israel’s environmental future .
“You cannot really say this is Israel’s water or this is Palestinian water. A good part of the water accumulates on the mountains of the West Bank and the rest is from aquifers that are fed along the coast. The whole system is one system. And we will have to manage it.”
There is also the possibility of large-scale desalinization, for which Amir has high hopes. Advances in the technology point toward a possible source of cheap and plentiful water for both the Israelis and Palestinians. But serious hurdles still remain; no one knows where to dump the tons of sludge generated by the desalinization process and the huge plants along the sea will not aid Israel’s tourism industry, the professor wryly notes.
But, he adds, in providing water for the region, quantity counts no more than quality.
Israel and a possible future Palestinian state are small, and the population is cramped, and pollution can quickly ruin the realm’s limited natural resources.
Already, 80 percent of the water Israelis wash down the drain is reclaimed for future usage. Yet this technology has not yet been perfected.
“So, when we hear about [pollution] along the Mediterranean in Israel, it is by and large due to the fact that we are in the process of completing a national re-treatment of the sewage, and, from time to time there are,” he pauses, “technical difficulties.”
In other words, don’t go swimming off Tel Aviv just now.
Israel’s rapid population growth in the 1990s taxed its water infrastructure, he said, and has necessitated extensive new work.
But water is about more than rain and ocean water and pipes. Much of Israeli and Palestinian water resources are located underneath threatened open spaces; forest land, agricultural land and nature reserves actually make up two-thirds of greater Israel.
The logical solution — encouraging responsible population policies to limit the number of inhabitants in the region to a manageable amount — is a “taboo” in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, said Amir, who is teaching a pair of upper division courses at Berkeley.
“Future Israeli policymakers will have to make really big decisions,” he said.
“These open spaces, the agricultural land, the forests, the nature reserves, are very important for water management. And as the Palestinian standard of living improves, so will the demand for water. And you can’t tell them to not develop.”