Socialist Agriculture Must Survive - Even if There is No Water to Drink

National Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman authorized Water Commissioner Shimon Tal to further lower the red-red-line in the Sea of Galilee to 215.5 meters below sea level.  The existing red-red-line of 214 meters below sea level was to be breached by August 5, 2001.  Failure to lower the red-red line, which was recently reduced from the previously regarded unbreachable red line, would have meant that pumping from the Sea, the source of a third of Israel’s fresh water, would have to be halted.

What prompts Lieberman and Tal to play such a dangerous game with an important source of Israel’s fresh water?  The answer is that the situation is even worse in the northern section of the Mountain Aquifer, the source of another third of Israel’s fresh water.  Tal insists that the water level in the Mountain Aquifer could not be allowed to fall below its present mark of eight meters above sea level.  Further pumping could cause irreversible ecological damage to the aquifer.

Tal is between a rock and a hard place.  Both the Mountain Aquifer and the Sea of Galilee are at risk of contamination from salinity.  It just a matter of which poison is preferred.

Why can’t the government of Israel resolve this growing crisis?  A first place to look is the failed peace process crisis, which overshadows every other crisis in Israel, from water to endless strikes to rising unemployment to budget deficits to failing to get more aid from the U.S.  Israel’s socialist system is extremely enervating; it doesn’t have enough energy or focus to cope with the water crisis.  Proposals to further cut quotas to farmers have been vetoed.  (The farmers generate about 2% of the country’s national income, but about a fifth of all Knesset Members have kibbutz blood flowing through their veins.)  Plans to curtail urban consumption have failed to materialize.  The government of Israel is literally putting the country’s water supply, in the arid Middle East of all places, at grave risk of permanent, irreversible damage.  (Perhaps Yossi Beilin and Yossi Sarid, Israel’s great peace-processors, might pay more attention to this crisis if the water supply to their homes were cut off.)

The same issue of The Jerusalem Post carried another headline: “Lauder: Israelis Not Interested in Saving Water.”  Ronald Lauder, president of the Jewish National Fund, was in Israel with JNF delegates from the United States to study first-hand Israel’s water crisis.  After briefings by Shimon Tal and other hydrologists, Lauder stated that Israelis have made little effort to conserve water.  “People are not interested in it.  They are used to having unlimited amounts of water.  And with all the other crises, water gets to be one crisis too many.”

Tal told JNF delegates that “Israel is in its deepest and most severe water crisis.”  All three major water sources are well below their red lines.  Tal placed Israel’s hopes on the completion of several desalination plans due to come on line in the next three to five years.

Lauder blasted Israel’s planning process in which six different government agencies must approve all decisions involving the construction of desalination plants.  (This is Lauder’s first introduction to Israel’s socialist bureaucracy?)  He pointed out that Israel needs five desalination plants of 200 million cubic meters each, rather than just the planned five plants of 50 million cubic meters each.  The latter, he said, will be outmoded and uneconomic by the time they are completed.  (But Mr. Lauder, isn’t that what Israel’s socialist system excels at—outmoded, obsolete, money-losing projects, just as long as the jobs of statist bureaucrats are protected.)

Lauder probably means well in wanting to help Israel solve its water crisis.  To that end, he is helping the JNF raise $100 million, of which $30 million has already been collected, to build more reservoirs in the Negev to catch runoff water during the rainy season.  He also wants to help with recycling water for agriculture.  He said he was proud of the fact that 9.7% of Israel’s water resources are provided by the JNF.  Lauder is active in the current fund-raising effort—even though he said that he previously gave money in a private effort to encourage Israelis to conserve water, but said it was a failed effort.

In September 2001, IASPS will release a new Policy Studies paper which exposes decades of mismanagement and waste of funds by the JNF.  Mr. Lauder would do well to study this paper very carefully before he aids and abets the misallocation of millions more.

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