August 4, 2025 • 25 mins
Explores Israel's remarkable journey in water management, transforming from a water-scarce nation to a global leader in water solutions. The text highlights historical milestones like the 1964 opening of the National Water Carrier and the development of pioneering technologies such as drip irrigation and advanced desalination. It further details Israel's innovative approaches to wastewater treatment and reuse, alongside its strategic national water governance that prioritizes efficient use and research. Finally, the sources demonstrate Israel's international impact through collaborations and the export of its water expertise to countries facing similar challenges.
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You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Let-There-Be-Water-Water-Starved/dp/1250115566?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=c454f0aac5c2ee4e611ac3933c73acc1&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Have you ever stopped to consider what happens when a
nation literally born in a desert with a growing population
and well less and less rain, starts running out of water.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It's a critical question, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Absolutely Today we're doing a deep dive into this really
extraordinary story, Israel's journey. How they went from being incredibly
water scarce to believe it or not, a global water powerhouse.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, achieving actual water independence from the weather. It's quite something,
truly compelling narrative it is. It shows how a country
starting in such a tough spot landscape wise, use innovation,
smart planning, and maybe most importantly, a kind of national
mindset to well not just survive, but thrive. Yeah, and
even export water.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So for this deep dive, you've given us some fascinating sources,
mainly excerpts from Seth M. Siegal's book let There Be Water.
Our mission today to distill this incredible story for you,
our listener, show how Israel did it step by step
and what lessons we can all take away.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Sounds like a plan.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Okay, let's start with the bigger picture. The sources kick
off with a pretty stark warning from the US National
Intelligence Council Basically, the world's heading into a long term
water crisis. And it's not just a problem over there.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Right, That's key. It's not just developing nations. You look
at major economies China, India, even parts of the US,
they're already feeling the pinch.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Like where in the US.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well, think about the San Joaquin Valley in California, huge
agricultural area, high end stuff right running out of water
that hits global food prices. Or the High Plains aquifer
critical for farming across eight states in the Great Plains.
It's been massively overdrawn since the fifties. And get this,
a third of all the water taken out in the
twentieth century happened just in the early two thousands.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Wow. So climate change is obviously part of it's faster evaporation, droughts,
hard soil. But what else is driving this? According to
the sources.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Two big things stand out. First, the global middle class
is growing billions of people, and their lifestyle uses a
lot more water. I think protein diets. Raising beef uses
vastly more water than growing corn, like seventeen times more
per pound, plus more energy use cars, ac electronics, making
(02:11):
oil takes fresh water fracking takes millions of gallons per site.
That all adds up.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Okay, that makes sense. And the second factor, this.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
One's blunt bad governance. The report says water problems are
basically a proxy for bad governance. Too many countries just
ignore the morning signs, mismanage things, and make the problem worse.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So how does Israel's story connect here? They started from
scarcity too, Exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
They had this almost innate awareness of water scarcity. It's
deep in Jewish tradition. The Hebrew Bible mentions water hundreds
of times rain, nearly one hundred specific words for the
first rain the last rain.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Huh. Interesting detail, right, So.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
That cultural awareness, mixed with early Zionist ideals put water
front and center for the nation way before it was
even officially independent.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
And then came an unexpected push, didn't it, the British
White Paper in nineteen Yes, that.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Paper aimed to limit Jewish immigration. So leaders like David
Bengurion had this urgent need to prove the land could
support millions more people than the British thought, and that
meant challenging the British calculations about.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Water, which forced them to think differently.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Absolutely spurred innovation. Back in nineteen thirty five, Levi Eshkohl,
later Prime Minister, tamed up with an engineer, Simpsha Blasts.
They planned a water company Mecarrot founded two years later.
Mecar Okay and Blast drafted this well. It was called
a fantasy water plan initially, but it evolved into the
National Master Plant. The idea move water from the wet
(03:38):
or north to the center and the dry Negiv desert in.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
The south sounds ambitious totally.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
It included ideas like trapping storm water, treating sewage for reuse,
drilling sophisticated wells. He even dreamt of a med dead
canal for hydropower, though that part never happened.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So the Negev Desert, Why was that so important to
Ben Gurin?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
It sounds like a wasteland, strategically vital, a port on
the Red Sea, a buffer against Egypt and land for
growth and farming. If they could solve the water problem,
he needed to establish control there before the UN drew
the borders.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
So facts on the ground, as they.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Say, precisely. October nineteen forty six, boom eleven Jewish settlements
pop up overnight in the northern Negev. Incredible feat but uh.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Oh no water right the missing piece.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
So Blast's phase one was crucial drill wells in the
Negev and at near Am, one of those new farms,
they hit.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Water success and then came the pipes right the story
about the London Blitz pipes.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, get this. Blasts quietly bought surplus pipes used for
firefighting during the Blitz, cost of fortune. They called it
the Champagne pipeline, but it linked near Am to the
other desert farms, a vital first step and this plus
Blast basically selling his vision for future phases bringing riverwater south.
The Robin Hood Plan convinced the UN investigators in forty
(04:52):
seven to give his desert land to the new Jewish state.
It was over half its territory.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Incredible, but moving water between regions, especially for from the
Jordan River that caused issues, didn't it? The Johnston Plan, Oh.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Huge challenge. Eric Johnson's nineteen fifty three plan initially gave
Israel way less Jordan River water and insisted to stay
in the Jordan basin. That would have killed the national
water carrier idea. So what happened Blast basically became Johnston's
personal tutoring guide showed him Israel's farming innovations, explained why
letting fresh water flow unused to the sea was wasteful,
(05:26):
and Johnson actually changed his mind, agreed to a bigger
share for Israel and allowed moving water between basins. That
was the green light they needed.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Wow, Blast seems like a key figure, absolutely pivotal. So
with that sordid phase two, the Yarkon Negev Pipeline opened
in fifty five.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
YEP July nineteen fifty five, funded largely by American Jews,
watered fifty thousand acres of desert. And then the big
one June nineteen sixty four, the National Water Carrier opened
Israel's real national water grid.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
This massive project, what was the.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Impact transformative, huge pipes bisecting the country, Thousands employed. It
finally let Ben Gurion make the desert bloom settlements pushed
miles further south. Beersheba became a proper regional capital, and
it underpinned Israel's food sell sufficiency. Fruits, veggies, dairy, poultry,
plus billions in agricultural exports, all built on that water grid.
(06:19):
And as Shimon Tao, a former water commissioner said, you
can tell a lot about a country by the way
it manages its water. After building the carrier, the focus
shifted to management.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Right the day to day.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
The nineteen to fifty nine Water Law was the cornerstone.
It basically said all water belongs to the state, managed
centrally by the Israel Water Commission, later the Water Authority.
Private property rights took a backseat to national needs.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Centralized control that must have needed specific rules. How did
they enforce that on the ground you mentioned even rain
water in a bucket.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yes, technically between fifty five and fifty seven, three key
laws locked it down. One no drilling for water without
a license, even on your own land. Period. Two all
water districts had to be metered, every single home, every
business got its own meter. This created incredible data, putting
(07:07):
Israel way ahead in.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It really smart. And number three.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Government ownership of all surface water, rivers, streams, plus rain
water and crucially sewage. It all became a.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
National resource, but managing it wasn't It initially spread across
loads of different ministries sounded chaotic.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Oh, it was a knot, as someone called it. Finance, agriculture, interior, environment, health, justice, defense,
foreign affairs, everyone had a finger in the pie. Like
trying to manage a tree by giving each ministry a
different part leaves bark roots not efficient, not at all.
So by the early two thousands there was big pressure
to consolidate power untie that knot, which.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Leads to pricing. The sources call it the most effective incentive.
How did that work well?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Even with the culture of conservation. Making people pay the
real cost was a game changer. In two thousand and eight,
the new Water Authority made a bold move.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
What was it?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
They announced everyone households farms, everyone would pay the actual
cost of the water. They used household price. It jumped
forty percent ouch.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
How did people react?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
They howled, as the source puts it, big protests, But
Professor Eurie Shane, the first head of the Authority, stood firm.
His line was everyone would be on the same rules,
everyone pays and did it work massively? Overall water use
dropped nearly twenty percent just from that one policy change. Incredible.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
What else did the authority do around that time?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Simultaneously they took water and sewage management away from the municipalities.
They created new independent, apolitical municipal water utility corporations.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Why was that necessary.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
To stop mayers using water fees for other things or
putting off vital pipe repairs, These new corporations had to
spend all the money clicked on water and sewage projects
or phase fines.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So it forced investment efficiency exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It incentivized fixing leaks, improving service. Thinking about innovation. Cities
basically became these labs for water.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Tech like Ron And now you mentioned that right.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Near barlev head of their water Core credits engage citizens
and tech. Lawn watering is way down. People are using
waterwise gardening. Overall use dropped almost thirty percent there.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
And they use smart meters, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Distant meter reading AMR. Barlow calls it a cell phone
married to your home's water meter. It reports usage every
few hours. They use algorithms like credit card companies use
for fraud to spot leaks or unusual use, often before
the homeowner even knows. Rana's leak rate is down to
six percent. The national average already low is eleven percent.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's impressive. Okay, let's shift to agriculture. This seems like
another area of major innovation, starting with drip irrigation.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It all goes back to Simschablast again. That engineer, way
back in nineteen thirty three, he noticed a tree thriving
next to a leaky pipe fitting water dripping slowly right
at the roots.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Just a simple observation, but it sparked.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The idea deliver water precisely where it's needed. Cut of
aperation and waste drip irrigation.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
But making it work practically getting the same amount of
water to every plant on slopes over distances. That sounds tricky,
huge challenge.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
The real breakthrough needed modern materials, specifically plastic after WWII
that allowed for precisely molded emitters. After years of experimentation
and struggle, blasts found two things which were one, drip
saved fifty sixty percent of water compared to flooding or sprinklers,
massive saving. And two, kind of unexpectedly, it increased crop yields.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Better yields and less water. That sounds revolutionary. How is
it received? Initially?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
You'd think everyone would jump on it, right, but no.
Academics at Hebrew University apparently scorned the idea, dismissed it.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Really why?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Hard to say for sure. Maybe resistance to new ideas,
maybe professional jealousy. But Luckily, kibbetz Hatsream, one of those
original Negev settlements, needed a non farming business because of
their own water shortages.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Ah a practical need.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Exactly A member there, Uryerber persuaded Blasts to sell the rights.
In nineteen sixty six, Metafin was born. The name means
to drip in Hebrew, and Netefim took off almost overnight.
Success in Israel than exports grew fast. An inventor named
Rafimhudar joined and made huge improvements, keeping flow even on
hillsides better fittings. Today, drip is seen as better and
(11:15):
more consistent than rain itself, better than rain, and it
enables nutrigation, adding nutrients directly into the water, so you
can grow crops anywhere, even pure sand. The soil just
needs to hold a plant up.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Are they still innovating in irrigation?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Oh yeah. Professor Yuri Shani, the water authority guy, developed
an irrigation on demand system. A cheap sensor near the
roofs tells the system exactly when the plant needs water
or nutrients, prevents overwatering very precise.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
What about the plants themselves?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Seeds another key area. Back in nineteen thirty nine, a
ban on Arab seed sales forced Jewish farms to create
their own cooperative azerra. Their goal consistent quality seeds, but
also crucially strains that thrived with less water.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So breeding for water efficiency from the start.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Right now, Israel is a leader in plant research companies
like Hazara Evogene. They're breeding plants for maximum water efficiency.
And also this is fascinating for brackish.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Water, salty water. Why would you breed plants for that?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Because the negap dessert has tons of underground brackish water
from old aquifers, unusable for drinking. So plant geneticist did
this counterintuitive thing, created melons, tomatoes, peppers that thrive on
diluted brackish water.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And what's the result, salty vegetables.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Surprisingly no, The plants change structure slightly increase natural sugars,
so the fruits and veggies taste sweeter, have better texture.
A breeder named mosh Bar said, everything tastes better and
the marketplace is noticed.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
So the desert is now the best place to grow
certain crops.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Ironically, yes, thanks to those seeds and drip irrigation.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Okay, let's talk about waste water. Sewage historically a source
of disease, right until people like doctor John Snow figured
out the link in London exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Separating drinking water from sewage was a huge health leap.
For a long time, treatment was basic, remove solids, maybe
some organic matter, then dump it.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But environmental concerns grew.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Right the seventies brought tertiary treatment disinfecting before discharge. But
Israel saw sewage differently, not just a nuisance but a resource.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
How did they make that shift?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
The shaft in wastewater plant opened in sixty nine was key.
Their radical idea was sand aquifer treatment or SAT, developed
earlier in late fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Sand aquifer treatment, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
They take secondary treated sewage, run it through sand dunes
over an aquifer. The sand acts as a natural filter,
polishing it to tertiary quality, and then they store this
clean water in the aquifer ready for irrigation.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That sounds incredibly risky using an aquifer, potentially a freshwater one,
to store treated sewage in a water scarce country.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It was a bold, educated risk. They had to get
multiple cities on board trust the sand filtration and yeah,
dedicate an aquifer. There were concerns, of course, from health
and environment ministries about contaminants.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
So how do they manage that?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Strict guidelines, special permits for farmers using the water constant monitoring,
and it worked. Today Israel treats about ninety five percent
of its sewage.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Ninety five percent. That's amazing. And how much gets reused?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
About eighty five percent of that treated water goes back
to farmers. It makes up a third of all agricultural
water use, maybe twenty percent of all water use in
the country.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
How does that compare globally?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Way ahead Spain's second, maybe twenty five percent reuse. Most
rich countries like the US reuse less than ten percent.
This sewage revolution basically allowed Israel to guarantee food and
self sufficiency and exports rain or shine.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And they're getting more than just water out of it. Right.
Energy materials, Yes, the.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Treatment process produces biogas methane. They capture that to help
power the plants. Shaft Dan gets over sixty percent of
its energy this way, aiming for energy neutral and teial
As a company applied clean tech harvesting tiny bits of cellulose,
toilet paper fibers, lint, veggie scraps from raw sewage. They
call it resilos turn sewage into raw materials.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Incredible resourcefulness, but what about tricky contaminants, salt, pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Big challenges. Israel's natural water is already a bit salty,
and sewage concentrates it and things like hormones, antibiotics, and
waste water. It's a young field of research, so what
are they doing? Hundred chemists like Professor dr Avisar are
studying what happens to these compounds. The Israel mandates tertiary
treatment everywhere and is researching even higher levels of fourth
stage Maybe nanofiltration membranes companies like Memtech are working on that.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Okay, let's pivot to desalination. Making fresh water from the
sea seems like the ultimate solution. But expensive, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Historically? Yes, energy cost was the killer. Ancient Romans tried
WWII scientists found it too costly. But Ben Gurion was.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Interested early on, and so is Lyndon Johnson Apparently.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah. LBJ was really passionate about it. Came from a
tough Texas background. Even wrote a long article for The
New York Times in nineteen sixty while running for VP,
pushing desalination for world peace and poverty reduction. Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
So Israel tried.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Early on Bigurian funded a freezing technique by Alexander z
Archin in the fifties. Didn't work out economically. It cost
way more than hoped, but they learned a lot. An
early desalination engineer, Nathan Berkman said, basically nobody thought it
would work affordably, but we tried.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Then Johnson became president and pushed it with Israel.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Met with Prime Minister Eshkol in sixty four, promised US
help for joint desalination efforts, despite potential era of backlash,
famously told reporters they remake the world without deserts.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Did the US funding come through quickly?
Speaker 2 (16:34):
It was slow, but Berkman's team at Israel Desalination Engineering
IDE kept working developed more efficient methods like mechanical vapor
compression MVC and multi effect distillation MED.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
But the real game changer technology was reverse osmosis ro.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Absolutely, invented by Sidney low but UCLA in the early
sixties for brackish water, tiny nanosized cores and a membrane
let water through block salt. The father of RORO called
that by some ironically, he only got fourteen thousand dollars
in royalties for an invention that created a multi billion
dollar industry, and then he moved to Israel in sixty six,
(17:12):
became a professor, kept improving his invention.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
So RO existed, but Israel wasn't using a large scale yet.
What pushed them.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
A really bad drout in the late nineteen nineties, plus
years of advocacy from professors like Rafi Semyat and David Hassen,
they started the Israel Desalination Society in ninety five.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And the government decided to go for it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
The Finance Minister, Abraham Shochat considered importing water from Turkey first,
but decided against it, probably wise geopolitically. Instead, he opted
for private companies to build and run the desalination plants
under tight contracts, and the result phenomenal. A decade earlier
they had almost no desalination. Today, nearly five hundred million
gallons of fresh water daily from salt sources, mostly from
(17:54):
five big plants on the Med coast Ashkalon Paulmikim Hadera, Zurich,
World's largest one hundred and sixty five million gallons a day,
an incredibly cheap fraction of a penny per gallon Because
they use smart algorithms to buy electricity when it's cheapest.
This desalinated water now covers like ninety four percent of household.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Needs independence from weather.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Exactly as one official, Elin Cohen said, it lets Israel
control our destiny. And all this new water from reuse
from desalination hasn't just met demand, it's helped the environment too.
How so, well, take the Arkon River. There was a
tragic bridge collapse there in ninety seven during the Maccabia Games.
People died. It drew attention to how polluta the river was.
(18:36):
An environmentalist called it a trap of stench, dirt and death.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Awful. So what changed?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That tragedy spurred clean up efforts, but also having alternative
water sources meant less pressure on the rivers, less water
taken out, less sewage going in, more natural flow to
help cleanse them.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
To the Arkon recovered.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
It's a huge success story now fisher back birds, people
kayaking running along the banks completely transformed.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
What about up the bare similar story.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
It used to flow only about a month a year,
basically carrying waste. Now there's this ambitious plan by the
Jewish National Fund, a huge park, bigger than Central Park
with a massive lake near Beersheba. They're building luxury apartments
overlooking the park now changing the city's image.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But the sources mention a state controller report saying no
river is fully rehabilitated.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yet true, it's ongoing work. But the key thing is
the attitude change rivers are seeing in as community assets
now places for recreation and the Sea of Galilee.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
The National Water Level Indicator.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Right, its level used to be on the news every night.
Now it's stabilized. They limit withdrawals to keep it healthy
regardless of drought. It's basically a flexible reservoir and a
larger resilient system. And they monitor water quality constantly, microbes, pesticides, algae.
So tapwater is safe comparable to bottled water. And this
expertise isn't just kept in house. Israel uses it for
(19:56):
hydro diplomacy.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
How does that work?
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Mashaf, part of the foreign industry, has trained over a
quarter million people from one hundred and thirty countries since
the fifties on water efficiency using brackish water, irrigation.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Reuse and tall The state engineering companies.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Started planning Israeli projects, then went global by the sixties,
designing water and sewage systems across Africa, Asia, South America.
They spent decades in Nepal, for instance, developing groundwater for
poor farmers. One exec called it an honor to help.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
How has this played out with countries that have had
difficult relationships with Israel?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
China, for instance, fascinating case diplomatic freeze for years. Then
in nineteen ninety China proposed in exchange an Israeli water
expert for a Chinese tourism expert. That led to the
first official contact and irrigation conference in Beijing within a year,
full diplomatic relations. Now Israel helps China with its own
serious water.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Issues and Iran.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Historically, before the nineteen seventy nine revolution, Israeli experts managed
most of Iran's major water projects, rehabilitating systems after earthquakes,
building new ones in big cities. It was an important
alliance back then. An Israeli expert who went dozens of
times said he never faced hostility from ordinary Iranians.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Only the clerics and closer to home, Palestine and Jordan.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Water is a core part of the Peace Treaty with
Jordan ninety four and the Oslo of the Second Agreement
with the Palestinians ninety five. There's the huge Red Sea
Dead Sea conveyance project.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Tell me about that one.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
It's complex, but clever. Jordan builds a desalination plant near
the Red Sea. They give some desalinated water to Israel
for the desert. Israel, in return gives Jordan fresh water
from the Sea of Galilee, which is much closer to
him on saving Jordan pumping costs. The leftover Brian from
desalination goes to the shrinking Dead.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Sea, creating interdependence exactly as.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Urishani said, Everyone needs everyone else and pulling out hurts yourself.
Palestinians also get desalinated water from Israel's medplants, even amid tensions.
Some Palestinian water professionals see cooperation is necessary and NGO's
like Innovation Africa use Israeli tech solar pumps, drip irrigation
managed remotely from Tel Aviv in African villages.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
And this expertise is reaching developed nations too.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
California absolutely, California signed a water cooperation agreement with Israel
in twenty fourteen. During their megadrough, Governor Jerry Brown acknowledged
Israel's efficiency pm net Yahoo explained how they achieved water independence, recycling,
drip leak prevention, desalination. Now California cities and universities are
using Israeli solutions like la getting help cleaning a polluted aquifer.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
So bringing this all together for our listener, Israel's journey
from scarcity to abundance basically achieved in about ten years
after two thousand, but built on seventy years of work.
What's the core philosophy?
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's what they call on all of the above approach.
There's no single magic bullet for water problems. You have
to integrate all the sources natural water, desalinated reuse, sewage,
brackish water, and all the conservation technology creates redundancy of resilience.
As Trime and Talent said, if one part fit ail's
a diesel plant, an awkwardfer due to drought, the system
(23:03):
keeps working, nobody's water gets shut off.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
So what are the key principles that takeaways for any
country facing water issues?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Okay? First, centralized national control. Water is a national resource
managed for the common good, not by fragmented local interests.
Prevents waste.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Makes sense.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Second, real cost pricing. Remember, cheap water is expensive pricing
it properly is the best conservation tool. People use what
they need, not more, and it drives innovation and water
saving tech. Third, dedicated water fees. Those independent municipal utilities
ensure all the money collected goes back into the water system, infrastructure, maintenance, innovation,
reliable funding. Fourth embracing innovation. Government has policy but encourages
(23:43):
private innovation, often with incentives. Utilities went from cautious to
innovative hubs.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And fifth, the one I found really striking action over perfection.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yes, Abram Tanna from the water authority, put up perfectly.
Don't wait until all the answers are in. Go into
each project knowing it won't be perfect.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
What does that allow?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It avoids getting stuck in endless analysis. You start, you learn,
you adapt, because, as he said, not taking action is
also a kind of taking action, often with negative consequences. Sixth,
data driven security, constant monitoring like at the ESH coal
filtration plant, checking for contaminants, ready to switch sources immediately
if needed.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And the last principle maybe the foundation.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
For it all a national mission mindset. Beyond the tech
and policy, it's the shared understanding the culture of conservation.
Treating water as precious, those old posters saying make every
drop count. That mindset is maybe the most powerful solution.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It really is an amazing story of resourcefulness, of innovation
under pressure, a conquest in water, as one official called it,
like winning a second War of independence.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And the lesson isn't just the specific technologies those are
mostly available globally, it's the integrated approach, the mindset, the
long term commitment. Israel shows that even affluent societies eye
regions can secure their water future with time, investment, and
change attitudes.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So, as you've listened to this deep dive, what parts
of Israel's all of the above approach resonate with you?
What could apply to water challenges where you live? Something
to think about.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It really does suggest that viewing water as finite, as precious,
and fostering that culture of constant innovation, that's the path
to a comfortable water future, even in the driest places.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Join us next time for another deep dive, exploring more
insights from the sources you share
Have you ever stopped to consider what happens when a
nation literally born in a desert with a growing population
and well less and less rain, starts running out of water.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It's a critical question, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Absolutely Today we're doing a deep dive into this really
extraordinary story, Israel's journey. How they went from being incredibly
water scarce to believe it or not, a global water powerhouse.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, achieving actual water independence from the weather. It's quite something,
truly compelling narrative it is. It shows how a country
starting in such a tough spot landscape wise, use innovation,
smart planning, and maybe most importantly, a kind of national
mindset to well not just survive, but thrive. Yeah, and
even export water.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
So for this deep dive, you've given us some fascinating sources,
mainly excerpts from Seth M. Siegal's book let There Be Water.
Our mission today to distill this incredible story for you,
our listener, show how Israel did it step by step
and what lessons we can all take away.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Sounds like a plan.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Okay, let's start with the bigger picture. The sources kick
off with a pretty stark warning from the US National
Intelligence Council Basically, the world's heading into a long term
water crisis. And it's not just a problem over there.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Right, That's key. It's not just developing nations. You look
at major economies China, India, even parts of the US,
they're already feeling the pinch.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Like where in the US.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well, think about the San Joaquin Valley in California, huge
agricultural area, high end stuff right running out of water
that hits global food prices. Or the High Plains aquifer
critical for farming across eight states in the Great Plains.
It's been massively overdrawn since the fifties. And get this,
a third of all the water taken out in the
twentieth century happened just in the early two thousands.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Wow. So climate change is obviously part of it's faster evaporation, droughts,
hard soil. But what else is driving this? According to
the sources.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Two big things stand out. First, the global middle class
is growing billions of people, and their lifestyle uses a
lot more water. I think protein diets. Raising beef uses
vastly more water than growing corn, like seventeen times more
per pound, plus more energy use cars, ac electronics, making
(02:11):
oil takes fresh water fracking takes millions of gallons per site.
That all adds up.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Okay, that makes sense. And the second factor, this.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
One's blunt bad governance. The report says water problems are
basically a proxy for bad governance. Too many countries just
ignore the morning signs, mismanage things, and make the problem worse.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So how does Israel's story connect here? They started from
scarcity too, Exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
They had this almost innate awareness of water scarcity. It's
deep in Jewish tradition. The Hebrew Bible mentions water hundreds
of times rain, nearly one hundred specific words for the
first rain the last rain.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Huh. Interesting detail, right, So.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
That cultural awareness, mixed with early Zionist ideals put water
front and center for the nation way before it was
even officially independent.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
And then came an unexpected push, didn't it, the British
White Paper in nineteen Yes, that.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Paper aimed to limit Jewish immigration. So leaders like David
Bengurion had this urgent need to prove the land could
support millions more people than the British thought, and that
meant challenging the British calculations about.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Water, which forced them to think differently.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Absolutely spurred innovation. Back in nineteen thirty five, Levi Eshkohl,
later Prime Minister, tamed up with an engineer, Simpsha Blasts.
They planned a water company Mecarrot founded two years later.
Mecar Okay and Blast drafted this well. It was called
a fantasy water plan initially, but it evolved into the
National Master Plant. The idea move water from the wet
(03:38):
or north to the center and the dry Negiv desert in.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
The south sounds ambitious totally.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
It included ideas like trapping storm water, treating sewage for reuse,
drilling sophisticated wells. He even dreamt of a med dead
canal for hydropower, though that part never happened.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So the Negev Desert, Why was that so important to
Ben Gurin?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
It sounds like a wasteland, strategically vital, a port on
the Red Sea, a buffer against Egypt and land for
growth and farming. If they could solve the water problem,
he needed to establish control there before the UN drew
the borders.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
So facts on the ground, as they.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Say, precisely. October nineteen forty six, boom eleven Jewish settlements
pop up overnight in the northern Negev. Incredible feat but uh.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Oh no water right the missing piece.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
So Blast's phase one was crucial drill wells in the
Negev and at near Am, one of those new farms,
they hit.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Water success and then came the pipes right the story
about the London Blitz pipes.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, get this. Blasts quietly bought surplus pipes used for
firefighting during the Blitz, cost of fortune. They called it
the Champagne pipeline, but it linked near Am to the
other desert farms, a vital first step and this plus
Blast basically selling his vision for future phases bringing riverwater south.
The Robin Hood Plan convinced the UN investigators in forty
(04:52):
seven to give his desert land to the new Jewish state.
It was over half its territory.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Incredible, but moving water between regions, especially for from the
Jordan River that caused issues, didn't it? The Johnston Plan, Oh.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Huge challenge. Eric Johnson's nineteen fifty three plan initially gave
Israel way less Jordan River water and insisted to stay
in the Jordan basin. That would have killed the national
water carrier idea. So what happened Blast basically became Johnston's
personal tutoring guide showed him Israel's farming innovations, explained why
letting fresh water flow unused to the sea was wasteful,
(05:26):
and Johnson actually changed his mind, agreed to a bigger
share for Israel and allowed moving water between basins. That
was the green light they needed.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Wow, Blast seems like a key figure, absolutely pivotal. So
with that sordid phase two, the Yarkon Negev Pipeline opened
in fifty five.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
YEP July nineteen fifty five, funded largely by American Jews,
watered fifty thousand acres of desert. And then the big
one June nineteen sixty four, the National Water Carrier opened
Israel's real national water grid.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
This massive project, what was the.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Impact transformative, huge pipes bisecting the country, Thousands employed. It
finally let Ben Gurion make the desert bloom settlements pushed
miles further south. Beersheba became a proper regional capital, and
it underpinned Israel's food sell sufficiency. Fruits, veggies, dairy, poultry,
plus billions in agricultural exports, all built on that water grid.
(06:19):
And as Shimon Tao, a former water commissioner said, you
can tell a lot about a country by the way
it manages its water. After building the carrier, the focus
shifted to management.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Right the day to day.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
The nineteen to fifty nine Water Law was the cornerstone.
It basically said all water belongs to the state, managed
centrally by the Israel Water Commission, later the Water Authority.
Private property rights took a backseat to national needs.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Centralized control that must have needed specific rules. How did
they enforce that on the ground you mentioned even rain
water in a bucket.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yes, technically between fifty five and fifty seven, three key
laws locked it down. One no drilling for water without
a license, even on your own land. Period. Two all
water districts had to be metered, every single home, every
business got its own meter. This created incredible data, putting
(07:07):
Israel way ahead in.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It really smart. And number three.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Government ownership of all surface water, rivers, streams, plus rain
water and crucially sewage. It all became a.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
National resource, but managing it wasn't It initially spread across
loads of different ministries sounded chaotic.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Oh, it was a knot, as someone called it. Finance, agriculture, interior, environment, health, justice, defense,
foreign affairs, everyone had a finger in the pie. Like
trying to manage a tree by giving each ministry a
different part leaves bark roots not efficient, not at all.
So by the early two thousands there was big pressure
to consolidate power untie that knot, which.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Leads to pricing. The sources call it the most effective incentive.
How did that work well?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Even with the culture of conservation. Making people pay the
real cost was a game changer. In two thousand and eight,
the new Water Authority made a bold move.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
What was it?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
They announced everyone households farms, everyone would pay the actual
cost of the water. They used household price. It jumped
forty percent ouch.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
How did people react?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
They howled, as the source puts it, big protests, But
Professor Eurie Shane, the first head of the Authority, stood firm.
His line was everyone would be on the same rules,
everyone pays and did it work massively? Overall water use
dropped nearly twenty percent just from that one policy change. Incredible.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
What else did the authority do around that time?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Simultaneously they took water and sewage management away from the municipalities.
They created new independent, apolitical municipal water utility corporations.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Why was that necessary.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
To stop mayers using water fees for other things or
putting off vital pipe repairs, These new corporations had to
spend all the money clicked on water and sewage projects
or phase fines.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So it forced investment efficiency exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It incentivized fixing leaks, improving service. Thinking about innovation. Cities
basically became these labs for water.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Tech like Ron And now you mentioned that right.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Near barlev head of their water Core credits engage citizens
and tech. Lawn watering is way down. People are using
waterwise gardening. Overall use dropped almost thirty percent there.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
And they use smart meters, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Distant meter reading AMR. Barlow calls it a cell phone
married to your home's water meter. It reports usage every
few hours. They use algorithms like credit card companies use
for fraud to spot leaks or unusual use, often before
the homeowner even knows. Rana's leak rate is down to
six percent. The national average already low is eleven percent.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's impressive. Okay, let's shift to agriculture. This seems like
another area of major innovation, starting with drip irrigation.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It all goes back to Simschablast again. That engineer, way
back in nineteen thirty three, he noticed a tree thriving
next to a leaky pipe fitting water dripping slowly right
at the roots.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Just a simple observation, but it sparked.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The idea deliver water precisely where it's needed. Cut of
aperation and waste drip irrigation.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
But making it work practically getting the same amount of
water to every plant on slopes over distances. That sounds tricky,
huge challenge.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
The real breakthrough needed modern materials, specifically plastic after WWII
that allowed for precisely molded emitters. After years of experimentation
and struggle, blasts found two things which were one, drip
saved fifty sixty percent of water compared to flooding or sprinklers,
massive saving. And two, kind of unexpectedly, it increased crop yields.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Better yields and less water. That sounds revolutionary. How is
it received? Initially?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
You'd think everyone would jump on it, right, but no.
Academics at Hebrew University apparently scorned the idea, dismissed it.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Really why?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Hard to say for sure. Maybe resistance to new ideas,
maybe professional jealousy. But Luckily, kibbetz Hatsream, one of those
original Negev settlements, needed a non farming business because of
their own water shortages.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Ah a practical need.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Exactly A member there, Uryerber persuaded Blasts to sell the rights.
In nineteen sixty six, Metafin was born. The name means
to drip in Hebrew, and Netefim took off almost overnight.
Success in Israel than exports grew fast. An inventor named
Rafimhudar joined and made huge improvements, keeping flow even on
hillsides better fittings. Today, drip is seen as better and
(11:15):
more consistent than rain itself, better than rain, and it
enables nutrigation, adding nutrients directly into the water, so you
can grow crops anywhere, even pure sand. The soil just
needs to hold a plant up.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Are they still innovating in irrigation?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Oh yeah. Professor Yuri Shani, the water authority guy, developed
an irrigation on demand system. A cheap sensor near the
roofs tells the system exactly when the plant needs water
or nutrients, prevents overwatering very precise.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
What about the plants themselves?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Seeds another key area. Back in nineteen thirty nine, a
ban on Arab seed sales forced Jewish farms to create
their own cooperative azerra. Their goal consistent quality seeds, but
also crucially strains that thrived with less water.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So breeding for water efficiency from the start.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Right now, Israel is a leader in plant research companies
like Hazara Evogene. They're breeding plants for maximum water efficiency.
And also this is fascinating for brackish.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Water, salty water. Why would you breed plants for that?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Because the negap dessert has tons of underground brackish water
from old aquifers, unusable for drinking. So plant geneticist did
this counterintuitive thing, created melons, tomatoes, peppers that thrive on
diluted brackish water.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And what's the result, salty vegetables.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Surprisingly no, The plants change structure slightly increase natural sugars,
so the fruits and veggies taste sweeter, have better texture.
A breeder named mosh Bar said, everything tastes better and
the marketplace is noticed.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
So the desert is now the best place to grow
certain crops.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Ironically, yes, thanks to those seeds and drip irrigation.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Okay, let's talk about waste water. Sewage historically a source
of disease, right until people like doctor John Snow figured
out the link in London exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Separating drinking water from sewage was a huge health leap.
For a long time, treatment was basic, remove solids, maybe
some organic matter, then dump it.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But environmental concerns grew.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Right the seventies brought tertiary treatment disinfecting before discharge. But
Israel saw sewage differently, not just a nuisance but a resource.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
How did they make that shift?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
The shaft in wastewater plant opened in sixty nine was key.
Their radical idea was sand aquifer treatment or SAT, developed
earlier in late fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Sand aquifer treatment, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
They take secondary treated sewage, run it through sand dunes
over an aquifer. The sand acts as a natural filter,
polishing it to tertiary quality, and then they store this
clean water in the aquifer ready for irrigation.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
That sounds incredibly risky using an aquifer, potentially a freshwater one,
to store treated sewage in a water scarce country.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
It was a bold, educated risk. They had to get
multiple cities on board trust the sand filtration and yeah,
dedicate an aquifer. There were concerns, of course, from health
and environment ministries about contaminants.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
So how do they manage that?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Strict guidelines, special permits for farmers using the water constant monitoring,
and it worked. Today Israel treats about ninety five percent
of its sewage.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Ninety five percent. That's amazing. And how much gets reused?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
About eighty five percent of that treated water goes back
to farmers. It makes up a third of all agricultural
water use, maybe twenty percent of all water use in
the country.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
How does that compare globally?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Way ahead Spain's second, maybe twenty five percent reuse. Most
rich countries like the US reuse less than ten percent.
This sewage revolution basically allowed Israel to guarantee food and
self sufficiency and exports rain or shine.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
And they're getting more than just water out of it. Right.
Energy materials, Yes, the.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Treatment process produces biogas methane. They capture that to help
power the plants. Shaft Dan gets over sixty percent of
its energy this way, aiming for energy neutral and teial
As a company applied clean tech harvesting tiny bits of cellulose,
toilet paper fibers, lint, veggie scraps from raw sewage. They
call it resilos turn sewage into raw materials.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Incredible resourcefulness, but what about tricky contaminants, salt, pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Big challenges. Israel's natural water is already a bit salty,
and sewage concentrates it and things like hormones, antibiotics, and
waste water. It's a young field of research, so what
are they doing? Hundred chemists like Professor dr Avisar are
studying what happens to these compounds. The Israel mandates tertiary
treatment everywhere and is researching even higher levels of fourth
stage Maybe nanofiltration membranes companies like Memtech are working on that.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Okay, let's pivot to desalination. Making fresh water from the
sea seems like the ultimate solution. But expensive, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Historically? Yes, energy cost was the killer. Ancient Romans tried
WWII scientists found it too costly. But Ben Gurion was.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Interested early on, and so is Lyndon Johnson Apparently.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah. LBJ was really passionate about it. Came from a
tough Texas background. Even wrote a long article for The
New York Times in nineteen sixty while running for VP,
pushing desalination for world peace and poverty reduction. Wow.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
So Israel tried.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Early on Bigurian funded a freezing technique by Alexander z
Archin in the fifties. Didn't work out economically. It cost
way more than hoped, but they learned a lot. An
early desalination engineer, Nathan Berkman said, basically nobody thought it
would work affordably, but we tried.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Then Johnson became president and pushed it with Israel.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Met with Prime Minister Eshkol in sixty four, promised US
help for joint desalination efforts, despite potential era of backlash,
famously told reporters they remake the world without deserts.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Did the US funding come through quickly?
Speaker 2 (16:34):
It was slow, but Berkman's team at Israel Desalination Engineering
IDE kept working developed more efficient methods like mechanical vapor
compression MVC and multi effect distillation MED.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
But the real game changer technology was reverse osmosis ro.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Absolutely, invented by Sidney low but UCLA in the early
sixties for brackish water, tiny nanosized cores and a membrane
let water through block salt. The father of RORO called
that by some ironically, he only got fourteen thousand dollars
in royalties for an invention that created a multi billion
dollar industry, and then he moved to Israel in sixty six,
(17:12):
became a professor, kept improving his invention.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
So RO existed, but Israel wasn't using a large scale yet.
What pushed them.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
A really bad drout in the late nineteen nineties, plus
years of advocacy from professors like Rafi Semyat and David Hassen,
they started the Israel Desalination Society in ninety five.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And the government decided to go for it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
The Finance Minister, Abraham Shochat considered importing water from Turkey first,
but decided against it, probably wise geopolitically. Instead, he opted
for private companies to build and run the desalination plants
under tight contracts, and the result phenomenal. A decade earlier
they had almost no desalination. Today, nearly five hundred million
gallons of fresh water daily from salt sources, mostly from
(17:54):
five big plants on the Med coast Ashkalon Paulmikim Hadera, Zurich,
World's largest one hundred and sixty five million gallons a day,
an incredibly cheap fraction of a penny per gallon Because
they use smart algorithms to buy electricity when it's cheapest.
This desalinated water now covers like ninety four percent of household.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Needs independence from weather.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Exactly as one official, Elin Cohen said, it lets Israel
control our destiny. And all this new water from reuse
from desalination hasn't just met demand, it's helped the environment too.
How so, well, take the Arkon River. There was a
tragic bridge collapse there in ninety seven during the Maccabia Games.
People died. It drew attention to how polluta the river was.
(18:36):
An environmentalist called it a trap of stench, dirt and death.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Awful. So what changed?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That tragedy spurred clean up efforts, but also having alternative
water sources meant less pressure on the rivers, less water
taken out, less sewage going in, more natural flow to
help cleanse them.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
To the Arkon recovered.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
It's a huge success story now fisher back birds, people
kayaking running along the banks completely transformed.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
What about up the bare similar story.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
It used to flow only about a month a year,
basically carrying waste. Now there's this ambitious plan by the
Jewish National Fund, a huge park, bigger than Central Park
with a massive lake near Beersheba. They're building luxury apartments
overlooking the park now changing the city's image.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
But the sources mention a state controller report saying no
river is fully rehabilitated.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yet true, it's ongoing work. But the key thing is
the attitude change rivers are seeing in as community assets
now places for recreation and the Sea of Galilee.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
The National Water Level Indicator.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Right, its level used to be on the news every night.
Now it's stabilized. They limit withdrawals to keep it healthy
regardless of drought. It's basically a flexible reservoir and a
larger resilient system. And they monitor water quality constantly, microbes, pesticides, algae.
So tapwater is safe comparable to bottled water. And this
expertise isn't just kept in house. Israel uses it for
(19:56):
hydro diplomacy.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
How does that work?
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Mashaf, part of the foreign industry, has trained over a
quarter million people from one hundred and thirty countries since
the fifties on water efficiency using brackish water, irrigation.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
Reuse and tall The state engineering companies.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Started planning Israeli projects, then went global by the sixties,
designing water and sewage systems across Africa, Asia, South America.
They spent decades in Nepal, for instance, developing groundwater for
poor farmers. One exec called it an honor to help.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
How has this played out with countries that have had
difficult relationships with Israel?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
China, for instance, fascinating case diplomatic freeze for years. Then
in nineteen ninety China proposed in exchange an Israeli water
expert for a Chinese tourism expert. That led to the
first official contact and irrigation conference in Beijing within a year,
full diplomatic relations. Now Israel helps China with its own
serious water.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Issues and Iran.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Historically, before the nineteen seventy nine revolution, Israeli experts managed
most of Iran's major water projects, rehabilitating systems after earthquakes,
building new ones in big cities. It was an important
alliance back then. An Israeli expert who went dozens of
times said he never faced hostility from ordinary Iranians.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Only the clerics and closer to home, Palestine and Jordan.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Water is a core part of the Peace Treaty with
Jordan ninety four and the Oslo of the Second Agreement
with the Palestinians ninety five. There's the huge Red Sea
Dead Sea conveyance project.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Tell me about that one.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
It's complex, but clever. Jordan builds a desalination plant near
the Red Sea. They give some desalinated water to Israel
for the desert. Israel, in return gives Jordan fresh water
from the Sea of Galilee, which is much closer to
him on saving Jordan pumping costs. The leftover Brian from
desalination goes to the shrinking Dead.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Sea, creating interdependence exactly as.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Urishani said, Everyone needs everyone else and pulling out hurts yourself.
Palestinians also get desalinated water from Israel's medplants, even amid tensions.
Some Palestinian water professionals see cooperation is necessary and NGO's
like Innovation Africa use Israeli tech solar pumps, drip irrigation
managed remotely from Tel Aviv in African villages.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
And this expertise is reaching developed nations too.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
California absolutely, California signed a water cooperation agreement with Israel
in twenty fourteen. During their megadrough, Governor Jerry Brown acknowledged
Israel's efficiency pm net Yahoo explained how they achieved water independence, recycling,
drip leak prevention, desalination. Now California cities and universities are
using Israeli solutions like la getting help cleaning a polluted aquifer.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
So bringing this all together for our listener, Israel's journey
from scarcity to abundance basically achieved in about ten years
after two thousand, but built on seventy years of work.
What's the core philosophy?
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's what they call on all of the above approach.
There's no single magic bullet for water problems. You have
to integrate all the sources natural water, desalinated reuse, sewage,
brackish water, and all the conservation technology creates redundancy of resilience.
As Trime and Talent said, if one part fit ail's
a diesel plant, an awkwardfer due to drought, the system
(23:03):
keeps working, nobody's water gets shut off.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
So what are the key principles that takeaways for any
country facing water issues?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Okay? First, centralized national control. Water is a national resource
managed for the common good, not by fragmented local interests.
Prevents waste.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Makes sense.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Second, real cost pricing. Remember, cheap water is expensive pricing
it properly is the best conservation tool. People use what
they need, not more, and it drives innovation and water
saving tech. Third, dedicated water fees. Those independent municipal utilities
ensure all the money collected goes back into the water system, infrastructure, maintenance, innovation,
reliable funding. Fourth embracing innovation. Government has policy but encourages
(23:43):
private innovation, often with incentives. Utilities went from cautious to
innovative hubs.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
And fifth, the one I found really striking action over perfection.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yes, Abram Tanna from the water authority, put up perfectly.
Don't wait until all the answers are in. Go into
each project knowing it won't be perfect.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
What does that allow?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It avoids getting stuck in endless analysis. You start, you learn,
you adapt, because, as he said, not taking action is
also a kind of taking action, often with negative consequences. Sixth,
data driven security, constant monitoring like at the ESH coal
filtration plant, checking for contaminants, ready to switch sources immediately
if needed.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And the last principle maybe the foundation.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
For it all a national mission mindset. Beyond the tech
and policy, it's the shared understanding the culture of conservation.
Treating water as precious, those old posters saying make every
drop count. That mindset is maybe the most powerful solution.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
It really is an amazing story of resourcefulness, of innovation
under pressure, a conquest in water, as one official called it,
like winning a second War of independence.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And the lesson isn't just the specific technologies those are
mostly available globally, it's the integrated approach, the mindset, the
long term commitment. Israel shows that even affluent societies eye
regions can secure their water future with time, investment, and
change attitudes.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So, as you've listened to this deep dive, what parts
of Israel's all of the above approach resonate with you?
What could apply to water challenges where you live? Something
to think about.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It really does suggest that viewing water as finite, as precious,
and fostering that culture of constant innovation, that's the path
to a comfortable water future, even in the driest places.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Join us next time for another deep dive, exploring more
insights from the sources you share
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