To calm troubled waters
Photo: Seamus Murphy
newscientist.com
Arie Issar is steeped in water. His father made and sold ice with Arab friends in Jerusalem. He spent his youth rewriting the rules of hydrology to find water in the Negev desert - to "green the desert" of the new state of Israel - and much of his adult life doing the same for the rest of the world. Now at 76, he tells Fred Pearce how a little more science and a lot less religion could defuse the fight for water between Israelis and Palestinians
How did your family come to Jerusalem?
My grandfather came from Ukraine a hundred years ago. He was an orthodox Jew and wore all the clothes: the hat and long coat and so on. But he died young and my father was brought up in an orphanage in Jerusalem. He adored reading Charles Dickens because he saw his life as very similar to life in the orphanage in Oliver Twist. Later, he ran a syndicate of Jews and Arabs that made ice using compressed ammonia to freeze the water. They sold the ice in the streets of Jerusalem from an insulated van pulled by a mule.
Was that the start of your interest in water?
Maybe so. It also showed me that Jews and Arabs could live and work together, though even at that time, when the British ruled under a League of Nations mandate, there were tensions. I was born in 1928 and the following year there was what today we might call an intifada, because Arabs feared that the Zionists were going to take the Al Aqsa mosque. My family often visited Jewish friends close to an Arab village at weekends. One week I got mumps and we didn't go, and that weekend the family who invited us were killed by their Arab neighbours.
And later you fought against Arabs.
Yes, in our war of independence in 1948, after the British pulled out. I missed much of the war because I had been in refugee camps in Austria helping bring children who survived the holocaust to what was then Palestine. I have always seen myself as a Zionist, like my father. We hoped that there would be peace after the war when we won our homeland. But it hasn't happened. All our Arab friends in Jerusalem left during the 1948 war.
After the fighting you became a geologist. How did that happen?
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, decided we had to make the desert bloom so the immigrants coming from the refugee camps could have farms. To do that, we needed water. I wanted to help, so I became a geologist - and a smuggler.
A smuggler? How come?
After independence, the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem, which had been established in 1925, was under a Jordanian siege for a long time. It contained vital geological samples from drilling carried out by Jewish scientists before independence. We badly needed the samples to guide us in finding water. Under the ceasefire agreement, a convoy would go up Mount Scopus every two weeks with UN supervision to change the guard there. I went up with them, found the boxes of drilling cores in the archive, labelled them, and secretly brought them down, two or three every trip, in big pockets in a long mackintosh I wore. This went on through winter and summer. I remember I sweated very heavily. The UN observers always checked our bags, but they never looked in my pockets so my smuggling was a success.
Then you went into the desert...
Yes. As a student I was a well-sitter, sampling the layers brought up by boreholes at sites chosen by my professor, Leo Picard. Later I located the wells myself. European water engineers said there would be no water underground where the rainfall was less than 250 millimetres a year, because the vegetation would take it all. But they were from Europe, they didn't understand the desert. There is no vegetation in the desert, so their rules didn't work. We went looking and we found water in the limestones.
I had also started to think about finding water in the Nubian sandstones deep beneath the desert, after reading that French geologists had found water in similar layers under the Sahara. It was ancient fossil water that ended up there thousands of years ago when the desert was humid. I predicted there would be billions of cubic metres beneath the Negev and Sinai, too, but the Israeli water establishment dismissed the idea. Even my professor forbade me from drilling in the sandstone. But I did it anyway. We found artesian water that spurted to the surface under its own pressure in the sandstone south of the Dead Sea. Those wells are still pumping and provide water for industry and agriculture all along the road south to Eilat, on the shore of the Red Sea.
So Ben-Gurion had the idea of making the desert bloom, but you found the water. You must have been in great demand as a water diviner...
The UN asked me to go to Iran, where traditionally farmers had used ancient tunnels dug into the hillsides to drain the underground water by gravity. The tunnels are called qanats and they are amazing structures, sometimes many kilometres long. The Shah was enacting land reforms, which enabled the feudal landlords to keep the land with qanats for themselves. The new farmers were left with land without qanats so we drilled wells. I was there for four years altogether. During my stay, a severe earthquake west of Tehran destroyed many villages and their qanats. The people were left without water, but we were working there and knew where to drill and find more.
At that time you didn't rehabilitate the qanat system. Was that a mistake?
Qanats are wonderful, I agree, but they do waste water because it flows freely all the time, whether you need it or not. Often the water is wasted in salty swamps. Also, qanats involve a great deal of dangerous digging, and I found that children were involved in the excavations, carrying baskets of dug soil through the narrow tunnels. This is child labour, just the same as making carpets. I love Persian carpets as much as their qanats but they should be phased out and the children should be in school.
Where else did you go to look for water?
An Afrikaner asked me to find water in South Africa. He came with his bible open, and believed we would find water in the promised land. I went all over that country in the 1970s and predicted that they would find a lot of water in the hard compact sandstone of Table Mountain near Cape Town. They simply did not believe what I said, and it was only in the 1990s, after the end of apartheid, that the new government followed it up. I had a letter recently from the South African department of water affairs thanking me for showing them the way.
There must be something basic about finding water and greening the desert?
It goes very deep, to a society's sense of its permanence in arid lands. And not without reason: if you compare the archaeology of civilisations with the evidence of past climates you find that almost all major historical change in the Middle East has been the result of big changes in climate. When the climate becomes cooler the deserts get wetter, the land blooms and civilisations flourish. People came from the north bringing copper around 4000 BC, bronze around 2500 BC and iron in 1000 BC. But in between there were periods of aridity and crisis when the civilisations collapsed.
That sounds a bit deterministic. What's the evidence?
Yes, this sort of environmental determinism isn't very popular. Historians and archaeologists put all the blame for historical catastrophes on human society. For instance, they blame the Sumerians in Mesopotamia for poisoning their soils with salt by over-irrigating them around 2000 BC. But we now know the climate became warmer and drier then, so they ran out of water to flush the soil clean. The Arabs were blamed for turning the Middle East into desert after the 7th century, when the real culprit was, climate. We can see this from the fact that lake levels fell all across the Middle East at the same times as civilisations failed. Also changes in oxygen isotopes in lake deposits and stalagmites show how the climate changed.
Your views are controversial among environmentalists as well, aren't they?
Yes. I want to plant the deserts with trees, but I find environmentalists are like religious fundamentalists who don't want change. They cannot imagine another landscape from the one we have now. They say we should preserve the desert in the Negev. But we know that 2000 years ago it was wetter, and people farmed there. There were agricultural terraces and systems for channelling floods onto fields. So yes, I think we should plant the deserts with trees. The trees will soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Most deserts have fossil water beneath them that could be used. Again, people say we shouldn't use fossil water because it won't be replaced. But I say if fossil fuel created the problem, then it is not unreasonable to use fossil water to help solve it. This water will last for centuries. But the planners here agree with the environmentalists and want to leave the desert as it is.
Really? Why did the dream of greening the desert die?
After Israel won the six-day war in 1967 we began to occupy the West Bank instead. The whole focus of Israeli development changed from the desert to areas already populated by the Palestinians. Now we are fighting over land and water on the West Bank when we could be developing the land and water in the Negev. I would like to see forests, vineyards, towns in the desert. I worked and lived for almost 30 years at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. We were developing the science of living in the desert. We need to get back to that idea. We could become a model for other desert regions in the Middle East, North Africa, even Australia.
But is there enough water in the Holy Land?
If we use it wisely, yes. People talk about water wars but water can also be the basis for peace, and I think it can be so here. On the West Bank, the Israeli and Palestinian water managers cooperate every day over practical management of water, even while they disagree about how it is shared out.
How would you share out the water?
We have to plan water use together. That way we could be much more efficient. We Israelis use too much drinkable water for irrigation in the north of our country when farming is no longer important for our economy. We do crazy things like turning fresh water into oranges and exporting them. The Palestinians need that water. They use much less than us: our urban waste water could be used for irrigation in Gaza, for instance. It is true that the Palestinians are still quite inefficient about using water for agriculture. They use twice as much to irrigate each hectare as we do. But once they are on the modernising trail, we can give them all the water they need. Their well-being will mean our well-being.
What about the water that falls on the West Bank? At the moment Israel takes most of this but the Palestinians say it is theirs?
Well, the Palestinians could not take more than about half of it, because there is not much storage in the rocks under the Palestinian Territories, and when it gets underground, the rainwater quickly flows west to beneath Israeli territory. But if they took half, Israel could replace what it lost with desalinated seawater. Desalination is not so expensive now. It doesn't cost much more than pumping water up from the Sea of Galilee in the Rift Valley, which we do on a large scale. Even in the worst scenario, the cost of desalination to the Israeli taxpayer would be about $200 million per year. It is not much of a price to pay for peace.
So why isn't it happening?
In the first place, Palestinian terrorism stopped the rational dialogue and brought the election of people like Ariel Sharon who are very old-fashioned in the way they think about everything, including water. We have a government that depends too much on the religious, nationalistic groups to which most of the settlers in Palestinian Territories belong. They don't think about how sharing water can make more for all. Israel was founded on rational thinking and good science as much as anything. If we concentrated more on science and less on religious fundamentalism we would be better off. |
