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TIBERIAS, Israel - The Sea of Galilee is drying up. It's a victim of the building blocks of the modern state of Israel, the legends that drove the pioneers and inspired books and movies. Especially “making the desert bloom.”
Israel is turning 60, a success story in many ways. It is a high-tech, Western-style, comfortable democracy that has increased its Jewish population more than tenfold in the six decades of its existence.
It's an irony of history that the very success of the Jewish state is causing many of its current problems. The founders, some of whom are still with us because it wasn't that long ago, never dreamed it would turn out this good this fast. They didn't plan for it.
The Sea of Galilee is a prime illustration. First of all, it's no sea at all. It's a freshwater lake. And if you haven't seen it, you might have the impression that it's huge. After all, many of the miracles of the New Testament occurred around its shores.
Seeing it brings you down to earth. You can take in the whole lake from Tiberias, the Israeli city on the western shore. There's no horizon. There are no white-capped waves. There are no cargo ships.
The Sea of Galilee is just 7 miles across and 13 miles long. It's about four times the size of Lake Wawasee. It would fit in the tiny part of Lake Michigan between Gary and Chicago.
And that's all there is to the lake that provides Israel with at least a quarter of its fresh water.
Israel's climate has two basic seasons - a wet winter and a dry summer. But the last four winters haven't been all that wet. Since the Sea of Galilee depends on rainfall to fill it, that explains why it's drying up.
Partly explains.
The other part is the fact that Israel pumps water out of the Sea of Galilee to distribute all over the country.
Add those two facts together, and you get “no swimming” signs hundreds of yards from the shore. They used to be on the waterline. You have people with fishing poles sitting on rocks that used to be well under water.
In other words, you have a critical water shortage.
Water expert Alon Rimmer of the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research company has a lab next to Tabgha, site of the Loaves and Fishes miracle from the Bible on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Rimmer draws two parallel lines across a piece of scrap paper. The top one is the maximum level of the lake. The bottom one is the minimum level.
Then he draws a squiggly line between them. It squiggles up and down, but generally down - then suddenly it shoots up to the top.
“This is nature,” Rimmer says, pointing to the line spiking to the top. “Once every few years, there's an especially wet winter. It fills the lake.”
Then he points to the squiggles heading steadily down. “That's us,” he explains, “pumping water from the lake.” His last squiggle goes beneath the minimum acceptable level. That's where we are headed now, because the rainy season is over, and the hot, dry summer is ahead.
And there's no guarantee that next winter will be one of the wet ones. It could just get worse and worse.
It's no accident that the common name for the cease-fire line that separates Israel from the West Bank is the “Green Line.” When Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli fighter, drew the truce line on a U.N. map in 1949 after the two-year war that followed Israel's creation, he used a wide blue marker, not a green one. It's a blue line on the 1956 replica of the map that hangs in my backyard office.
The green part of “Green Line” represents Israeli agriculture.
Before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, if you flew over the area, you could easily see where Israel ended and the West Bank began. Israel was mostly green. The West Bank was mostly brown.
Even the Negev Desert, south of the West Bank, had large green patches by then.
Almost all of the green was the result of one of Israel's most ambitious and successful infrastructure development projects - the National Water Carrier.
Completed in 1964, it's a series of pipes, tunnels and pumping stations transporting water from the Sea of Galilee and other sources along the way to the center and south of the country - all the way to the Negev.
So those fields of crops in the Negev, where it rarely rains, are being irrigated partly by water from the Sea of Galilee. Other sources are underground reservoirs, one along the coast and another straddling the Green Line.
But 40 years later, all the sources are becoming depleted. Water experts warn of creeping salination of the fresh water sources. As too much fresh water is pumped out, more sea water creeps in.
Numbers tell some of the story. Fully half of Israel's water is used for agriculture. Just a third is used by private households.
Yet Israeli agriculture, “making the desert bloom,” has such a mythical hold on Israeli society that only a few courageous experts will say publicly that agriculture must be drastically reduced. Rimmer calls it the “greatest water buffer,” the area where the deepest cuts can be made.
The emotional arguments against that, which are not without merit, are twofold: Agriculture gives Jews a hold on the land that would otherwise be taken over by Arabs. Also, Israel needs to grow its own food because in times of turmoil, Israel cannot count on anyone else to supply its basic needs.
Both of these axioms are of diminishing relevance in the 21st century.
Israel controls vast areas of desert without agriculture because it's an established state with strong enforcement arms.
And Israel, like it or not, is dependent on foreign sources for vital commodities, such as oil. It already imports significant amounts of food.
Add to that the anomaly of increasing Israeli agricultural exports. Many of the flowers adorning the tabletops of Europe are grown in Israel. Many of the fruits and vegetables, too. Israelis get to buy the best tomatoes and cucumbers for themselves only when there's a shippers' strike. Otherwise, the best produce is exported.
But that means Israel is exporting water. Every drop that dripped out of the National Water Carrier onto the fields that yielded the flowers and crops for export is shipped abroad along with the produce.
Agriculture uses half of Israel's water, but it employs less than 2 percent of the country's labor force. Farming uses half the nation's water, but it accounts for only about 6 percent of its total economy.
Israel reduces water subsidies and allocations to agriculture in desperate times like these, and farmers cry out in pain. Pictures of tractors digging up apple trees appear in newspapers, and that hurts.
But the real solution to Israel's water crisis would be to eliminate agriculture altogether.
Ilan Tsur smiles knowingly. In his four decades of maintaining farm machinery at kibbutz collective farms in the northern part the country, he's heard it all before.
His first reply is simple. “If we eliminate agriculture, what will we eat?”
His next response is more sophisticated. “Did you see that reservoir down the highway?” he asks.
“The problem is, often you can smell it,” observes Tsur's very pregnant daughter, Naama, wrinkling her nose.
It's one of Israel's many wastewater purification pools. While it's true that agriculture uses half of Israel's water, half of that is purified waste water that isn't used for anything else. Last year Israel crossed the threshold, using more purified water than fresh water in agriculture for the first time.
But Tsur's argument that there is no other use for purified water may soon go the way of science.
In Orange County, Calif., they're purifying water so well that they can pump it into the underground reservoirs to replenish them. Critics point to the “ick” factor and call it “toilet to tap,” but it works there - and it could work here.
Tsur's kibbutz, Ein Carmel, south of Haifa, is making adjustments. This is the first year they aren't growing cotton, one of the most water-intensive crops around. It's not profitable anymore, Tsur says, because of the high cost of water and the low price of cotton.
But they're still growing bananas. In huge swaths of northern Israel, banana trees, with blue plastic bags protecting ripening bananas from pests, are the dominant feature of the landscape. Bananas are tropical plants, meaning they need lots of water. They might be the next to go.
Science is offering some solutions.
The most obvious one is desalination. Israel is a pioneer in sea water desalination technology. But it isn't used extensively at home. Instead, Israel exports most of its desalination know-how. There are a couple of plants in operation, and three more set to be working by 2012, too late to solve the current crisis.
On my first visit to Eilat, the Israeli resort on a finger of the Red Sea at the southern tip of the barren Arava desert, an extension of the Negev, my hosts showed me two desalination plants. The “new” one and the “old” one. That was in 1972.
Which is to say, 36 years ago there was an “old” desalination plant in Israel. So why isn't there a string of new ones all along the Mediterranean coast now?
The answer is how Israel deals with its problems, another legend that dates back to the beginning: Improvising.
Though some of the shine has come off in recent years, Israel's victory in the war that followed its creation is considered miraculous by many. The newborn state's ragtag, poorly armed forces drove back regular Arab armies from all over the region, against all the odds.
The ability to improvise was a key. Badly outnumbered and outgunned, the Israeli army had to make up its battle plan as it went along. Legends include the Davidka, a little homemade mortar that made a loud, frightening boom that was more effective than its tiny shell. Until recently, one of the old mortars stood in a place of honor at Jerusalem's Davidka Square, which is now being renovated.
Another legend is the story of the nighttime transfer of Jewish forces to confront one of the Arab armies, whose scouts reported back to their commanders about seeing a long, seemingly endless line of Israeli armored vehicles streaming into the area. The commanders ordered a retreat. Later it emerged that the long line was about a dozen vehicles driving in a circle, lights on heading north and lights out heading south.
True or not, these stories became part of the national character. Israel came to trust its ability to improvise its way out of any situation. Improvisation is the opposite, the death, of long-term planning, a concept that hardly exists here.
The water crisis is partly due to the feeling that when the time comes, someone will improvise a solution. Usually it's been the heavens, blessing Israel with an especially rainy winter just in time.
Taking that mentality into account, Israel's water use planning has been awful, says Brian Berkowitz, a professor of environmental science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv.
A water expert, Berkowitz has a succinct way of describing Israel's approach to taking water from the Sea of Galilee and other sources: “Overpump in the good years, overpump in the average years, and when a dry year comes along, say, ‘Omigod, what do we do now?' ”
Purely from a water point of view, Berkowitz says not only agriculture is a problem - so are all the forests planted so proudly by the Jewish National Fund for the last century.
If Israel wants to solve its water crisis, he says, “we should uproot all the trees and pave over the entire Galilee with asphalt.”
Of course, he isn't advocating that. Though his specialty is water, he points to the abstract benefits of forests and farms despite the water they consume. “It makes Israelis feel good to drive by green fields and trees,” he says. “It's good for the national psyche.”
His solution is less drastic, and it's shared by others: Eliminate the subsidy on water rates for agriculture. The crops that are viable economically would survive, and the others wouldn't. “If they can turn a profit, let them,” he says.
Berkowitz lives in a new neighborhood of an old community outside Rehovot. New neighborhoods like his are springing up all over Israel. They have to. The Jewish population of Israel has increased from 600,000 in 1948 to more than 6 million today.
The moral basis of the state is to provide refuge for persecuted Jews, a home for the entire Jewish people. The Law of Return is one of the main building blocks of the state. It grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who enters the country. Almost no other country grants potential immigrants automatic citizenship.
The Law of Return is named for the concept that a Jew moving to Israel is “returning” to his biblical homeland. It defines a Jew, for purposes of citizenship, as any person who has one Jewish grandparent or converted. That is a much broader definition than Jewish religious law, which requires a person to be born of a Jewish mother or converted to be considered Jewish.
At the time the law was passed in 1950, it was just five years after 6 million Jews were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The Nazis considered a person a Jew if he had a Jewish grandparent, and that meant death. It was logical and humane that Israel's founders would extend the state's protection to the same people.
In 1950, Israel was an impoverished, new country struggling to settle dazed survivors of the Holocaust and hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Arab countries, which expelled Jews after Israel was created. There were food shortages. It was so tough that 1949-1959 was an official period of austerity, with government-mandated rationing.
It never occurred to the founders that anyone besides Jews would want to live here.
All that changed by the 1990s, by which time Israel had turned into an economic success. Suddenly large numbers of non-Jews, most of them from the former Soviet Union, descended on Israel, claiming citizenship by virtue of the grandfather clause.
So among the inhabitants of Israel are about 300,000 non-Jews who received automatic citizenship under the Law of Return.
Not only that, there are periodic reports of huge tribes in Africa undergoing mass conversions to Judaism and planning to flood into Israel to claim its economic benefits. That hasn't happened, but as the Law of Return stands, it could.
There is plenty of land for them - the Negev Desert is still mostly empty, though living there is a challenge.
But where would their drinking water come from?
If Israel's population had remained at 600,000, as it was when the state was created in 1948, the water crisis would never have happened. If Israel had not sent pioneers out to the farthest, most barren areas of the state to stake their claims to the land by farming it, it would never have happened.
It would never have happened because without bringing a dynamic new population here and settling the land, Israel would never have survived.
The old watchwords - making the desert bloom, improvising and the Law of Return - provided the ideological and mystical fuel that built the Jewish state.
But now Israel is 60. Just as kids outgrow Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, Israel must find a way to go forward without its childhood legends.
The fate of the Sea of Galilee, and by extension, the fate of the state of Israel, depend on it.
