More than 3,400 years ago, God told Joshua to lead the Hebrew people across the Jordan River into the Promised Land that is now Israel. If they worked hard and followed his commandments, it would become “a land flowing with milk and honey.”
At least the central, northern and Galilee (Kineret) regions would; they generally received enough rainfall to sustain ancient nomadic and agricultural communities. The south, the Negev Desert around and below Be’er Sheva and Abraham’s famous well, was too parched for much more than camel stops.
In 1900, Be’er Sheva was home to just 300 hardy souls, and even today most of the Negev gets a fraction of Arizona’s annual rainfall.
Nevertheless, Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion envisioned milk, honey and much more in a prosperous Negev. Today, time-traveling Israelites would be astounded to see a lake and 660,000 people in the bustling modern city of Be’er Sheva — and crops, livestock and small towns transforming the vast desert.
I recently joined other Jewish National Fund volunteers in the area. We were overcome by emotion at memorials to victims of Hamas’ barbaric massacres last October. But we also visited hospitals and schools, met with grateful, passionate, resolute, resilient people, painted and spruced up less devastated kibbutzim and marveled at how fruitful the desert has become.
Endless acres boast fields of wheat, flowers and vegetables; lemon, orange, date, olive, apple and avocado orchards; and huge “hothouses” that actually keep temperatures from getting too hot, while controlling sunshine and insects, enabling farmers to grow tomatoes, eggplants, berries, bananas and other bumper crops to feed Israel and send abroad.
We got dirty, weeding and pruning tomatoes, planting herbs and picking lemons. Scratches on my forearms still remind me that lemon trees have dastardly thorns. Who knew?
Israeli commitments to inspiration, innovation and especially perspiration continue to pay dividends. They’ve fostered new technologies and techniques that turn dry wastelands into bountiful farmlands, using desalination, water recycling, drip irrigation and constant refinements — while more atmospheric carbon dioxide spurs crops and natural plant growth.
Israelis are doing today what our ancestors did: adapting to harsh climates by devising new techniques and technologies for living and farming in cold, wet, dry and changing climates. They’re relying less on nature’s unreliable beneficence, leaving themselves less at the mercy of the elements — and being more self-reliant, resourceful and innovative, especially in water use and conservation.
Desalination plants use ultra-filtration and reverse-osmosis to remove salts and minerals from seawater and brackish groundwater deposits. The leftover brine goes to the Mediterranean and Red Seas.
Israel’s eight desal plants annually produce 835 million cubic meters of expensive yet affordable safe drinking water for Israelis, Bedouins, and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. That’s 835 billion liters; 221 billion gallons. Over 90% of Israel’s drinking water is desalinated, freeing up Sea of Galilee water that Jordanians can then purchase from Israel, especially as the Kineret reaches its highest levels in decades.
A vast water recycling system further aids in conquering deserts and droughts. Israel reuses over 85% of its water (with a goal of 95%). Treatment plants purify “graywater” from homes, hospitals, schools and businesses, so that farms can irrigate crops, and polluted water stays out of streams and groundwater. The Shafdan wastewater treatment facility alone provides nearly 140 million cubic meters of clean, recycled irrigation water to Negev Desert farms every year.
Over half of Israel’s farm irrigation water is recycled graywater. Much of it is combined with urban and highway stormwater runoff and stored in hundreds of underground reservoirs, which local and regional communities also utilize.
Recurring droughts, growing populations and expanding agricultural needs underscore the imperative to build more desalination plants, treatment facilities and reservoirs in Israel and neighboring countries.
Drip irrigation delivers water slowly and directly to plant roots via a network of hoses, valves and drip nozzles. That’s a monumental improvement over systems that spray water on plants, resulting in significant loss through evaporation. Simcha and Yeshayahu Blass began developing the water-saving technology 65 years ago and established the Netafim irrigation products and services company to market their technologies and educate
people worldwide.
Today, drip irrigation waters over three-fourths of Israel’s crops. However, only 5% of farms globally use the technology, due to a reluctance to change longstanding practices and the costs of replacing existing systems with initially expensive drip technologies.
Cutting-edge research continues apace to further improve water technologies, reduce their costs, decrease recycled water sediments that can eventually clog irrigated soils, optimize equipment efficiencies and crops’ water uptake and promote water-saving technologies in the United States and around the world.
Israel’s Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in the eastern Negev’s Kibbutz Ketura conducts research and teaches Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, African and Asian students how to utilize water and agricultural technologies and best practices. Led by Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, it also teaches them to live and work together with other future scientists, farmers and leaders of different cultures, ethnicities and religions.
The institute understands that “in the hyper-arid, drought-stricken Middle East, one resource is more precious than water: Trust.” Since 1996, it has brought together more than 2,000 students to do research and engage in university-accredited programs. I’ve met some of them.
In a further testament to how far back these agricultural challenges go, Ketura is also home to a date tree called Methuselah because it was grown from a 2,000-year-old seed found in King Herod the Great’s palace and fortress at Masada, near the Dead Sea.
Perhaps instead of trying to replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and battery technologies, we should focus on adapting to whatever climates we live in or encounter — especially since China is building hundreds of coal-fired power plants, in large part to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and grid-scale batteries to sell to Western nations for their “energy transition.”
Paul Driessen is a member of Congregation Olam Tikvah in Virginia, a frequent visitor to Israel, and author of books and articles on Israeli, energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.
