Jordan Valley Waters LAKE GALILEE PROJECT IS FOCUS OF ARAB POLITICS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30443, 18 May 1964, Page 12

Jordan Valley Waters LAKE GALILEE PROJECT IS FOCUS OF ARAB POLITICS

[By 1

IAN COLVIN

in the "Daily Telegraph") .

(Reprinted by arrangement)

It is not usual for Jew and Arab to allow a journalist to visit both of their territories to report on a dispute between them and its causes. It is a measure of the serious view that the Israeli and the Jordan Governments take of the Jordan Valley waters dispute that they agreed to let me see their rival water projects and to hear each side of the case. The Lake Galilee project, now being started by Israel, has become the focus of Arab politics. Around the snores of the lake three States, Israel, Syria and Jordan, keep watch on the use made of the waters flowing along the Great Rift, which they were meant to share.

The Lake Galilee project is to Israelis what the Aswan High Dam i$ to Egyptians. It has already provoked one Arab “summit” meeting in Cairo and it will lead to another in August in Alexandria, at which President Nasser will again threaten Israel with rockets. Ready For Pumping That will be a decisive month for the Middle East. The Jordan waters will be lower. Tempers will be higher. The complex of hydraulic -machinery built by Israeli engineers into the depths of a limestone hill on the shore of Lake Galilee will be ready for sustained . pumping to begin.

When 1 visited this cavern at Esher Kinrot, between Tiberias and Capernaum, the three Swiss pumping units were in place, the British filter gear and chlorination plant still being installed. With Syria only eight miles miles away across the lake, a double portcullis of steel gates guards the rock-hewn entry. Not far from the central control panel, Israeli sentries polish their rifles in an underground barrack room. There is a Maginot Line atmosphere in the project. The plan is to raise about 4000 gallons of water a second from the Lake of Galilee and push it up 650 feet to flow to a small head reservoir at Netqfa and thence by pipeline and canal to the Waterless Negev 300 miles away. Thus, f6r lack of agreement with her Arab neighbours, Israel has decided to take the amount of .water from the Jordan Valley flow that was provisionally allocated to her In the plan drawn up In 1955 by Mr Eric Johnston, President Elsenhower’s personal representative in the Middle East.

At that time there was general technical agreement on the needs of the riparian States. President Eisenhower told Congress that all the interested parties had accepted the need for co-ordinated water development, with Lake Galilee as the probable reservoir.

Sixty per cent of the waters of the Jordan River Valley, Including Lake Galilee, were

to be allocated to Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon, and 40 per cent to Israel. Thia was the hard-won understanding that the Arab League wrecked with a resolution rejecting the plan in October, 1955. The. Soviet Union had already vetoed, In the previous year, an Israeli project to build a hydro-electric project at Bnot Yaakov on the Upper Jordan, from which the Jordan waters would have flowed by gravity towards the dry south. The veto

was imposed on the pretext that the scheme lay within the so-called demilitarised zone. The present Esher Kinrot project of pumping water uphill at great expense, loading the Israeli electric ’grid to one-sixth of its national capacity, is an ambitious and costly second-best. Moreover the main storage reservoir at Netofa is so small (about 950 million gallon capacity, equivalent to 0.4 per cent of the volume of water flowing annually through the lake) that it is difficult to prevent the continued waste of winter high waters into the Dead Sea.

There can be no high barrage at the lower end of the lake without flooding more fertile land than' could ever be irrigated in the Negev desert. The Israelis can lower the level of the lake and attempt to gain storage space in that way, assuming that next winter’s rains will replenish it. But that te a risky assumption. Lake Brimming This year, after seven years of drought, the Jordan valley has been blessed with abundant rain. The lake stands brimming to its green shores, seven feet above its normal seasonal level. The waters still spill away fast towards Jericho and the Dead Sea, where 218,000 million gallons of sweet water have run to waste this winter, raising the level of the Dead Sea by three feet. While Arabs and Israelis quarrel over water the Dead Sea takes its ancient usury. • The vital question. It seems to me, is whether there will be more years of rain or another cycle of drought.

What the Arabs fear is that Israel will go on pumping in dry weather -and that the river Jordan will increase in salinity and run down to a trickle.

It is no argument in this hot political climate to aay that much of Jordan Is wasted already. After all there are few rivers that do not in the end run' somewhere into a salt sea. In the next two years there is a paramount need for a unified Jordan water authority, if the Middle East, through mis ; understandings and exasperation, Is not to drift into war. Many allegations have been poured out from Cairo about plans tff bring another million Jews to Israel at the expense of Arab water diverted into Israel, 1 have been assured in Tel Aviv at the offices of the Water Development Authority that there is no basis for such allegations of expansion. The first urgent need Is for a transfusion from Galilee' into the parched wells of the Palestine citrus belt, which have been so overworked that there is a dangerous saline thrust from the Mediterranean under the coastal water-table. When the needs of the plains are met, there will be a flow along the conduits enough perhaps

to maintain 15,000 families of pioneer farmers in the Negev desert, but no more. Israel is also investigating the desalination of sea water and the dehydration of clouds as alternative means of increasing its water resources. Two Arab Project# •The Arab projects on the eastern bank of the Jordan are twofold. One is sensible and economical. The other is chimeric and highly perilous. Jordan is economically and steadily extending the East Ghor canal system with irrigation branches. This deflects to a higher contour the waters of the Yarmuk river eight miles above the confluence with the Lower Jordan. By drawing off 70 per cent of the Yarmuk flow into the East Ghor canal, this deprives a belt of Israeli agriculture below the Lake of Galilee of its summer waters. Moreover a big dam above the canal, in which both Syria and Jordan participate, will further ensure summer supplies for the Arabs at the expense of Israel, and Israel in turn will divert more Galilee waters to make good this lack. A series of dams in the wadis along the east bank of the Lower Jordan will store more water for the Hashemite Kingdom. Jordan’s Opportunity All that is needed now is some systematic agricultural crop-planning in Jordan to make the plains round Jericho bloom like the vale of Sharon. If Jordan is not made the victim of pan-Arab water politics, she will steadily improve her water resources and utilisation.

But the danger is that she may be tempted into a plan discussed by the Arab League in Cairo to deflect the headwaters of the Upper Jordan for the main purpose of depriving Israel. Water engineers in Amman have explained to me that the waters of the Hasbani and Banias rivers can be channelled off inside the Lebanese and Syrian frontiers and carried down in a canal to spill into the Yarmuk river. British observers speak of this plan as costly and complicated, but the mood of some Arabs is in favour of it

Israeli water experts tell me that ft would wreck their plan to use the Lake of Galilee as a water reservoir. For the level of the lake would then fall by 6ft a year without hope of replenishment. Israeli spokesmen refer to this scheme either as unrealistic or as a casus belli.

Yet the Arab League Technfcal Committee charged with the plan speaks of proceeding with it President Nasser, himself pitilessly bombing the scanty wells of the royalist Yemen, poses in the Jordan affair as the champion of Arab water rights. Rockets Threat •

The Arab States are aligned, and there is some nervousness in Israel that President Nasser’s answer, if the quarrel heightens to the pitch of battle, will be to shower Israel with Germandesigned rockets. There is a sinister background to the waters dispute, an arms race supported by a responsive Russia, with Britain and America reluctant to imitate her. Such is the situation which President Johnson has discussed with King Hussein, and which will have been surveyed by Sir Alec DouglasHome in his talks with the King. The Jordan river, the size of the Exe, and the 65 square miles of the Lake of Galilee can bring the blessing of improved agriculture to wide areas. They can also be the pretext for war and desolation if Israel’s thirst proves too great, or if the Arab counter-plan brings confrontation dn the borders of Syria.

lan Colvin, of the “Dally Telegraph,” London, has been investigating the Jordan Valley waters dispute on both sides of the frontier between Jew and Arab.