ABSTRACT
Most if not all contemporary experts on Israeli water policy and politics assume that water has been a scarce resource long before the establishment of the state in 1948. This presumed scarcity is not framed in relative terms, where per capita availability is the main concern; rather water scarcity is often described in absolute terms, where the resource is perceived as limited because of the natural conditions that are usually described as arid and semi-arid.26 This is precisely why Israeli water management became synonymous with the challenges of dealing with “water scarcity” – hence focusing attention on the supply side to increase available resources, on efficiency measured in terms of the productivity per unit of water, and the centralization of the administrative and technical apparatuses of water management. The basic question facing the water policy apparatus had been: how can the state ensure that there is enough water for a population that had been increasing exponentially since the establishment of the state? That is also probably the reason why water quantity rather than water quality was the main issue defining water policymaking at least until the late1970s and early-1980s.27 Given this predominant assumption, most water policies during the 1950s and 1960s are often seen as a logical consequence of water scarcity: the heightened importance of public and state interests in water resources, the efficient use of those resources, their national security relevance, and hence the importance of their technical and institutional centralization (Menachem, 2000; Feitelson, 2006). All of these elements, especially during the 1950s, legitimized arguments in favor of building a strong centralized state at the intrastate level (to presumably protect every
drop of water) and hawkish politics on the regional and interstate level – to gain as high a share of shared water resources like the Jordan River as possible (Lowi, 1993; Wolf, 1995; Brecher, 1975).
