The Myth Of Water.(Cover Story: Who Is the Greenest of Them All?; SPECIAL REPORT)(Israel)

Byline: Kevin Peraino and Joanna Chen

Making the Negev Desert bloom once seemed like a good idea, but it's killing the Dead Sea.

Israel ranks 49th on the green index but first among desert nations.

Few notions are more deeply rooted in Zionism's founding mythology than the exhortation to "make the desert bloom." The earliest Zionist pioneers arrived in Palestine with a strong faith in science and technology, shaped by the Jewish enlightenment that began in the late 18th century. They also brought an earthy sense of self-reliance that made growing their own food--even in the bleak Negev Desert--a high priority. Amid the ashes of the Holocaust, that determination only deepened. "For those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands, and even millions," Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1954, when he moved to the Negev himself. As Israeli society grew increasingly devout in the 1970s, the prophet Isaiah provided further inspiration: "The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose."

At first glance, today the parched land indeed looks glad. The arid coastal plain sprouts with fields of watermelons, tomatoes and sunflowers, and Israel has earned a reputation for creative use of sparse water supplies. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Israelis pioneered the use of "drip irrigation"--which delivers water directly to a plant's roots. More recently, Israeli experiments with desalination and water recycling have drawn attention around the world. The Yale/ Columbia Environmental Performance Index ranks Israel 49th overall and best among desert nations, in part for managing the stress irrigation puts on water supplies. Still, some scientists worry about the environmental cost of building an economy in the desert. Israel consumes 1.8 billion cubic meters of water each year; 15 years from now, it will need an additional 1.5 billion cubic meters to meet demand rising due to population and economic growth, according to Israeli water experts. About half of Israel's clean water is used for agriculture, yet farming accounts for only 2 percent of Israel's GNP. Considering those numbers, some environmentalists are beginning to question whether agricultural growth in a desert climate like Israel's is really sustainable. The question, says David Brooks, a Canadian water expert and environmentalist, "is not whether water is used efficiently in Israeli agriculture, but whether agriculture is an efficient way to use water in Israel."

Water has long been a deeply political issue in the Levant; wars are waged over it. Aquifers and other sources of water tend to straddle political boundaries. Levi Eshkol, Israel's prime minister during the Six Day War, was a water-company executive who spent long hours poring over maps of potential sources. According to "The Iron Wall," a history by Avi Shlaim, Eshkol believed that "without control over the sources of water the Zionist dream could not be realized." In 1964 Israel completed the National Water Carrier, designed to pipe drinking water from the Sea of Galilee, in Israel's north, to ...