Foreign News: HOPE for the MIDDLE EAST

Sharing the Water Could Restore Biblical Plenty

For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains . . . a land wherein thou shall eat bread without scarceness…

—Deuteronomy 8:7-9.

That was the Middle East Moses saw as he stood atop Mount Nebo 30 centuries ago. The Middle East a recent U.N.

mission saw was a land of “poverty and hunger,” of “barely . . . food enough to keep life in the people,” where “vast areas . . . are desert.” Though 80% of its 44 million depend for a living on the soil, less than a twentieth of the land is cultivated, and only a tenth of its potential realized. It is backward and unstable, a menace to itself and the world’s peace.

Once, on the east bank of the Jordan, the Greeks founded the League of Ten Cities, the Romans built baths and forums, and 1,500,000 people dwelt in plenty and exported wheat to Rome. Now the east bank cannot even support its 400,000 people, who get along only because London, for strategic reasons, ships in £8,000,000 sterling a year to Jordan. Mesopotamia (now Iraq), in the fabled caliphate of Harun al-Rashid (786-809), supported 30 million people; Bagdad had a population of 2,000,000, and 30,000 public baths. Today, all Iraq barely supports 5,000,000 people, and last week a New York Times reporter described much of Bagdad as “a festering slum.” An entire civilization once flourished in the Negeb, with terraced lands, inns for wayfarers and broad-avenued cities. The cities have crumbled, and the Negeb is now a dust bowl, with rare patches of green painstakingly watered by dedicated Israelis.

What happened? It was not nature that changed. The land remains, the rains still fall, the rivers flow in the same measure. But under the pounding of warriors and nomads, the ancients’ brilliantly intricate system of water conservation disintegrated. Hulagu Khan— and his Mongol hordes rode out of Central Asia, smashed Mesopotamia’s elaborate crisscross of canals and dehydrated the Garden of Eden. The waiting Bedouin nomads advanced into the Sinai and Negeb like locusts when Roman and Byzantine authority declined. They demolished vaults, run-off canals and 300-ft. reservoirs. Their goats and camels pushed over terraces, broke fencing, ate the water-hugging groves of trees and stunted tamarisk, and sent the area back to desert. Silt choked the irrigation canals, sand jammed the thousands of storage cisterns, salt caked the wells. And on the Nabatean dew mounds, carefully constructed 2,000 years ago of millions of pebbles to catch and condense the desert morning dew and trickle it onto the seeded earth below, buzzards took up roost.

As the water supply declined, so did the Middle East. Even the discovery of oil in the Middle East made little difference.

Most of the new wealth is still skimmed off the top by sheiks, who live well and proliferate, raising sons who travel not by camel but by air-conditioned Cadillac.

Since 1919, the living standard in three-fourths of the Middle East has fallen.

The Middle East has “two underground resources of very great importance—namely, water and oil,” says British Scientist E. B. Worthington. And he adds: “Of these, water takes first place … In the Middle East nearly as many murders take place on account of water as on account of women, which is saying a good deal.” Oil is what the Middle East has to offer the rest of the world; water is what it needs for itself.

Flooded Drought. The opportunity that the ancients took advantage of still awaits the moderns. They have only to care enough. Some do:

EGYPT, by an agreement with Britain which has outlasted riots and mutual insults, controls the flow of the Nile. She thus manages to support 17 million fellahin on a thin green strip of land along its banks. The Nile’s surplus is dammed up at Aswan during the wet season, released during the dry. Now in process: a Nile “century” scheme to even out wet and dry decades and provide an ever-normal flow for irrigation by making Lake Victoria into the world’s largest storage dam.

IRAQ has a long-range plan to restore the Biblical green of the Tigris-Euphrates, if only its restless people and its turbulent politicos will wait for its fruition. By turning the Wadi Tharthar (dry river bed) into a reservoir to sequester the Tigris-Euphrates overflow in floodtime, the annual drought-flood cycle will be controlled and Iraq’s irrigated area doubled. It is being financed out of the country’s oil royalties ($140 million last year).

Heritage of Hatred. “It is the duty of each man in his lifetime,” says an Arab proverb, “to beget a son, to plant a tree and to dig a well.” If each nation in the Middle East did its duty about its water supply in the next 30 years, Egypt could raise its food output 30%, Syria 143%, Iraq 183%. Lebanon 37%. One difficulty is that in the vast dry-land area between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, only one of six major rivers—Lebanon’s Litani—runs its entire length within a single country. To store and use the 44 billion cubic feet of water that the Jordan River pours annually into the Dead Sea, for example, would require an agreement between Israel, Syria and Jordan. On the Jordan, a solution to the thousand-year water problem could bring not only economic survival but peace. It is blocked by a heritage of hatred.

In 1948 some 870,000 Arab men, women and children fled from the Holy Land to get out of the way while their five armies sought to liquidate the Israelis.

But when the fighting ended in Arab defeat, they had no place—neither in victorious Israel (which feared them as fifth columnists and turned over their lands and houses to Jewish immigrants) nor with their Arab hosts, already short of water for their own people. From Gaza to Syria, they became dwellers-on-the-dole, in 61 tent, mud-hut and cave colonies leaning against the flimsy Israel border.

The longer they waited, the more sullen they grew, and the more receptive they became to the fanaticism of the Moslem Brotherhood and the rabblerousing of Communist agitators. Firebrands among them killed Jordan’s King Abdullah (for compromising with Israel), overthrew governments and raided into Israel, setting off a chain of attacks and reprisals that led straight to the massacres at Kibya and Scorpion’s Pass.

The Arab-Jewish war for Palestine and the astounding growth of Israel since then (from 782,000 to 1,661,000) have turned a chronic water shortage into a burning thirst, an engineering difficulty into a first-class diplomatic problem.

Assignment: Trouble. One day last October, American Supersalesman Eric Johnston, the spring-legged onetime “boy president” of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, headed out of the White House for a new sales territory with a fateful assignment: to break the Arab-Israeli deadlock, solve the refugee problem and promote local peace by getting those sworn enemies, the Arabs and Israelis, to agree on a common scheme for developing the Middle East’s water resources.

He put his chances at about 1 in 10.

He faced a bewildering task. Since the end of World War II, both sides have been spawning water-development plans at the rate of about two a year. Today there are at least 20 dissimilar schemes.

The Israelis have one with the catching title TVA-on-the-Jordan. The plan: to divert the Jordan’s sweet waters from the Dead Sea to the arid Negeb (half of Israel’s land mass), and to compensate the salty Dead Sea, whose level would otherwise drop disastrously, by piping in Mediterranean water 25 miles across Israel. On the way to the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point in the world (1,286 ft. below Mediterranean sea level), the incoming waters would drop swiftly through turbines, thereby generating 803 million kw-h of hydroelectricity annually for Israel.

The Jordanians had another plan: divert the waters of the Yarmuk (a tributary of the Jordan) exclusively for Arab use. Both schemes have, to some extent, U.S. sponsorship. U.S. Experts Walter C.

Lowdermilk and James B. Hays wrote the Israel TVA-on-the-Jordan; Mills E.Bung-er, U.S. Point Four expert, using a $929,000 U.S. grant, conceived Jordan’s Yarmuk plan.

Into this scramble walked Johnston, carrying yet another U.S.-designed scheme: a desk study by a Boston engineering firm, Charles T. Main, Inc. The Main plan would divide the Jordan’s waters so as to irrigate 234,000 acres—three-eighths of them in Israel, most of the rest in Jordan (where 200,000 Arab refugees would be resettled), with a token amount in Syria. Johnston had to move cautiously. If he pushed his own plan too hard, the participants might pick up their blueprints and go off to play their own games. In that case, Jordan might go ahead on the Yarmuk and deprive the Jordan of half its waters; Israel might take the rest; Syria could confound them both by diverting the Jordan’s headwaters. Water, which could bring peace and prosperity to the land, might also precipitate a shooting war.

Just as Johnston flew off to the Middle East, the massacre of the Arab village of Kibya took place (TIME, Oct. 26, 1953), inflaming the area to its highest pitch since 1948. When he landed, the embittered Arab press greeted Johnston (who heads Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association) by calling him the Zionist servant of a Jewish-controlled industry; the eight-nation Arab League rejected his scheme, sight unseen. Jordan said it would rather suffer economic disaster than cooperate “directly or indirectly” with the Israelis. Iraq sent word to Johnston not to bother to come (but later shamefacedly invited him). Only the Israelis were polite to President Eisenhower’s emissary. They did not much like his scheme either (since it would bring no water to the Negeb), but decided they might as well let the Arabs bear the onus of saying no.

Rebuffs only seemed to spur Eric Johnston to new efforts of persuasion. Where-ever he went, he deflected tirades by holding up his hand and saying he did not want a yes or no answer right now, just a promise to look at his proposal.

Back at the White House after three weeks, Johnston reported that Jordan “closed the door but did not lock it,” while Syria “left the door slightly ajar.” That was enough: Salesman Johnston had his foot in the door. He revised his chances from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3. He said he would go back in a few months.

In those months since last October, the atmosphere has changed. Both sides —Arabs, who had not wanted to talk to Johnston, and Israelis, who had not really listened—had devised new proposals. Each revised Johnston’s scheme in its own interests. Instead of storing the Jordan’s waters in the all-Israel Lake Tiberias, said the Arabs, keep the water behind two dams on the all-Arab Yarmuk. (They also wanted to cut Israel’s share of Jordan water from one-third to one-fifth.) The Israelis proposed to double the amount of available water by piping Lebanon’s Litani River (which skirts Israel) into the scheme, and give all the increase to Israel to irrigate the Negeb.

This time when Johnston returned to the Middle East, his success, said an American observer, was greater “than anybody had a right to expect.” In six quick days in Cairo, Johnston, with much help from Egypt’s government, hammered out a give-and-take agreement with the Arabs. The Arabs abandoned their alternative proposal. Johnston, in return, agreed to: 1) their demand for additional dams on the Yarmuk, and 2) their insistence that the Jordan waters be used “only within the Jordan basin” (which rules out irrigating Israel’s Negeb).

Significantly, the Arabs accepted “international controls” of the water scheme, the first time since the war’s end that they had agreed to recognize and talk peaceably with Israel. No one had been able to win such a concession before.

Israel was another success. Reluctantly but realistically, the government agreed to abandon its alternate plan and to negotiate for Jordan water on Johnston’s terms. “We have reached the ten-yard line,” said Johnston exuberantly.

Last week, reporting to the President, Eric Johnston was a little more cautious but still hopeful: “An early understanding . . . on a plan for unified development of both the Arab and Israeli portions of the Jordan Valley is now a possibility,” he said. That understanding might be more late than early in coming but after seven centuries of drought and six years of border warfare, it is news in the Middle East that there should be even a faint chance.

— Grandson of Genghis, brother of Kubla.