REPORT – 85% of the country’s water comes from seawater desalination. And Israel even has a plan B to deal with an emergency.
Special Envoy to Israel
In the beginning, the Promised Land was a desert. To the west, the Mediterranean, to the east, the Jordan River, which serves as the border with Jordan, to the northeast, Lake Tiberias and, at the southern end, the Red Sea. The country born in 1948 is surrounded by water. However, with fifty days of rain a year, it is a semi-desert land, especially in its southern part, the Negev. Not to mention that its population has doubled with successive waves of immigration and that it too has been hit hard by climate change.
For a long time, Lake Tiberias – a center of Christianity locally known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Kinneret in Hebrew, where Jesus walked on water -, with its 4.5 billion cubic meters (when it is full) was the country’s only water source. From an early age, young Israelis are made aware of the price of blue gold, which their parents buy at a fair price to avoid waste…