National Water Carrier of Israel

Based on Wikipedia: National Water Carrier of Israel

The Pipe Dream That Changed a Nation

In 1964, Israel completed what might be the most ambitious plumbing project in human history. They took water from a lake in the green, rain-fed north and pushed it 130 kilometers south through a system of pipes, tunnels, canals, and pumping stations to reach cities and farms in the parched heart of the country. The National Water Carrier didn't just move water. It moved the boundaries of what seemed possible in one of the driest inhabited regions on Earth.

To understand why this mattered, you need to understand Israel's geography. The country is shaped roughly like a dagger, with the Sea of Galilee—a freshwater lake also known as Lake Kinneret—sitting in the north. Below it, the terrain drops dramatically into the Jordan Rift Valley before rising again into the central highlands where most Israelis live. Further south, the Negev Desert covers more than half the country's land area. Rain falls generously in the north but barely touches the south.

The problem was obvious: water was in the wrong place.

The Engineering Challenge

Building a water pipeline sounds straightforward until you realize what the engineers were up against. The Sea of Galilee sits 213 meters below sea level—it's one of the lowest freshwater lakes on Earth. The water needed to travel uphill, over mountains, through valleys, and across terrain that ranged from fertile farmland to rocky wilderness.

The system begins with nine concrete pipes submerged in the northern part of the Sea of Galilee, joined together by an internal cable threaded through them like beads on a string. Each of these nine sections contains twelve individual concrete segments, each five meters long and three meters wide. When these massive pipes were manufactured, workers encased them in steel shells, sealed the ends, and floated them out onto the lake like enormous gray cigars before sinking them into position.

At the end of this underwater pipeline sits a star-shaped intake cap, designed to draw water from all directions rather than creating a single suction point that might disturb the lake bed or trap debris.

From here, the water enters the Sapir Pumping Station on the shore, named after Pinhas Sapir, one of the founders of Mekorot, Israel's national water company. Four horizontal pumps lift the water through a pressure-resistant steel pipe that rises over 250 meters—from well below sea level to 44 meters above it—in just 2.2 kilometers of distance. Imagine pushing water up a steep hill for more than a mile. That's what happens here, every hour of every day.

Canals, Tunnels, and Inverted Siphons

After the initial pumping, the water enters the Jordan Canal, an open channel that runs along a mountainside for 17 kilometers. When full, the water flows 2.7 meters deep, moving purely by gravity. No pumps needed. The engineers calculated the precise slope required to keep the water moving without accelerating too fast or slowing to a standstill.

But gravity only works when you're going downhill, and the landscape doesn't always cooperate.

The canal's path is interrupted by two deep wadis—seasonal riverbeds carved by flash floods over millennia. These are Nahal Amud and Nahal Tzalmon. You can't just bridge over a wadi with an open canal; the water would splash out or evaporate excessively. Instead, the engineers used inverted siphons.

An inverted siphon works on a counterintuitive principle. You send the water down into a U-shaped pipe that dips into the valley and rises on the other side. As long as the exit point is lower than the entrance, the water's own weight pushes it up the other side. It's the same principle that lets you siphon gas from a car tank with a hose, except here the "hose" is a massive industrial pipe carrying enough water to supply a city.

After crossing these obstacles, the water reaches the Tzalmon Reservoir, a holding basin in the Nahal Tzalmon valley with a capacity of one cubic hectometer—that's a million cubic meters, or enough water to fill 400 Olympic swimming pools. Here, a second pumping station lifts the water an additional 115 meters before sending it into the Ya'akov Tunnel.

Through the Mountains

The Ya'akov Tunnel bores 850 meters through the hills near the village of Eilabun. It's three meters in diameter—wide enough to drive a small car through, if cars could drive underwater. This tunnel connects the Jordan Canal system to the Beit Netofa Canal, which crosses the Beit Netofa Valley.

The Beit Netofa Canal presented its own challenges. The valley floor is clay soil, which expands when wet and contracts when dry. A rectangular canal would crack and leak within years. The solution was an oval-bottomed design that could flex with the soil's movements. The canal stretches 17 kilometers, with a width of 19.4 meters at the top narrowing to 12 meters at the bottom. Water flows through at a depth of 2.15 meters.

At the southwestern edge of the Beit Netofa Valley sits the Eshkol Water Filtration Plant, completed between 2007 and 2008. When it opened, it was the fourth-largest water filtration facility on the planet. The water first enters a sedimentation pond holding 1.5 million cubic meters, where gravity does the work of a filter—suspended particles settle to the bottom over time, leaving clearer water above. A second reservoir, separated by a dam, holds 4.5 million cubic meters and regulates the flow into the final pipeline.

Before entering the closed pipeline, the water undergoes final testing. Chemicals are added to bring it to drinking water standards. Then it enters what engineers call the "108-inch Pipeline"—nearly three meters in diameter—which carries the water 86 kilometers to the Yarkon-Negev system near Rosh HaAyin, just east of Tel Aviv.

Dreams Before the State

The idea of moving water from north to south predates Israel itself. Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, wrote about it in his 1902 novel "Altneuland," which translates to "Old New Land." Herzl imagined using the Jordan River for irrigation and channeling Mediterranean seawater through the Beit She'an and Jordan valleys to generate electricity. He was writing about a country that wouldn't exist for another 46 years.

A more practical blueprint appeared in 1944, when American soil conservationist Walter Clay Lowdermilk published "Palestine, Land of Promise." Lowdermilk had worked for the United States Department of Agriculture during the Dust Bowl, studying how poor land management had turned fertile prairies into wastelands. He saw Palestine's potential—and its limitations.

His book became a bestseller and influenced the Truman administration's thinking about how many Jewish refugees the land could absorb. If Palestine could be made to bloom, it could hold many more people than its current arid state suggested.

An American engineer named James Hayes took Lowdermilk's vision and turned it into a detailed technical plan. Hayes proposed using all of Israel's water sources—about two cubic kilometers per year—for irrigation and electricity. His plan was ambitious, perhaps too ambitious. It called for diverting water from the Litani River in Lebanon, building a massive reservoir in the Beit Netofa Valley capable of holding one billion cubic meters (a quarter of the Sea of Galilee's volume), and constructing a joint Israeli-Jordanian dam near the Syrian border.

The Hayes plan never materialized. Jordan wouldn't cooperate, and the economics didn't work.

The Johnston Plan

Between 1953 and 1956, while Israel was actually building its water carrier, American diplomat Eric Johnston tried to broker a regional water-sharing agreement. Sent by President Dwight Eisenhower, Johnston proposed dividing the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers' water among the nations that needed it: 40 percent for Israel, 45 percent for Jordan, and 15 percent split between Syria and Lebanon.

Remarkably, Arab water experts accepted the plan as technically fair. Each country would keep the right to use water flowing within its borders, as long as doing so didn't harm its neighbors.

But the politics of the 1950s Middle East were poisonous. The plan died not because it was unfair but because acknowledging fairness would have required acknowledging Israel's right to exist. Arab leaders walked away from a deal their own experts had endorsed.

Water as a Weapon

The National Water Carrier was inaugurated in 1964, and the regional response was swift. Syria began construction on a Headwater Diversion Plan, a project designed to redirect the sources of the Jordan River before they could reach the Sea of Galilee. If completed, it would have drastically reduced the water available to Israel's carrier.

Israel didn't wait to see if diplomacy would work. In 1965, Israeli forces physically attacked the Syrian diversion works. Tanks shelled construction equipment. The Syrian project never recovered.

These water skirmishes were among the factors that escalated regional tensions toward the 1967 Six-Day War. When that war ended, Israel controlled the Golan Heights—the high ground on the Syrian border that contains several sources feeding the Sea of Galilee. Water security and military security had become inseparable.

The Changing Balance

When the National Water Carrier opened, 80 percent of its water went to agriculture and only 20 percent to drinking water. This made sense for a young country trying to establish itself as a land of farms and orchards, turning the desert green as a point of national pride.

But countries change. Populations grow. By the early 1990s, the carrier was supplying half of Israel's drinking water. Projections suggested that by 2010, the ratio would flip entirely: 80 percent for drinking, 20 percent for farms.

Then something unexpected happened. Israel got better at water.

The country invested massively in two technologies: desalination and water reclamation. Desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast now produce fresh water from seawater at industrial scale. Meanwhile, Israel recycles approximately 90 percent of its wastewater for agricultural irrigation—the highest rate in the world. For comparison, Spain, the second-highest, recycles about 20 percent.

By 2016, the Sea of Galilee was supplying only 10 percent of Israel's drinking water needs. The carrier that once seemed like the lifeline of a nation had become one piece of a much larger puzzle. That year, Israel expected to draw only 25 million cubic meters from the lake, down from more than 300 million cubic meters annually a decade earlier.

This wasn't just about efficiency. The Sea of Galilee had been suffering. Severe droughts had shrunk the lake to dangerous levels, and decades of heavy pumping had stressed its ecosystem. Reducing extraction gave the lake a chance to recover.

The Dead Sea Is Dying

But you can't move water without consequences, and the biggest consequence of Israel's water engineering sits at the lowest point on Earth.

The Dead Sea—a hypersaline lake on the border between Israel and Jordan, famous for letting swimmers float effortlessly on its surface—has lost about a third of its surface area since the 1960s. Its water level drops by more than a meter every year.

The Jordan River once delivered between 1.2 and 1.3 billion cubic meters of water to the Dead Sea annually. As of 2021, that flow has collapsed to less than 100 million cubic meters. The National Water Carrier isn't solely responsible—Jordan and Syria also draw heavily from the Jordan River system—but it's a major factor.

The consequences are visible and strange. As the shoreline retreats, it leaves behind a thick layer of underground salt. When heavy rains come, freshwater dissolves this salt as it percolates into the ground, creating underground cavities. Eventually, these cavities collapse.

The result is sinkholes—hundreds of them, appearing along the Dead Sea's shores. At Ein Gedi, a nature reserve on the western coast, sinkholes have swallowed parts of roads and parking lots. A highway segment built in 2010 to a supposedly "sinkhole-proof" design has already been damaged. The sinkholes have created a feedback loop: as more of them appear, flash floods pour into them instead of reaching the Dead Sea, accelerating its decline.

The Bigger Picture

In 1994, Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty that included water provisions. Israel agreed to transfer 50 million cubic meters of water annually to Jordan, acknowledging that water scarcity was a shared regional challenge rather than a zero-sum game.

This represented a shift in thinking. The early decades of the National Water Carrier were marked by a siege mentality: secure water for our people, and let the neighbors figure out their own problems. But as both scientific understanding and diplomatic relationships evolved, Israel began to recognize that water doesn't respect borders. A healthier Jordan means less pressure on shared resources. A recovering Sea of Galilee benefits everyone downstream.

The story of the National Water Carrier is ultimately a story about how nations mature. The young Israel of 1964 saw water as a resource to be captured and controlled, moved from where nature put it to where people wanted it. The Israel of today sees water as part of an interconnected system—hydrological, ecological, and political—that requires management rather than conquest.

What Remains

The physical infrastructure of the National Water Carrier still operates. Water still flows from the Sea of Galilee through those submerged pipes, still gets pumped up that first massive hill, still travels through canals and tunnels and reservoirs before reaching the filtration plant and the final pipeline to Tel Aviv.

But the carrier's role has fundamentally changed. It's no longer the heart of Israel's water system but rather one artery among many. Desalination plants, reclamation facilities, aquifer management, and international agreements now share the load.

Perhaps that's the most remarkable thing about this engineering marvel: it succeeded so well that the country outgrew it. The carrier bought Israel time—decades of water security during which the nation could develop, grow, and eventually build the infrastructure to become less dependent on a single lake in the north.

The 420 million Israeli lira spent in 1964 was an investment in the future. That future has arrived, and it looks different than anyone expected. The desert blooms not just with piped water from the Galilee but with desalinated seawater, recycled wastewater, and a hard-won understanding that in a dry land, every drop has to count.