Storm over Galilee

In a limestone cave beside the Sea of Galilee, not far from the spot where Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, two giant hydraulic pumps hummed into action. The pumps sucked in the sweet water that flows into the sea from the Jordan River, pushed it through nine-foot conduits up an 845-ft. incline to the top of the Galilee Hills, then sent it coursing down an open spillway toward the central plains of Israel and the parched Negev Desert in the south. Thus last week Israel successfully completed the first full-scale test tapping in its critical and controversial Jordan waters project.

For the thirsty nation, the $150 million scheme is a modern equivalent of Christ's miracle of multiplication. Eventually, 85 billion gallons of water a year will flow through Israel's 154-mile network of pipelines, channels, siphons and tunnels. It will replenish the overexploited water table of the citrus-growing central plains, slake the thirst of existing Negev settlements, and provide enough water to sustain some 15,000 new families in the desert. But, momentous as the plan may be to Israel's future, the government last week went to great pains to play it down. In the nation's biggest newspaper, the afternoon tabloid Maariv, the dry, 93-word official announcement landed on page 15.

Israel had reason to bury the news. The Arab nations, well aware that the waters will sustain a more populous, prosperous Israel, threatened war if the project ever went through.* Then last January, at a summit meeting of 13 Arab leaders in Cairo, Egypt's President Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein persuaded their colleagues to drop the war talk and concentrate instead on a scheme that would, in effect, leave Israel high and dry. "We are not going to attack Israel," says Nasser. "We are going to build our own projects to utilize the Jordan headwaters before they reach Israel."

Accordingly, Arab reaction to last week's initial Israeli tapping was notably restrained. But the danger of war has not entirely evaporated. In Syria, the shaky Baathist regime might decide that it could profit from a little external diversion, such as an attack by jet bombers on Israel's main pumping station--which is buried deep underground to guard against such contingencies. But if the Arab nations go ahead with their plans to divert the Jordan's headwaters, Israel has already warned that it would treat any such move as a clear "act of aggression."

* However, Arab leaders rejected a formula, worked out by Special U.S. Envoy Eric Johnston in 1955, that would have given Israel 40% of the Jordan's annual flow of some 335 billion gallons. Jordan would have received 45%, with Syria and Lebanon sharing the other 15%.

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