Let There Be Water

Seth Siegel argues that Israel solved a water scarcity problem that most of the world will eventually face, and sets out the specific policies and technologies involved. The book is advocacy: Siegel wants other countries to copy the approach and organises the material accordingly.

The substantive content covers several distinct decisions. Israel priced water at full cost recovery from the start, including agricultural water, which removed the subsidised overuse common elsewhere. It centralised water management in a national authority with control over allocation and pricing, insulated from agricultural lobbying. It built the National Water Carrier to move water from the north to the arid south. It developed drip irrigation through Netafim, which reduced agricultural water use per unit of output substantially. It treats and reuses roughly eighty-five per cent of municipal wastewater for agriculture, a rate no other country approaches. It built large-scale reverse osmosis desalination plants that now supply most household water, at costs that fell sharply through the 2000s.

Siegel underplays the political dimensions, particularly Israeli control of West Bank aquifers and the water allocation to Palestinian communities, which he addresses briefly and defensively. He also treats the policy choices as freely available to other countries without engaging the political economy that makes agricultural water pricing impossible in most places. The technical and institutional material is accurate and useful; the framing requires discounting.