Palestine’s Jordan River Drained of Water and Livelihood

Megan Awwad was 12 years old when she traveled with her family from the Bay Area to Jordan to attend a cousin’s baptism near the Jordan River, which flows southward along the Jordan-Palestine border from headwaters in Lebanon and Syria into the Dead Sea. During the ceremony, a curious Awwad snuck away, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mighty river she had heard about in family stories.

What she found, instead, was a sludge-filled riverbed strewn with long grasses, wilted and yellowing in the summer heat. “When I got to the shore, I just remember stepping in mud and thinking, like, This is not a river. What is this?” recalled Awwad, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California, studying environment and settler colonialism in Palestine. 

On the opposite bank from where young Awwad stood in Jordan, she remembers seeing an Israeli soldier, gun in hand, stationed at some sort of military installment in Palestine. “It terrified me,” she said. “Ever since, it has been a haunting memory.”

Stories of the Jordan River, like those that animated Awwad’s childhood, also fill the pages of religious and historical texts. For millennia, the waterway has wound through great cultures, religions, and empires. Remnants of Roman, Mamluk, and Ottoman-era infrastructure still dot its banks. The Bible says Jesus was baptized in the river, and today, 200,000 Christian pilgrims flock to it each year. Historically, it has also supported one of the region’s lushest ecosystems and has been an important stopping point for migratory birds.

Today, however, the Jordan River and especially its lower branch, linking Lake Tiberias to the Dead Sea, is a shadow of its former self. Over the last 50 years, the river’s annual flow has dropped to less than 10% of its historical average. Downstream, the Dead Sea is shrinking at a rate of about a meter per year as its major tributary slows to a trickle. The river’s transformation has everything to do with the frightening image of occupation that Awwad encountered in her youth.

“Water, from the earliest days, was central to Zionist and then Israeli colonizing and state building with consequences for the Palestinians in terms of their dispossession,” explained Jan Selby, professor of international politics and climate change at the University of Leeds. Throughout the century-long war on Palestine, colonial Britain, Zionist settlers, and Israel have sought to control and weaponize the river in their mission to conquer its surrounding territories. Now, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, the destruction of Palestine’s natural resources and the denial of Palestinian people’s rights have become more evident than ever.

Early Zionist leaders narrativized the possibility of agricultural settlement in Palestine as an alternative to the alienation of Jewish life “in exile,” outside their supposed promised land of Israel. They advocated the redemption of the Jewish people through agrarian labor. During the first decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe arrived in Palestine, committed to this redemptive narrative and to transforming the so-called wasteland of Palestine into the abundant land promised in the Hebrew Bible, “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Zionist immigration continued throughout the British Mandate for Palestine, which lasted until the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Known as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, Israel’s founding entailed the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, as 78% of historic Palestine became the state of Israel.

The Jordan River was vital to Palestine’s growing settler population. Zionist technocrats diverted the river to expand settlements in the Negev Desert in southern Palestine. The first in a series of ambitious projects drained Lake Hula in the upper Jordan Valley, beginning in 1951. The lake was a unique freshwater wetland, home to hundreds of species of flora and fauna and Indigenous communities that practiced subsistence farming and reared water buffalo on its shores. By 1958, it was drained, forcing Palestinians out of the area and pushing endemic species toward extinction.

As the last of the water buffalos vanished from the Hula Valley in the mid-20th century, work began on a conduit, more than 80 miles long, beginning in nearby Lake Tiberias to transport water into the Negev Desert. This megaproject, completed in 1964, would come to be known as the National Water Carrier. Researchers attribute much of the Jordan River’s downstream degradation to its construction. “The National Water Carrier project has destroyed the southern part of the river,” said Awwad. 

If the goal of those early projects was to secure enough water to sustain exploding settler populations, those priorities have since shifted. Nowadays, Israel has a water surplus. Yet, it is still manipulating the Jordan River. “Water now for Israel in the West Bank is more a weapon in its political and territorial ambitions than done in relation to making sure there’s enough water for Israel,” said Selby. 

Settlements in the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea, along Palestine’s eastern border, are meant to serve as Israeli border infrastructure. Israeli politicians advocated settlement in the area for this purpose following the 1967 War, during which Israel occupied the remainder of historic Palestine, comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Settlement across the West Bank has intensified since, ramping up to a fever pitch as the global media focuses on the current onslaught on Gaza. In March, Israel greenlit permits for more than 3,000 new illegal settlement housing units in the territory and declared the appropriation of almost 2,000 acres of land in the Jordan Valley—the largest action of its kind in decades.