On March 28, 1956 approximately 700 workers from Israel's water planning company, TAHAL, gathered to celebrate the completion of quarrying the Eilabun tunnel, the first of four major tunnels constructed for Israel's largest water infrastructure project, i.e. the National Water Carrier. As clouds gathered and a light rain misted the skies, Simcha Blass, head of TAHAL and the Water Department, stood to give a speech to mark the festivities of the day. The speech, meant to praise the outstanding accomplishments of TAHAL's workers, quickly turned into a scathing public critique of the government's recent decision to dissolve the construction branch of TAHAL and transfer its responsibilities to the semi-private Israeli water company, Mekorot. "Authority cannot tolerate partnership," Blass warned, as he ominously predicted Mekorot's complete domination of Israel's water industry. Three months later, Simcha Blass, the "father of Israeli water planning," resigned as Chief Water Advisor in Israel after unsuccessfully fighting a long battle to prevent the dismantlement of TAHAL's construction branch and of Mekorot's monopolization of the water industry. This paper will discuss the implications of the debate over Mekorot's influence in the National Water Carrier and Israeli water in general. It will be argued that despite the difficulties planners faced, the debates surrounding the National Water Carrier project served as an arena where the government asserted its role as the primary owner of all Israel's water and the chief power player in the water industry. Ironic as it appears, throughout the 1950s, the height of Israeli mamlakhti (statist) ideology, the Israeli state chose to strengthen the role of Mekorot, a semi-private company in the water sector, while it weakened the role of TAHAL, a government created and owned water planning company. Mekorot's ascendency to the status of "national water company" cemented the strong ideological and bureaucratic alliance between Mekorot's elite and the ruling MAPAI (Labor) party. Collectively, these inner debates between experts, governmental departments, and various arms of the water sector represented opportunities where decisions over the future of the national water project became enmeshed in decisions that translated into centralizing authority over water policy decisions through Mekorot. The implications of this water policy decision in the 1950s helps explain the present overwhelming role of Mekorot in the current water industry in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This paper traces how Palestinian residents of Nazareth appealed to aid from the American Point Four program during the early 1950s in order to attempted to overcome the city’s water crisis as well as Israeli state policies that led to its persistence. Point Four sought to share U.S. aid and expertise with the underdeveloped world. In it, Nazarenes saw a potential solution to the chronic water shortages they suffered through for decades, as well as a potential leverage against their exclusion by the Israeli state. From the 1930s, residents of the city and their leadership repeatedly attempted to overcome water problems, but their efforts were frustrated by the municipality’s lack of resources (almost a quarter of the buildings in Nazareth belonged to tax-exempt Christian religious institutions) and the British colonial authority’s full control over the project. In the transition to the Israeli state in 1948, political considerations compounded these obstacles. Seeking to advance the interests of the new ruling Jewish majority by controlling water, Israeli authorities attempted to impose an alternative water project on Nazareth, under the direction of the national water company (Mekorot). When Nazarenes rejected the Israeli design, insisting on their right as a national minority to control their water, Israeli authorities stalled any attempts to resolve the crisis. Nazareth’s local leaders realized the limitations of their power, and understanding the city’s cachet as a holy Christian city, turned to American aid representatives in Israel, requesting their help in seeking control of the city’s waterworks. This paper investigates these interactions of local and international politics in negotiating American aid. Focusing on this recently, yet not fully, decolonized setting, and on non-state actors in a contested national conflict, this paper seeks to complicate the role of US aid and Cold War policies in the Middle East.

This paper explores what patterns of water distribution in Mount Lebanon can tell us about the relative importance of sect, class, and politics in state resource allocation policies. Although Lebanon receives substantial rainfall, mismanagement and poor infrastructure have left many Lebanese reliant on private distributors during the summer months and, at times, even during the winter (Amery 2000). However, not all Lebanese citizens are affected equally by state distribution schemes. Consider the Aley region, where over the summer of 2015, Bhamdoun allegedly received three hours of water from the government each week, while the neighboring village of Sofar did not encounter water shortages. We see these patterns across the country, certain communities being given preferential treatment over others. The question is, how can we understand the Lebanese state’s algorithms for determining who receives water and who must rely on private distributors? In the available literature on Lebanon’s political system, two paradigms can be deployed to help make sense of this situation, though neither is entirely sufficient. Scholars in the first camp argue that Lebanon lacks an effective state, and that in its stead, traditional political bosses and their subsidiary welfare organizations provide social services and resources to their constituents, primarily of their own religious sect in exchange for political support during elections (Leenders 2010; Salti & Chaaban; 2010; Cammett 2014). Extending this logic to Aley, the reason why Bhamdoun doesn’t receive as much water as Sofar is because its a Christian village in a region of Druze political control. As with this paradigm, however, the explanation ignores questions of social stratification within communities, treating Lebanon as heterogenous only at the level of sect. While Bhamdoun may receive less overall water than Sofar, are there internal differences? Do some households receive more water? Who is most impacted by the shortages? An emergent second camp of scholars like Fawwaz Trabulsi (2014) and Hisham El-Achkar (2012) have taken up the subject of class, arguing that the Lebanese state apparatus is strong, but only in its service to the interests of a small ruling elite. This paper serves to bridge the gap between these two bodies of literature by exploring the state logic behind inequitable water distribution in Mount Lebanon and how this affects peoples’ relationships to the state. The paper is built on survey and interview data to be collected from communities along the Damour River Watershed over the summer of 2016.

With the passage of United Nations General Assembly Resolution officially recognizing the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS), there has been increasing interest in understanding how the human rights framework may influence work on water justice. Using case studies from the occupied Palestinian territories, this paper argues that the human rights frame provides new opportunities to explore the issue of water justice in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Based on field work, data analysis, and interviews with key actors, this paper outlines applied research strategies for data collection and analysis, and conceptual and practical opportunities and pitfalls in the use of the human rights frame in addressing water issues. Opportunities include using the framework to empower Palestinian community residents to engage in making claims to the right to water and sanitation. These include both access to water resources and protection of deterioration of those resources. The paper describes efforts to implement participatory citizen monitoring of existing and changing conditions of water availability and management practices. The participatory research strategy includes engagement of citizens in monitoring a range of issues, including both the extent and effects of intermittency of domestic water delivery, availability of sanitation services, household costs around water (including service fees and fees for additional infrastructure to address intermittent supply issues), to conditions associated with rural water supply, including the impacts of landscape change and colonial settlement on quality and quantity of water supply through Springs and irrigation networks. This research also documents the ripple effects of improving water availability in communities, while also highlighting the significant barriers to public participation in water decision making. While the author acknowledges significant pitfalls from adopting an HRWS discourse, including the inherent urban and domestic use bias, the paper attempts to demonstrate how use of methods that adopt historical landscape change and right to nature discourses can provide an opening for addressing the right to this most basic of natural resources.

This study investigates Lebanese and American designs for hydroelectric infrastructure on Lebanon’s Litani river. Beginning in the late 1940s, Lebanese and American experts transformed the river by rendering it into statistical representations, seeking to redesign it from a complex biosphere into a machine producing economic growth and national unity. I draw upon methodologies from environmental history, science and technology studies, and the history of science to ask: What informed different kinds of calculation by different individuals and institutions? What can infrastructure tell us about the boundaries of science, finance, and nature? How might financial institutions demarcate good science from bad? The first section discusses development proposals submitted to the World Bank by two Lebanese planners, Ibrahim 'Abd al-'Al and Maurice Gemayel. The second examines a subsequent proposal submitted by the United States Bureau of Reclamation. Rather than evaluate these proposals according to absolute standards of good and bad science or sound and unsound design, this study explores how and why the World Bank made such demarcations in practice. The World Bank deemed the Lebanese proposals unacceptable and the Bureau’s satisfactory. I argue that this difference in acceptability emerged from three interrelated differences. Unlike the Lebanese engineers, the Bureau prioritized hydroelectricity over irrigation; established a boundary between the political and the technical in a manner that conformed to the World Bank mandate; and extended their calculations to the total economic inputs and outputs of the project, constituting a particular technocratic future for Lebanon. The Bureau’s calculations rendered the Litani into a machine that manufactured a single commodity: kilowatt hours. Calculating the total economic effects of that single commodity allowed the Bureau to calculate Lebanon’s future. Their calculations required that the Lebanese government legislate that a public utility purchase the all of the Litani’s kilowatt hours at a fixed price above market rate. The World Bank then constructed a regime of disciplinary debt that could compel the Lebanese government to make this and other legislation, ensure the durability of those reforms, and maintain the stability of the Bureau’s calculations into the future.