Word: negev
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Like the U.S., which once advised its young men to go west, Israel also has a slogan for its young people. Exhorts a popular Israeli song: "Go south, young man." But Israel's south, the Negev, is no land of opportunity. Comprising half the nation's land total, the Negev is a forbidding wasteland spotted with the rare patches of green of a few farms expensively irrigated by dedicated pioneers. Yet to determined Zionists, the Negev could provide an outlet for Israel's rapidly growing population (more than doubled since 1948, to 1,700,000) and abundant...
...happy crowd of 15,000 at Rosh Haayin, ten miles from modern Tel Aviv-Jaffa, old President Itzhak Ben-Zvi thanked God and pressed a lever. With a roar giant diesel pumps began to send water from the Yarkon River into a 66-in. pipeline that snakes toward the Negev plateau 65 miles away...
After 1958, when a twin pipeline is completed to the eastern Negev, the whole project will increase Israel's irrigable area by 100,000 acres, or 50%, and there will be land for 66,000 newcomers. Unfortunately, the Negev pipeline scheme is far from being the answer to Israel's search for self-sufficiency in food. Last fiscal year, Israel's best economically since its birth seven years ago, imports of $289,500,000 greatly exceeded exports of $881 million. The agricultural output resulting from the new Negev farms will cut the huge deficit by only...
Thus, even as the Israelis rejoiced last week over their advance into the Negev, more sober officials realized that they had gone about as far south as they could go. In committing the Yarkon they had mortgaged almost their entire available water supply. (In fact, part of the annual 7 trillion cubic feet of water that will flow through the pipeline will be reclaimed from Tel Aviv's sewers...
Israel's only hope of getting enough water to irrigate the 125,000 dry acres remaining in the Negev is to find a way to end the political fight with Jordan, which has blocked use of Jordan River water...