ABSTRACT
More than a decade ago, Lee and Roth (2001) asked the question “How can ditch and drain become a healthy creek” in order to demonstrate the exhaustive work performed by an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) to turn a heavily polluted “ditch” into a “healthy creek.” In this chapter, I am asking the same question, only in reverse: how did a historically significant, extremely healthy river become a ditch? At present the lower Jordan River is nothing more than a trickle! The reason is that while
Israel has been diverting the upper Jordan from LakeTiberias in the north to the Negev Desert in the south using its NationalWater Carrier since the mid-1960s, Jordan, at the same time, has been diverting the river’s largest tributary, the Yarmuk River, into its East Ghor Canal (see Figure 18.2).The result is not only that the Jordan River has almost disappeared in its lower stretches but also that the Dead Sea has been shrinking at an alarming rate, to the degree that large, threatening sinkholes have been appearing in its vicinity (see Figure 18.1). So, the river does not invoke the positive emotions familiar to us from a great number of travelogues. It is a disappointment for Christian pilgrims who get extremely disappointed upon reaching the point where Christ is said to have been baptized, and for environmentalists (Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli, and international) who are troubled by the looming ecological disaster. Some use the current state of the Jordan River to argue on behalf of the river and its restoration, others look for technical fixes like the proposed Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal, which would arguably replenish the Dead Sea, and yet others view the river’s current state as an expected and acceptable result of progress. But why and how was the Jordan River turned into a ditch? What were the forces of history that worked their magic against nature, if not even against God, and seem to have won? How did that happen despite the reverence that the Jordan River has in people’s imaginations? My brief answer to these questions is that the Jordan River had the misfortune of becom-
ing a border, initially in the politics of empire (1840s-1923) and subsequently in the politics of nation-states (1948 until the present).1 By turning the river into a border,water became a territorial object. Empires, however, cared about the river as a border in order to demarcate spheres of territorial influence and not in order to use its waters in development, at least not chiefly or essentially. The consequence of turning the river into a border and water into a territorial
object led the nation-states of the late-1940s and early-1950s to use the very sovereign claims over territory to redefine water as a matter of national security and as a resource that could and would be used in order to secure the nation-states. It is this history of turning the Jordan River into a border,water into a territorial object, and its utilization in the discourse of national security that might explain how the river became a ditch.
