and from tilling the land to cutting-edge industry, can be seen in a kibbutz like Hatzerim. This kibbutz, along with ten other isolated and tiny outposts, was founded one night in October 1946 when the Haganah, the main pre-state Jewish militia, decided to establish a presence at strategic points in the southern Negev Desert. When daylight broke, the five women and twenty-five men who’d arrived to start the community found themselves on a barren hilltop surrounded by wilderness. A single acacia tree could be seen on the horizon.
It took a year before the group managed to lay a six-inch pipe that would supply water from an area forty miles away. During the 1948 War of Independence, the kibbutz was attacked and its water supply cut off. Even after the war, the soil proved so salty and difficult to cultivate that by 1959 the kibbutz members had begun to debate closing Hatzerim and moving to a more hospitable location.
But the community decided to stick it out since it became clear that the problems of soil salinity affected not only Hatzerim but also most of the lands in the Negev. Two years later, the Hatzerim kibbutzniks managed to flush the soil enough so that they were able to start growing crops. Yet this was just the beginning of Hatzerim’s breakthroughs for itself and the country.
In 1965 a water engineer named Simcha Blass approached Hatzerim with an idea for an invention that he wanted to commercialize: drip irrigation. This was the beginning of what ultimately became Netafim, the global drip irrigation company.
Professor Ricardo Hausmann heads the Center for International Development at Harvard University and is a former minister of development in the Venezuelan government. He is also a world-renowned expert on national economic development models. All countries have problems and constraints, he told us, but what’s striking about Israel is the penchant for taking problems—like the lack of water—and turning them into assets—in this case, by becoming leaders in the fields of desert agriculture, drip irrigation, and desalination. The kibbutz was at the forefront of this process early on. The environmental hardships the kibbutzim contended with were ultimately incredibly productive, much in the same way Israel’s security threats were. The large amounts of R&D spending deployed to solve military problems through high technology—including in voice recognition, communications, optics, hardware, software, and so on—has helped the country jump-start, train, and maintain a civilian high- tech sector.
The country’s disadvantage of having some of its area taken up by a desert was turned into an asset. Looking at Israel today, most visitors would be surprised to discover that 95 percent of the country is categorized as semi-arid, arid, or hyperarid, as quantified by levels of annual rainfall. Indeed, by the time Israel was founded, the Negev Desert had crept up almost all the way north to the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Negev is still Israel’s largest region, but its encroachment has been reversed as its northern reaches are now covered with agricultural fields and planted forests. Much of this was accomplished by innovative water policies since the days of Hatzerim. Israel now leads the world in recycling waste water; over 70 percent is recycled, which is three times the percentage recycled in Spain, the country in second place.10
Kibbutz Mashabbe Sade, in the Negev Desert, went even further: the kibbutzniks found a way to use water deemed useless not once, but twice. They dug a well as deep as ten football fields are long—almost half a mile—only to discover water that was warm and salty. This did not seem like a great find until they consulted Professor Samuel Appelbaum of nearby Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He realized that the water would be perfect for raising warm-water fish.
“It was not simple to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense,” said Appelbaum, a fish biologist. “But it’s important to debunk the idea that arid land is infertile, useless land.”11 The kibbutzniks started pumping the ninety-eight-degree water into ponds, which were stocked with tilapia, barramundi, sea bass, and striped bass for commercial production. After use in the fishponds, the water, which now contained waste products that made excellent fertilizer, was then used to irrigate olive and date trees. The kibbutz also found ways to grow vegetables and fruits that were watered directly from the underground aquifer.
A century ago Israel was, as Mark Twain and other travelers described it, largely a barren wasteland. Now there are an estimated 240 million trees, millions of them planted one at a time. Forests have been planted all over the country, but the largest is perhaps the most improbable of all: the Yatir Forest.
In 1932, Yosef Weitz became the top forestry official in the Jewish National Fund, a pre-state organization dedicated to buying land and planting trees in what was to become the Jewish state. It took Weitz more than thirty years to convince his own organization and the government to start planting a forest on hills at the edge of the Negev Desert. Most thought it couldn’t be done. Now there are about four million trees there. Satellite pictures show the forest sticking out like a visual typo, surrounded by desert and drylands in a place where it should not exist. FluxNet, a NASA-coordinated global environmental research project, collects data from over a hundred observation towers around the world. Only one tower is in a forest in a semi-arid zone:
