Desalination and drip irrigation. Appliance efficiency and ongoing education. A non-squeamish approach to wastewater and a bloodhound’s nose for leaks. The list of practices that make Israel a conservation role model for a parched world is long, impressive and, frankly, a little guilt-inducing.

Tzur Sezaf enjoys a pool at Shezaf vineyard in the Negev desert in Israel. Nationwide use of desalinated and recycled water has helped Israel meet its needs. (Uriel Sinai)

For all of Israel’s water-related triumphs, however, one of the country’s most powerful tools isn’t rooted in its innovative technology or forward-looking public policy. It is in the hearts and minds of its people, and it permeates everything.

“A lot of things flow from the idea that water is precious, and that trickles down to the way people in Israel are careful about the water they use,” said Seth M. Siegel, author of the new book “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World,” and the keynote speaker for the Jewish National Fund’s Water Summit series, which will be in San Diego in December.


“Even though Israel is a free-market economy, at its core it has a community-focused approach to the world. It is, ‘Yes, I have to worry about myself, but I also have to worry about my family and my community. We’re all in this together.’ I think the U.S. may have had that mindset during World War II, but not now.”

In our defense, signs point toward a water-saving sea change. As California soldiers through its fourth drought-plagued year, it appears that the message of personal sacrifice for the greater good is soaking in.

CALIFORNIA DROUGHT

According to the latest figures from the State Water Resources Control Board, Californians reduced their water use by nearly 27 percent during August. It is the third straight month we have exceeded Gov. Jerry Brown’s 25 percent conservation mandate.

In San Diego, long- and short-term conservation has been so successful, our water supplies are at 99 percent of normal. And there has been so much saving going on across the state, some cash-strapped water agencies will be charging more for the water we do use. So yes, sacrifice is happening.


“Up until the mid-1980s, the mindset here was there will always be enough water to support growth and to support an aesthetic that looks like the Midwest in a Mediterranean climate, and we have learned that is not the case,” said water-resources consultant Ken Weinberg, the recently retired water resources director for the San Diego County Water Authority. “I think you are seeing a mindset change now. We need less turf, and we need more landscaping that fits the climate. I think people are understanding that, and they are responding.”

Even as we inch toward a more drought-savvy lifestyle, there is still a lot we can learn from Israel. How did a country that is 60 percent desert build up a surplus of both water knowledge and actual water? Siegel’s instructive and highly readable book counts the ways, starting with history.

In 1939, the British government issued the British White Paper, a government decree designed to limit Jewish immigration to British-ruled Palestine. Eager to prove that the area could hold and sustain millions more people than the Brits thought it could, and that the water resources were more substantial than anyone suspected, the Zionist leadership began laying the groundwork for what became the State of Israel’s pioneering water efforts.

In his book, Siegel has a timeline of important dates in Israel’s conservation history that reads like a California drought to-do list. Except that Israel started tackling the challenge of desert living nearly 80 years ago.


In 1939, the Zionists began developing a plan for national water self-sufficiency. In 1947, deep drilling led to the discovery of water in the Negev desert. Drip irrigation equipment became available in 1966. The Shafdan wastewater treatment plants opened in 1969. Now, more than 85 percent of the nation’s sewage is reused, much of it for agriculture.

“They have smart governance. They are bold in trying new ideas. They go all out and all in when they come up with an idea that they think works, and they look to make sure everybody more or less carries a similar burden and everybody carries more or less the same benefits,” said Siegel, a lawyer and writer who blogs about water issues. “And they have very long-range plans for their water needs. The plan they are finalizing right now is a plan for the year 2050.”

In California, governance, infrastructure and other water-related civic duties are dealt with by the state as well as individual cities and counties, a crazy-quilt organizational strategy that makes Israel’s centralized pursuit of solutions a neat-freak’s dream that can never come true.

Factor in Israel’s necessary embrace of multifamily housing and low-water landscaping, its real-market water pricing and an obsession for finding and fixing leaks, and it’s hard to see how we could ever catch up.


But there’s hope. The new Carlsbad desalination plant, built by a team that includes Israeli desalination experts IDE Technologies, is expected to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day when it comes online later this year. More and more thirsty lawns are giving way to drought-appropriate landscaping. And the ambitious Pure Water San Diego program plans to use purified recycled water to provide more than one-third of the city’s potable water by 2035.

Israel is far away, but some of its drought-survival solutions are within reach. With the possibility of a drenching El Niño in our future, our next challenge could be hanging on to them, even as we clutch our umbrellas.

“Israel has developed a long-term conservation ethic. We are doing it short-term, and not everyone is conserving,” said Steve Erie, political science professor at UC San Diego and the author of “Beyond Chinatown,” an examination of water, growth and the environment in Southern California. “Israel is a besieged country, and it has a besieged mindset. We don’t have that, but we need to cultivate the mindset that we live in a desert. And we need to see water as a public good, and we are not all the way there yet.”