Seth Siegel on Israel's Water Revolution

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Water,” said Israel’s second prime minister Levi Eshkol, “is to the country like blood to a human being.” From the time of the Hebrew Bible and through the ages, Jews have prayed for water in the land of Israel, and when early Zionist leaders began building the institutions of statehood, they made water a central policy issue. In recent years, Israeli technology has effected a water revolution through desalinization, drip irrigation, and agricultural science. Now, the Jewish state's hydro-innovations have given it the diplomatic leverage to strengthen its friendships across the world.

On this week’s podcast, Seth Siegel, a water-technology expert, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Israel’s water revolution. Siegel is the chief sustainability officer at N-Drip, an Israeli hydro-technology company, and the author of the 2015 book Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water Starved World. In this podcast, he talks about his work and about how this precious natural resource affects everything from Israeli utility bills to international diplomacy.

Musical selections are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Water, said Israel's second Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, is to the country like blood to a human being.
0:15.9	It's vital.
0:17.5	Indispensable for so much human activity, we need water for our nourishment and hygiene,
0:23.6	and capturing and conveying water is a precondition for agriculture and animal husbandry.
0:30.6	It's necessary to establish human settlement and the development of cities, and therefore civilization.
0:38.3	So it's perhaps not surprising that water is a preoccupation in the desert culture of the Middle East,
0:46.3	in the land of Israel, where from antiquity the Hebrew Bible mentions water more than 20 times,
0:53.3	and indeed throughout history, that is the
0:55.6	land for which Jews, everywhere in the world, pray for rain.
1:01.0	For Zionist leaders, the planning for water would turn out to be one of their most ambitious
1:06.7	aspirations and one that returned in security and prosperity every effort made in its behalf.
1:13.6	By thinking about water, its procurement, and its use, one can understand much about
1:20.6	contemporary Israel, the Zionists who made it what it is, and the Jews who for millennia,
1:26.6	have longed for it.
1:28.6	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is Seth Siegel,
1:34.9	the chief sustainability officer at Endrip and Israeli hydrotechnology company. Seth is the author of
1:42.0	the 2015 book, Let There Be Water, and the 2019 Troubled Water.
1:47.5	Today we talk about Israel's Water Revolution. If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe
1:53.5	to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you'll leave
1:59.8	us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas.
2:04.0	I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast at ticfa fund.org.
2:11.5	And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
	...

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