Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [75]
Since no one would invest in a dead copper mine, Timna was subsidized and its shares taken up by the government; during the first three years of effort to begin operations, the project drew sarcastic press comment about “putting gold in the ground to get out copper.” Now with production booming, and a convenient world shortage caused by strikes in Chile and by Rhodesia’s troubles, it is exporting ten thousand tons of copper cement a year, at explosively profitable prices, to Spain, Japan, and Hungary, while the public offers to buy the government’s shares. No one expects this happy condition to last forever, but future, even present, limitations frequently fail in Israel to have a limiting effect. If Israelis looked ahead at the stone wall or ditch looming up, they would stop dead from sheer fright; instead, they go on out of optimism or necessity, and trust that God, or their own inventiveness, or some unforeseen development will provide.
Out of such necessities the country finds its resources. To compete with Italy in the export of oranges, for example, an Israeli fruitgrower joined with a village farm-machinery factory to invent an ingenious motorized orange-picking machine that consists of two raised platforms on a wheeled hoist and permits faster, cheaper harvesting. The Arid Zone Research Center in Beersheba has shown that the warm, sheltered climate of the Wadi Araba in the southern Negev can, with careful utilization of rain runoff from the hills, produce four crops a year. This makes possible the export to Europe of luxury out-of-season vegetables and fruits, such as the strawberries that are flown to European ski resorts.
A rather more major enterprise is Israel’s “dry Suez,” the pipeline which brings Iranian oil from Eilat on the Red Sea to Haifa and Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean. Built in answer to Nasser’s exclusion of Israel from the Suez Canal, one eight-inch and one sixteen-inch line, with a capacity of 4.5 million tons a year, already exist. They were chiefly financed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild on condition of a guaranteed return; he has since made two and a half times his original investment. The ditch for a third line can be seen cutting its way through the Negev toward a terminus on the Mediterranean at the new deep-sea port of Ashdod, opened in 1965. Chiefly for the use of foreign oil companies as a supplement to the tanker route through the Suez Canal, the new Israeli pipeline may, depending on eventual size of the pipe and cost of service, one day undercut Suez rates.
The Negev itself, known in the Bible as the Wilderness of Zin, is the prime “impossible.” Although it accounts for more than fifty-five percent of Israel’s land area, its capacity to absorb any increase of population was said by the Peel Commission, the most authoritative of the many which investigated Palestine’s troubles during the Mandate, to be nil. Nevertheless from 1948 through 1964 the number of people supported by the area has risen from 21,000 to 258,000, including the cities of Beersheba and Ashkelon, which are not strictly in the desert but on its northern edge. The rest are scattered among some 130 settlements, including Sde Boker, a kibbutz established in the middle of the desert as a magnet and an example, where Ben-Gurion has chosen to live. This population is greater than the estimated 30,000 to 60,000 which the Negev supported at its height in Roman and Byzantine times, when the system of guiding rainwater through man-made channels to cisterns was brought to engineering perfection. The Israelis consider themselves capable of no less, up to the limit of the rains from heaven. But modern man uses more water than the ancients; moreover, to bring