Israel's geography: a narrow land that has to move its water south

How narrow is the land between sea and rift

Britannica measures Israel at about 470 kilometres from north to south and 135 kilometres across at its widest; the Wikipedia account gives 424 kilometres by 114, narrowing to about 15 kilometres in the centre. The difference is a matter of what is being measured, and the two agree on the shape: a long, thin country whose exclusive economic zone in the Mediterranean, at 26,352 square kilometres, covers more than its land.

What counts as Israel's territory depends on which line is drawn. The area within the 1949 armistice lines is about 20,770 square kilometres. The area under Israeli law, which adds East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, is 22,072 square kilometres; Israel annexed both, and the international community has not recognised either annexation. Adding the West Bank, which is under military control and partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, gives 27,799 square kilometres. The Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem and the Golan in its figures and leaves out the West Bank and Gaza, although Israeli settlers living in the West Bank are included in the population.

Inside those lines the land falls into four strips running the length of the country, and both Britannica and the Wikipedia account name the same four: the Mediterranean coastal plain, the hills of the north and centre, the Rift Valley and the Negev.

What the coastal plain carries

The coastal plain runs from the Lebanese border to Gaza, broken only by Mount Carmel at Haifa. It is about 5 kilometres wide at the northern border and about 40 kilometres wide near Gaza. Its soils are mainly alluvial, it was historically malarial, and it is known for citrus orchards and vineyards. A sandy shore with many beaches runs most of its length.

Most of the population lives on this strip. Britannica records that the two conurbations of Tel Aviv-Yafo and Haifa house more than half the country's people, and the Sharon Plain between Nahal Taninim and the Yarkon River is the most densely settled stretch of all. The first modern Jewish settlers established themselves on the coastal plain in the 1880s, and the port of Jaffa grew the suburb that became Tel Aviv.

Short streams cross the plain to the sea: the Kishon, the Hadera, the Alexander, the Poleg and the Yarkon. All of them were badly polluted, and the Kishon, the Alexander and the Yarkon now flow all year again with parks along their banks.

Where the hills rise and the valleys cut through

East of the plain lies the central highland. In the north the hills of Upper and Lower Galilee are generally 500 to 700 metres high and reach their summit at Mount Meron, near Safed, where the mountains end on an escarpment above the Rift Valley. The Carmel range runs north-west towards Haifa, its peak at 546 metres, and almost reaches the sea.

The Jezreel Valley, also called the Plain of Esdraelon, divides Galilee from the hills to the south. It runs 48 kilometres from Haifa south-east to the Jordan valley and is 19 kilometres across at its widest. South of it the Samarian and Judean hills lie mainly in the West Bank, with Jerusalem on the top of the ridge. The highland averages about 610 metres.

To the north-east the Golan Heights rise to the Israeli-occupied part of the Mount Hermon massif, where a peak reaches 2,224 metres. The limestone and sandstone of these hills act as aquifers, carrying water from their western flanks eastward. It surfaces in springs along the Dead Sea, the oases of Ein Gedi and Ein Bokek among them.

Why the Rift Valley holds the lowest ground

Along the eastern edge runs a section of the rift, a fissure in the Earth's crust that the Wikipedia account measures at 6,500 kilometres from Syria to East Africa. It is the boundary between two plates: the Golan Heights and all of Jordan sit on the Arabian Plate, and Galilee, the West Bank, the coastal plain, the Negev and Sinai on the African Plate. The fault has produced destructive earthquakes in 31 BCE and in 363, 749 and 1033 CE, about one every 400 years, and the slip that has built up since 1033 is enough for an earthquake of magnitude 7.4. In 2007 about 50,000 residential buildings did not meet the newer construction standards.

The Jordan River rises from the Dan, the Banias and the Hasbani near Mount Hermon. Only the Dan rises in undisputed Israeli territory; the Hasbani flows from Lebanon and the Banias from land taken from Syria in 1967. Britannica puts the river at 152 metres above sea level at Dan. It runs through the drained Hula basin into the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake of about 166 square kilometres whose level moves with the rain, between about 207 and 213 metres below sea level depending on the season. Below the lake the Jordan forms the boundary between the West Bank and Jordan and ends in the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea has no outlet, and its level is falling. The Jordan once brought it about 1.3 billion cubic metres of fresh water a year and now brings about 100 million, much of it agricultural runoff and sewage, because of irrigation and other uses upstream. The US Geological Survey records how fast the fall has accelerated:

The last figure comes from a 2018 report by Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection. As the shore retreats, sinkholes open in the exposed salt bed, and the layer of salt on the lake floor thickens by about 10 centimetres a year. Published figures for the surface level differ for that reason: Britannica gives 400 metres below sea level, and other figures run from 417 to 420 metres. South of the Dead Sea the rift continues as the dry Arava for about 170 kilometres to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba.

The rift is also where most of the country's minerals are. Rock salt and gypsum are abundant along it, and Britannica lists bromine and magnesium drawn from the waters of the Dead Sea alongside potash, with copper ore in the Arava and phosphates and small amounts of gypsum in the Negev. Small oil deposits were found in the northern Negev and south of Tel Aviv after limited drilling began in the 1950s, and Israel still imports most of its petroleum. The larger find lay offshore: in 2009 natural gas was discovered at the Tamar site, 90 kilometres west of Haifa, and Israel has since exported gas to Egypt by reversing the flow of the Arish-Ashkelon pipeline.

How the Negev covers half the country

The Negev is the southern half of Israel, a rough triangle with its base near Beersheba and the Dead Sea and its point at Eilat. Geographically it continues the Sinai desert. Lowlands lie in the west, hills in the centre and the Arava along its eastern side.

Rain falls off steeply across it. The northern Negev receives about 300 millimetres a year on fairly fertile soils, the western Negev about 250, the central Negev about 200 on impervious soils that send water off as flash floods, the high plateau of Ramat HaNegev about 100, and the Arava barely 50. Land receiving more than 300 millimetres is where most of the country's farming is, which makes about a third of Israel cultivable. North of Beersheba, Britannica notes, most land is cultivated or grazed.

The Negev's distinctive landforms are the makhteshim, steep-walled erosion craters found only there and in Sinai. Makhtesh Ramon is 38 kilometres long; the other two are Makhtesh Gadol and Makhtesh Katan. The southern Negev is mainly sandstone with veins of granite, breaking into hills, wadis and cliffs before it narrows to the coast at Eilat.

Most of the Bedouin of the Negev left when Israel incorporated the territory, and the desert has remained largely the domain of those who stayed or returned. Beersheba grew from a planned new town of the 1950s into a city through waves of immigrants from North Africa and the former Soviet Union.

Where the rain falls and when

The year has two seasons: a cool, rainy winter from October to April and a dry, hot summer from May to September. More than 70% of the rain falls between November and March, and June to September are usually rainless. Rain comes on about 60 days a year, often in violent storms that cause erosion and flash floods. A late or weak rainy season brings severe water shortages the following summer.

The north is Mediterranean and the south semi-arid to desert. Britannica gives coastal temperatures from about 16°C in January to 29°C in August; Eilat reaches about 21°C in January and up to 46°C in August. Places at about 750 metres, Jerusalem among them, usually see at least one snowfall a year, and Mount Hermon keeps snow on all three peaks through the winter and spring. The highest temperature on record, 54°C, was measured at Kibbutz Tirat Zvi in 1942.

How water is moved and how it is made

Britannica describes the water shortage as chronic, with the resources fully used: about three quarters for irrigation and the rest for industry and households. The National Water Carrier, completed in 1965, took water from the Sea of Galilee, whose capacity is about three cubic kilometres, and carried it south. Fanack's survey of the system records the consequence: the south became water-abundant at the expense of the north. Farmers adapted with drip irrigation, which Israel developed to save water and fertiliser, and with treated wastewater: Noam Weisbrod of Ben-Gurion University puts about 90% of the country's wastewater through tertiary treatment and into irrigation.

Before 2004 most water came from the Sea of Galilee and the coastal and mountain aquifers. Desalination changed that. Five seawater plants at Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Sorek and Ashdod produce almost 90% of the desalinated water, and their combined output is about 600 million cubic metres a year. The share of drinking water they supply is given differently: about 50% in a 2022 study cited by Fanack, and about 80% according to Weisbrod. Desalination uses about 5% of the country's annual energy, now mostly natural gas from offshore fields.

The newest step reverses the old one. The New National Water Carrier, launched in December 2022, pumps desalinated water from the coast north to refill the Sea of Galilee, and a further desalination plant is being built on the northern coast.

What grows and lives on the land

Britannica counts more than 2,800 plant species and the Wikipedia account 2,867, at least 253 of them introduced. The original forests were cut over centuries for shipbuilding, farmland and goats and replaced by second-growth oak and smaller conifers. The hills are mostly maquis, wild flowers bloom in the rainy season, and the Negev and the coastal dunes carry only desert scrub. Planting by the Jewish National Fund raised forest cover from 2% of the area in 1948 to 8.5% in 2016.

Mammals include gazelles, ibex, wild boar, jackals, hyenas and badgers, and more than 400 bird species have been recorded. The Mediterranean coast and the Jordan and Arava valleys are routes for migratory birds. Israel has 380 nature reserves, among them parts of the Arava, Mount Carmel, Mount Meron and what remains of the Hula lake and marshes after they were drained.