The Power Plant on Two Rivers

The Naharayim plant was the focus of great hopes for the country's agricultural and industrial development, but equally, promised a higher standard of living, social progress and way of life. Everyone who aspired to see the people of Israel secure in its own land understood that the ability to absorb the millions who would return to the homeland and provide them with a decent living depended on technological prowess. Jews from eastern Europe in the yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community of Palestine), particularly the pioneers among them, liked to paraphrase Lenin's saying that socialism meant Soviet rule plus electrification. Applying this to their own situation, they said that Zionism, including the building up of the land, could not be realized without a technological revolution: namely, electrification of the means of production.

The production of electricity for illumination and its utilization for the public dates only from the last quarter of the 19th century. Electricity became available in Palestine quickly but on a small scale. By 1890, electric lighting had been installed at the Rishon Lezion winery, which had began partial operations, but the power originated neither in a power plant nor a generator but in an array of batteries. The initiative came from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who in addition to his widespread efforts and support for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, was an enthusiastic follower of the latest technological developments.

An electrical generator accompanied the German Kaiser Wilhelm II when he and his large entourage visited Palestine in 1898 and set up camp in Jerusalem and elsewhere, enabling the country's inhabitants to witness at first-hand the wonders and benefits of electricity. Electric lights were installed in Augusta Victoria, the castle-like structure, later to become a hospital, which the Kaiser built on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem and named after the Empress. Battery-powered lighting was also installed in the large house in Jerusalem built by Yosef Navon, who had sold his concession for installing the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway line to a French company, even before the formal dedication. A similar installation was made early in the 20th century in the Yefeh Nof Hotel in Jaffa, near the sea.

The electricity for the first moving-picture houses that had opened in Palestine between 1910 and 1912, first in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv, came from small generators. During the First World War, the German forces in Palestine also made use of generators to provide power for lighting and other needs in their military encampments.

After the war, and especially in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the hopes it aroused in the yishuv and among world Jewry in general, Jewish interest in Palestine grew and ways were sought to accelerate the country's economic and technological development. The production and use of electric power was seen as one of the key elements toward achieving that goal.

In 1919, an engineer, Pinhas Rutenberg, born in Ukraine in 1879, who had been active in the Russian Revolution and afterwards in the Zionist movement, arrived in Palestine. After making widespread surveys, he submitted a proposal to establish 13 hydroelectric power stations with a total capacity of 548,000 horsepower. His plan, which encompassed not only Western Palestine but also Transjordan and much of Syria and Lebanon, was ahead of its time. It was too ambitious in terms of the available financing and the number of potential consumers for the vast amount of electricity that would be generated.

In 1921, with the active assistance of the Zionist leadership, public figures, and private capital, Rutenberg was granted a concession from the British mandatory government to generate electricity by harnessing the Yarkon River near the growing city of Tel Aviv. Shortly afterwards, he received an assurance that he could also exploit all the running water in western Palestine, including that of the Jordan.

Prior to the First World War, the Turkish authorities had granted a franchise to utilize the Yarkon to generate electricity for Jerusalem to a Greek named Fukiya. However, he died before he could implement his plan and the concession passed to another Greek, named Mavromatis, who did not take it up. When Rutenberg was awarded the concession, Mavromatis sued, hoping to be granted compensatory payment and a waiver fee. The suit reached the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which ruled that his right to produce electricity applied only to Jerusalem. Thus was born the Jerusalem Electric Corporation.

The Palestine Electric Corporation, which had been established in London, built three diesel plants within five years. The first began operating in Tel Aviv in December 1923, followed two years later by Haifa and Tiberias. Together the three stations had a capacity of less than 1,000 kilowatts.

Rutenberg had also planned a power station to utilize the waters of the Yarkon but abandoned the idea when he found that its capacity would barely suffice for the rapidly developing town of Ramat Gan and its surroundings. In March, 1926, he was granted the concession for the utilization of the Jordan River and for the supply of electricity throughout Palestine, other than Jerusalem.

At about the same time, the Italians installed a water turbine at Tabgha on the north-western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was powered by the brackish waters of a stream, Ein Nur, which flowed down from a pool on the heights above. The turbine was used to grind flour and pump water from the lake up to the Mount of Beatitudes; the electricity generated was used to illuminate the monastery and a hostel for pilgrims on the Mount.

Rutenberg's first idea was to build a power station in the Beit She'an Valley to exploit the large concentration of springs there. However, the then remoteness of the area from Jewish settlements and its hostile Bedouin population, persuaded him to look elsewhere. He devised a new plan which he believed was more realistic with respect to the conditions of time and place, topography and possibilities for power generation.

The site he chose was the confluence of the river Yarmuk with the Jordan, of which it forms the major tributary, and potentially the greatest source of power that could be produced by harnessing Palestine's running waters. Moreover, the flow of the Jordan could be regulated by partially blocking and storing its waters in the Sea of Galilee during the rainy winter season when water was abundant, and then releasing these reserves in the summer. Topography and geography combined to suggest a name for the site: Naharayim ("Two Rivers").

Ground work began in 1927, including the re-aligning of the riverbed to accommodate the power plant and its facilities. The project gave employment to a large body of workers - some 3,000 worked there during the five years of construction, which coincided with severe economic depression and rampant unemployment throughout the country, jobs which lasted until almost the end of 1931.

One of the first acts of the project's management was to provide compensation to two flour mills that operated on the Jordan north of Naharayim and which stood to lose their water due to the deepening of the river bed. Work then began in earnest on the sprawling station in what was to be the biggest construction project undertaken until then in Palestine.

The amount of water that passes through the Jordan and Yarmuk is not constant: the torrents of a rainy winter inevitably give way to the shallow streams of the dry summers. The Sea of Galilee, therefore, made a natural storage reservoir for the Jordan's waters. By using dams to regulate the flow of the water out of the lake on its journey southward, an optimal amount of water could be assured for the turbines. This was not possible with the Yarmuk, other than storage for a brief period in a small artificial lake.

The first facility of the complex was a dam which also served as a bridge over the Jordan, at the point where its waters spilled out of the Sea of Galilee on their way south. The Degania Dam, as it is known, is adjacent to the bridge which forms part of the road leading from Tiberias to the Jordan Valley. The purpose of the dam was to regulate the flow of the Jordan River waters in accordance with the amount needed to activate the power plant. This was followed by the eight-metre-high Dalhamiya Dam (north of Kibbutz Ashdot-Ya'akov) by means of which a broad, deep channel was created for the Jordan, forming a flowing serpentine reservoir, three kilometres long, with a capacity of 60 cubic metres of water per second.

The third element was a dam over the Yarmuk, 14 metres high, which blocked the flow of the river not far from its natural spill into the Jordan and created an artificial lake covering 300 acres. Eight hundred cubic metres of water a second could pass through each of the dam's two sluice gates. The water of the Jordan was turned on its heels, as it were, and its waters merged with those of the Yarmuk.

A 400-metre concrete canal conducted the water from this lake to another pool from which it hurtled down through iron pipes from a height of 27 metres directly into the turbines of the power plant. The churning water activated the turbines and, its work completed, was channeled back through a special canal, 1,200 metres in length into the Jordan's natural riverbed.

By the beginning of 1932, construction of the Naharayim plant was almost complete and a test had already been carried out. However, in February that year, heavy rains in the region caused raging flash floods and the river overflowed its banks. The power plant was flooded and severe damage was caused, particularly to the system of canals and transformers. The result was a 16-month delay in the start of operations. Finally, on 6 June 1933, the Naharayim power plant was dedicated in a festive ceremony, with the nominal owner, Emir Abdullah, the ruler of Transjordan, raising the lever that activated the turbines.

The plan had envisaged four turbines with a total capacity of 26,000 kilowatts. or more than 32,000 horsepower. However, during construction, it emerged that only rarely would the necessary amount of water required to generate the maximum capacity be available. Consequently, it was decided to install three turbines, with a combined capacity of 18,620 kws, or 25,500 hp (though place was left for a fourth to be built at a later time). In the first phase only two turbines were operative, with the third beginning to operate a year later.

The station, which during its existence was the only hydro-electric plant in Palestine, had an effective capacity of 25,500 hp. This was 16-17 times as much as the initial capacity of the Palestine Electric Corporation's first three power plants combined.

Within two or three years Naharayim was supplying more than three-quarters of the total power generated by the Palestine Electric Corporation. But as time passed and the country experienced rapid industrial development, Naharayim's share of power production gradually declined. The original hope - for the plant to generate 150 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year - did not materialize; the actual figure was between 50 and 64 million kwh. In the absence of water sources in sufficient amounts, the Electric Corporation turned to steam-driven turbines. The first such plant, with a capacity of 30,000 kws, or slightly less than twice that of Naharayim, was dedicated in Haifa in 1935. In 1938, the first turbine (also steam-driven), with a capacity of 12,000 kws, went into operation at the Reading* Power Station in Tel Aviv.

By now, Naharayim's three water-driven turbines were turning out no more than a quarter of the country's power. The years that followed, and particularly the period of World War II, saw a rapid increase in electricity consumption in Palestine. In 1945, for example, consumers purchased 216 million kwh, and Naharayim's contribution to the country's electricity production that year was at most 25 percent. This decreased even further when the Reading Power Station put another steam-driven turbine into operation.

One day before the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, Iraqi forces seized Naharayim and the power plant ceased to operate. To prevent Iraqi tanks from crossing the Jordan and attacking the Jewish settlement in the Jordan Valley, the order was given to open the sluice gates of the Degania dam. The resulting rush of water, which also deepened the river at this crucial location, blocked the enemy's attempted breakthrough and prevented an Iraqi-Jordanian incursion into the Jordan Valley. This was the last service performed by the Naharayim power plant.

The plant's closure cost the infant state slightly more than 18,000 kws (about 20 percent) of its electrical power. Only the activation of a third steam-driven turbine at Reading and the severance from the system of consumers who were now outside the boundaries of the new state, prevented a large-scale technical-economic breakdown which would have been caused by a country-wide power shortage. Within a short time the building of Reading C and the expansion of the other plants brought about new momentum in Israel's production of electricity. The inclusion of the Jerusalem power plant and the building of a new plant at Ashdod and a major installation west of Hadera which uses coal-fired steam-driven turbines, has ensured a continuous increase in the capacity of the Electric Corporation.

Today, Israel's power plants generate over 8,300 megawatts. The current capacity, therefore, is more than 460 times that of the Naharayim turbines. Nothing tangible, then, would be gained by reactivating the Naharayim plant today.

Following the signing of the peace agreement between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, most of the area of Naharayim was returned to Jordanian sovereignty. On a hill top overlooking the plant, the Jordanian army set up a military presence, ironically dubbed "Island of Peace," and the area was visited by many Israelis as visible evidence of the peace process. This idyll was shattered in May 1996, when a deranged Jordanian soldier (subsequently imprisoned for life) started shooting at a bus load of young Israeli girls from Beit Shemesh on a school trip, seven of whom were killed. However, since that tragedy, the site once again attracts many thousands of visitors.

		NAHARAYIM
		The Yarmuk Dam under construction, 1929

NAHARAYIM
The central control room at the power plant, 1933

		NAHARAYIM
		Pinhas Rutenberg in the turbine hall, 1933

NAHARAYIM
The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan fomally inaugurates the power plant, June 1933; Rutenberg on the left

		NAHARAYIM
		The Emek Railway to Damascus crossing the Yarmuk at Naharayim

NAHARAYIM
The Jordan Bridge

		NAHARAYIM
		The remains of the power plant today

NAHARAYIM
Memorial to the seven girls killed at Naharayim, May 1966