The difference between a time- and volume-based system, therefore, is not just the adoption of a different unit or method of measuring but also the reconceptualization of the social relations that surround a water source. Measuring water in time allows users to take into account the natural properties of water—that it is neither constant nor infinite—and frames water as a collective resource of the community. When measuring water by time, each user receives his share, regardless of the volume or amount available. Measuring by volume, on the other hand, obscures water's natural properties and constraints, privileging the claims of the individual over the needs of the group. This is not to say that a time-based system is always fairer or more equitable in practice. Shares may still become the object of dispute (Nader Reference Nader and Mayer). Those with more resources can buy up or appropriate more shares, meaning that social hierarchies are reflected in inequitable proportions of water (Attia Reference Attia and Mayer; Hammoudi Reference Hammoudi and Mayer). Certain turns might also be less desirable than others, such as those at night or during weekly days of rest (Hammoudi Reference Hammoudi and Mayer).
What such possibilities illustrate is that a time-based distribution system is not simply a form of private property that creates a relationship between a person and a thing. It places the water user into a network of social relationships, and the nature of those relationships is both embedded in, and reflected by, the distribution of water (Hammoudi Reference Hammoudi and Mayer; Nader Reference Nader and Mayer). Laura Nader (Reference Nader and Mayer, 4) notes that, in the context of a time-based water-sharing system in the Ḍrā Valley in Morocco, that "[p]atterns of individual rights and collective obligation must be identified in order to understand water distribution. Water received is one person's property, but at the same time it forms part of a network of collective rules and obligations." An incoming settler population is naturally going to disrupt such a network. Settlers have two options in such a situation. They can assimilate into a preexisting network by buying up time shares of a water source, requiring them to embed themselves in a web of social relationships. Or, conversely, they can find some other way of appropriating water. In the case of Mandate Palestine, this was by drilling and pumping groundwater and using volume-based measurements to delineate a new, exclusive set of water rights.
WATER INVESTMENT AND SPECULATION
Differing ways of measuring water rights were but one piece of a larger picture. Because securing and developing water resources was seen as crucial to the Zionist project, there arose a high volume of traffic in water rights and a speculative water market. In this climate, time-based water rights became an obstacle to outside investment, frustrating both the British government and Jewish settlers. Because time-based water rights are embedded in a network of social relations, they obstruct potential outside investment from someone not already in that community. If a group of farmers sharing a spring all define their usage based on time, there is no problem with collectively investing in an upgrade. They will each have the same time allotment before and after the upgrade, and everyone's output will increase equally. However, if an outside investor wants to upgrade the spring in order to increase the output and exploit the surplus, he cannot put money into the spring unless there is a guaranteed surplus of water that will come from that investment. Only a standardized, volume-based unit can denote a guaranteed amount of surplus water and, hence, guarantee a return. For example, in 1943, the British administration wanted to construct a masonry channel in Wadi Fari, but it could not do so because it would not be able to claim the new surplus supplied by the channel. Preexisting users who held rights to the water each held a period of time and would be able to claim any new surplus during their turn at the spring.
In addition to often necessitating volume-based measurements, loans for water infrastructure sometimes decided de facto rights in place of disputed water ownership. It was not always clear if a loan applicant held rights to the sources that they wanted to develop. This was often the case when Jewish settlements applied for credit. The loan officer acted as a water arbiter because "[t]o approve loans in the absence of such settlement [of water rights] entails the tacit recognitions by Government of rights in water for the utilisation of which the loan is granted." Getting a loan, therefore, determined water rights simply by enabling one party to build the infrastructure to exploit the water in question. Settlements were able to take over water sources simply because they had access to credit.
Creating yet further confusion was the rise of a speculative market for water rights, which the director of development, Lewis French, attributed to the shift to intensive agriculture. In 1935, the British attorney general wrote in a memorandum:
Water rights are a frequent subject of commercial transactions; a man may sell half his land and the whole of his water rights or he may retain the whole of his land and sell half his water rights. It is, moreover, not uncommon for speculators, who own no land at all, to purchase the water rights in an area and to farm out the water thus required to the highest bidders.
According to British officials, both speculation and partitioning communally held land disadvantaged users with fewer water rights and disorganized the time-based method of water sharing. As speculation continued, a man who could not afford to develop his water was often forced to "sell his holding to a capitalist who can develop it."
Water was in such high demand that in 1920 the Jewish Agency even hired a sorcerer who was famed for finding underground petroleum, water, and mineral deposits to survey Palestine in search of groundwater. By the 1930s, Zionist organizations began deep well boring—a process that requires expensive equipment, such as mechanical drills (Survey of Palestine 1946; Nadan Reference Nadan). Because underground water sources feed into springs and shallower wells, deep well boring often diminishes the supplies of neighboring water sources, leading effectively to appropriation. Infrastructure, such as a mechanical drill or pump, was therefore not only a way to secure water but also to take it from others. Those unable to invest in such infrastructure—typically, the fellaheen (peasant farmers) —were the most disadvantaged. Varying regimes of property rights were thus one complicating factor in a larger, chaotic environment.
GRANTING THE CONCESSIONS
In 1921, before the Palestine Mandate had been ratified, the high commissioner for Palestine granted Pinhas Rutenberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, two concessions for the generation and supply of electricity in Palestine and Transjordan. The concessionaire was to generate hydropower from three rivers—the 'Auja, Jordan, and Yarmuk—as well as supply irrigation from the 'Auja. Significantly, the concessions gave Rutenberg rights of expropriation and forbade preexisting users of these rivers from increasing their water usage. Rutenberg was thus given the unique authority early on in the Mandate to expropriate, destroy, and lay significant infrastructure over a large territorial area. The PEC eventually took over both of these grants, vesting these powers in the corporation itself (Shamir Reference Shamir).
These concessions were important from the outset, not only because the electric supply they were to generate had the potential to transform the region's economy, but also because they granted broad control over three of Palestine's major rivers. It is for this reason that the issue of water use during the Mandate cannot be understood separately from that of electricity. As such, the concessions generated a significant amount of controversy. While the significance of granting control over these rivers was not fully grasped from the outset, the ramifications would become clearer over time. They were understood from the start, however, by at least some Palestinians as blatant Zionist favoritism that excluded them from the economic life of the country.
During a 1922 debate in the House of Commons, some opposed the concessions, while others championed them as economic progress, a source of job creation, and an affirmation of the Balfour Declaration. Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies, described the concessions as creating a "new Palestinian world … a good gift which the Zionists could bring with them. Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not have in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine." The "gift" of electricity and irrigation, therefore, was part of colonial tutelage and the task of civilizing a backward population. Yet the concessions also solved a more pragmatic issue—funding. Churchill emphasized that the concessions would alleviate the British government's burden of financing public works in Palestine. Any British development project would have to be funded by a loan, but electrification did not promise profit or the ability to repay such a loan (Shamir Reference Shamir). Churchill argued that Rutenberg could raise the capital, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild would fund him on non-commercial terms.
Arabs protested the concessions through official and informal channels. Despite contemporary stereotypes of Palestine as a feudal, uncultivated desert, Sherene Seikaly (Reference Seikaly) has shown that the area was, during the Mandate period, experiencing an economic nahda (renaissance) of cultural and economic thought. This is reflected in some of the arguments against the concessions. The Palestine Arab delegation communicated in writing to the Colonial Office in 1922 their upset at the granting of monopolistic rights to public works: "The Zionists, through Mr. Rutenberg, are aiming at getting a stranglehold on the economics of Palestine, and once these are in their hands they become virtual masters of the country. The delegation further argued that the concessions should have at least been put to public tender, allowing for basic competition. What else are economic and social matters like financing public works, they queried, if not "the entire life of the country?"
Arabs in Palestine and Transjordan also protested in more informal ways, such as through boycotts. Many refused to hook up to the grid, and Transjordan went for years without electricity or industrial development as a result (Konikoff Reference Konikoff). In 1923, in Palestine, residents of Jaffa and the surrounding orange groves similarly boycotted the power (Shamir Reference Shamir). In fact, in the early 1920s, hardly any demand for electricity existed beyond Tel Aviv, and the idea of building another powerhouse on the Jordan, which the concessions had authorized, appeared absurd. While Jaffa ultimately connected, many continued to oppose the scheme.
Given the protests from the Palestine Arab delegation, granting the concessions cannot be fully understood simply as a benign peace offering or "good gift" to the Palestinians. In more honest terms, the chief secretary to the high commissioner for Palestine wrote in 1921 that the "Rutenberg Concession is as much a part of the Mandate as if it had actually been included in it. There has never been any doubt in my mind that the Rutenberg Concession must go through, and that it must go through whether the people of Palestine agree with it or not." British officials knew that they were going against the wishes of at least some part of the population. The concessions, therefore, were not merely a well-intentioned scheme of good governance or pacification.
CORPORATE VOTING RIGHTS
On its surface, the Rutenberg concessions may seem like a rather benign form of favoritism. After all, the PEC did employ and provide electricity to Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. The catch, however, was that Rutenberg and other initial investors designed the PEC's corporate structure to keep management of the company in Zionist hands. The corporate form thus functioned as a vehicle of exclusion, delineating who could and could not exercise control over electric production and, by extension, rivers, in Palestine. This can be understood, at least in part, in the context of Rutenberg's own personal Zionist orientation, which differed from Labor Zionism, the branch that would become the most mainstream.