Irrigating Nazareth, Leveraging U.S. Aid: Water and Point Four Local Politics in the Middle East

This paper traces how Arab residents of Nazareth attempted to overcome their exclusion by the newborn Israeli state by appealing to aid from the American Point Four program during the early 1950s. Point Four sought to share U.S. aid and expertise in the underdeveloped world.  Nazarenes saw in it a potential solution to the chronic water shortages they had suffered for decades, and potential leverage against their exclusion by the Israeli state.  From the 1930s, residents of the city and their leadership had repeatedly attempted to overcome this problem, but their efforts were frustrated by the municipality’s lack of resources (almost a quarter of the buildings in Nazareth belonged to tax-exempt Christian religious institutions) and the British colonial authority’s full control over the project. In the transition to the Israeli state in 1948, political considerations compounded these obstacles. Seeking to advance the interests of the new ruling Jewish majority through controlling water, Israeli authorities sought to impose an alternative water project on Nazareth, under the direction of the national water company (Mekorot). When Nazarenes rejected the Israeli design, insisting on their right as a national minority to control their water, Israeli authorities stalled any attempts to resolve the crisis. Nazareth’s local leaders realized the limitations of their power, and understanding the city’s cachet as a holy Christian city, turned to American aid representatives in Israel, requesting their help in seeking control of the city’s waterworks. This paper investigates these interactions of local and international politics in negotiating American aid. Focusing on this recently, yet not fully, decolonized setting, and on non-state actors in a contested national conflict, this paper seeks complicate the role of US aid and Cold War policies in the process of decolonization.