The River Jordan plays two intersecting roles for Israelis and Palestinians: it is a national border and a major reserve of surface water. As a border, the Jordan is currently a site at which Palestinians travelling between Jordan and the West Bank endure lengthy and often humiliating encounters with Israel's occupation. As a resource, the river is claimed by both sides, but is diverted at present almost in its entirety into Israel's National Water Carrier and used upstream to a lesser extent by Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The ‘mighty Jordan’ of popular imagination is now a contaminated trickle of sewage, saline spring water and agricultural runoff from farmland and fishponds that sometimes disappears almost entirely. The Jordan's parlous ecological state is one of the best-known and most widely reported aspects of hydropolitics in Israel/Palestine. This is partly because the river's contemporary despoliation provides a compelling contrast with the historic fertility and abundance described in biblical accounts of the Holy Land, serving as an appealing narrative hook for journalists. Conflict over the Jordan's waters is also the most frequently cited example of past and future ‘water wars’. The River Jordan is overloaded with material and symbolic significance for Israelis, Palestinians and the international community, particularly the Christian world, and for this reason I take it as the starting point for this work.

In this chapter I examine three texts in which the River Jordan plays a major narrative role. The first is writer and president of the Jewish Farmers’ Federation Moshe Smilansky's largely forgotten short story ‘Hawaja Nazar’, initially published in four instalments from 1910 to 1911 in the World Zionist Organisation journal ha-Olam and included in English translation in Smilansky's 1935 collection Palestine Caravan.