From either shore Israeli and Jordanian mayors climbed down overgrown banks to waiting canoes. Soldiers forbade them from crossing so they rowed to midstream for a unique meeting yesterday to discuss the decline of the once-great biblical waterway.

Diminished, green and polluted this is the modern River Jordan, in which Jesus was baptised and whose waters, the Book of Joshua records, “overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest”.

Now the Jordan has lost more than 90 per cent of the 1.3 billion cubic metres (1.7 billion cu yds) that used to flow through it each year from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, 100km (62 miles) further south.

Worse, environmentalists fear, a new dam being built by Jordan and Syria on its main tributary, the Yarmouk, will cut a further 20 million cubic metres of the Lower Jordan’s fresh water, drying up its flow altogether.

“Sadly the Jordan River is little more than a sewage channel now,” Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, said. He added that the new dam would deprive the river of the “critical mass” of fresh water that maintains the present flow.

“Half the world would love to travel down the banks of the Jordan in the footsteps of Jesus, but they can’t do it because the waters are so polluted it is a health hazard,” he said.

“Not only have governments taken away the waters predominantly for agriculture, they have declared the whole area a closed military zone so the general public is not even aware of the scale of the problem.”

The main problem is water scarcity in a region where all countries are desperate to supply growing populations.
Israel initiated use of the river in the late 1950s, when its National Water Carrier began draining off hundreds of millions of cubic metres from the Sea of Galilee.

Neighbouring Jordan and Syria have also built dams and now there is just a tiny stream, boosted by sewage and agricultural waste from Palestinian and Jordanian villages, and Israel’s Jewish settlements.

As the mayors watch, environmentalists take depth soundings in mid-stream. The 1.5 metres recorded is less than half the river’s depth a century ago, when the nearby bridges’foundation stones were not clearly visible as they are today.

Like the river all three bridges — the original Roman arch, the Ottoman railway bridge of 1905, linking Damascus and Haifa, and the British road bridge of 1925 — are the victims of politics and war, destroyed in fighting between Jewish and Arab forces in 1948.

Sitting beneath them in a canoe, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, the Mayor of Ma’ad, said that raw sewage and agricultural pollutants have fish and crops on his Jordanian side.

“This is a holy river which is most sacred to our Christian brethren,” he said. “We urge everyone, on both sides, to act to purify and clean it. The Jordanian Government is aware of the problems within its limitations and capabilities, but it can’t do the job by itself.”

His Israeli counterpart, Dov Litvinoff, the Mayor of Tamar regional council, which is responsible for the Dead Sea, has little hope that governments will change the policies of decades which have left the Dead Sea 25 metres below its historic level, and shrinking by 1-1.2 metres a year.

“It is very frustrating. Even if they don’t try to bring back the old level, at least restoring part of it would bring two things back to life, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea,” he says.

Israeli officials, however, maintain that the Lower Jordan is not in danger of halting its flow.

“It is an absurd claim,”said Dr Doron Markel, of the Israeli Water Authority, said. “There is no increase in the diversion of the water. It is a question of priorities and Israel has decided to use the Sea of Galilee as its main source of drinking water.”

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