By Nigel Thorpe
Senior English Editor
Albawaba.com - Amman
As an old English proverb puts it "we never know the worth of water 'til the well is dry." Across the Middle East, wells are certainly running dry and becoming more and more saline at an alarming rate as both populations and the demands of agriculture and industry for water increase.
Water is emerging as a largely hidden but major key to peace in the Middle East. According to a recent National Geographic News article, “a lack of agreement on how the region’s scarce resources should be divided could not only wreck any peace deal with Israel, but could actually lead to new outbreaks of war among the Arab states. “People outside the region tend not to hear about the issue,” commented a US State Department official. “It just doesn’t make the news. But there are talks all the time among water specialists. Guaranteeing fair access to water is critical to any peace agreement.” Palestinian official Fadl Ka-wash agrees that water was “no less important and serious than any other final status issues on the agenda of the Camp David summit.”
The acute shortage of drinking water can be traced to both geological and political factors. The results of a recent American geological survey have revealed that, in common with much of the Horn of Africa, the climate of the Middle East has become progressively drier over the last few thousands of years. With a population of over 12 million, and low annual rainfall, Palestine, Jordan and Israel are all “running on low.” Israel receives over 40 percent of its water supplies from aquifers beneath the occupied West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza Strip while it obtains another 25 percent from the Sea of Galilee.
Israel’s dependency on water from the occupied territories explains its extreme reluctance to give up the entire Golan Heights region, which is often called the “water tower of the Middle East”, or lose control of the Sea of Galilee shoreline. As a consequence of over-explotation and low rainfall, the Sea of Galilee reached its lowest level in human history in the year 2000. In spite of its present control of the Golan and Galilee “water taps”, Israel was running dry last year due to the worst drought it had experienced since 1990 – 1991. The Israeli cabinet decreed a 40 percent reduction in subsidized water allocations for agricultural purposes and promised compensation to farmers for their resulting losses. In view of the high possibility of many more years of reduced rainfall and the “imminent threat to drinking water supplies,” the leading Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz’ called on the government to set “special regulations to reduce urban consumption and educational activities to promote water conservation.”
Political factors in the troubled Middle East have exacerbated the effects of local droughts and created a new divide, the “green lawns and dry taps” schism between Israel and the occupied territories. Palestinians say that their citizens on average receive less than one-third of the water as the average Israeli citizen. Israel’s rich, they argue, indulge themselves with profligate irrigation schemes, California-style lawns, vat-sized bathtubs, and ample swimming pools. At one point last year, Palestinian officials in Hebron, the most parched of the West Bank cities, limited the access of households to running water to two days per month. Despite agreements that returned control over most of the West Bank to Palestinian Authority, most of the occupied territories water still flows through Israeli pipes.
As well as restricting the flow of water into the occupied territories, according to a BBC.online report on Tuesday, Israel has opened a new front in the water wars. A Palestinian minister has charged that Israel is pumping waste water and sewage into a dried-up river bed that crosses the occupied territories of Gaza on its way to the Mediterranean. In addition to the obvious short-term health hazard of the effluent, the minister warned of a long term environmental disaster due to the contamination of Gaza’s ground water system, on which one-and-a-quarter million people depend, and the pollution of Mediterranean beaches and fish stocks. According to BBC.online, Israel has not commented on the Palestinian accusations.
According to a report issued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January, the aquifer’s of the Gaza Strip are already under the twin threats of over-exploitation and contamination by sea water. As water is drawn from the aquifer’s in ever increasing quantities to satisfy the growing demands for drinking water and agricultural irrigation, the aquifer water becomes smaller in volume but higher in salinity because the outflow is far in excess of the annual rainfall. The MIT researches, however, revealed at the December, 2000, meeting of the American Geophysical Union that even if the Palestinians could balance their water budget, the seawater infiltrating in the aquifers, together with the re-circulation and evaporation losses of pumped groundwater, are increasing the water’s salt concentration at a higher rate than the fresh rainwater can desalinate it.
Although efficient and fair methods of water management in the countries of the Middle East would help to ease the present chronic water shortages, more drastic measures are needed in the long term. One such solution would be to import water into the parched Middle East countries from their more northerly and “water-rich” neighbors. The 100 meter high Wihdeh ‘Unity’ Dam to be constructed on the Yarmouk River, Syria, will hold the 225 million cubic meters of water needed by Jordan to generate electricity, irrigate agricultural areas of the Jordan Valley and meet domestic demands.
On an even more ambitious scale, BBC.online reported on Thursday that the world’s most ambitious fresh water pipeline, 540 kilometers in length, will carry water from the Karkheh dam in northern Iran, to the coast of southern Kuwait. The 760 million liters of water flowing from Iran to the emirate each day will travel first down the 330 kilometers of pipeline that runs across Iranian territory. and then run under the sea for the remaining 210 kilometers.
Movements of water within a country are also becoming increasing common. After years of severe drought, the Egyptian government has ordered that a eight-hundred year old aqueduct should be restored to carry water from the Nile to Cairo’s thirsty population. In March 2000, the government of Iraq began digging a canal to take water from the Tigris River to the drought-striken lands north of Baghdad. Declining rainfall, however, means that the great rivers of antiquity such as the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are not the unlimited sources of water that they once were. The water levels of the Tigris, for example, have been falling sharply due to scarce rain fall over the past three years and the increased use of river water for irrigation.
The one truly unlimited source of water which Middle East countries are increasingly turning to are the world’s oceans. Desalination, although attractive in theory, is very expensive and brings with it the unexpected problem of thermal pollution of coastal waters. Saudi Arabia, which according to Bushank, an advisor to the Supreme Economic Council headed by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, consumes between three to eight times move water than is available from its renewable resources, has long been at the forefront of desalination technology. A report cited by AFP recently suggested that Saudi Arabia will need to invest 300 billion riyals (80 billion dollars) in the water sector over the next 40 years.
Desalination became a political issue in February, 2001 when the newly elected prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, offered a joint water development project as one of the rewards that the Palestinians could gain by “turning their backs on violence.” The Water Research Institute (WRI), Technion City, Haifa, held a conference in the year 2000 on “New Developments in the Treatment and Desalination of Effluents, Brackish and Other Marginal Waters” which reflected Israel’s growing understanding of the need to exploit alternative and renewable water supplies.
The National Geographical News article suggests that “many believe the biggest flash-point (in the world) is the Middle East with its desert climate, shrinking aquifers, staggering rates of population growth, and tradition of settling differences by fighting. World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin agrees, “Many of the wars of this (20th) century were about oil, but the wars of the next century will be about water.” A decade ago, the former Turkish president Turgut Ozal proposed a “peace pipeline” to sell surplus water from the Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers to the parched countries of the Arabian Peninsula. The National Geographical article suggests that it would not be the expense (billions of dollars), or time (up to ten years), involved in building the pipeline that would be the major problem, but “getting nations that have often warred against each other to cooperate.”
In any future Middle East conferences, water is likely to
be one of the hidden items on the agenda that will make
or break peace deals and the future pipe of peace is likely
to be a hubbly-bubbly ( hooka or shisha ), the
Arab water pipe.
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
