Israel's
Deadly Thirst
By Chris McGreal
The Guardian
13 January, 2004
Ask
Ariel Sharon about the Six Day war and he will tell you that the fighting
of that momentous week in 1967 really began more than two years earlier
as Israel responded not to Syria's tanks but its bulldozers.
Damascus was constructing
a vast canal to divert the waters of two of the Jordan River's main
tributaries away from Israel in an attempt to squeeze dry an already
parched land. For Israel, the threat to its precarious water supply
was as great a challenge to the existence of the fledgling Jewish state
as any Arab army. Artillery duels and the Israeli air force brought
work to a halt.
"People generally
regard June 5 1967 as the day the Six Day war began," Mr Sharon
wrote in his autobiography. "That is the official date. But, in
reality, it started two-and-a-half years earlier, on the day Israel
decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan. While the border
disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the
matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death."
The threat from
Arab armies was buried by Israeli victories and the overwhelming technological
weapons superiority it enjoys today, along with a stash of secret atom
bombs. But continued competition for scarce water supplies continued
to dog the Middle East. Anwar Sadat signed Egypt's peace accord with
Israel in 1979 with a warning. "The only matter that could take
Egypt to war again is water," he said.
Jordan's King Hussein
said much the same 11 years later about his own country's peace treaty
with Israel. The former UN secretary general and ex-foreign minister
of Egypt, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, forewarned of just such a war.
Last week, Turkey
agreed an extraordinary plan to ship millions of tons of water in giant
tankers to Israel in a deal linked to hi-tech weapons shipments to Ankara.
A few years ago the plan was to pump fresh water between the two countries
in an undersea pipe, but the project was deemed prohibitively expensive.
The tankers will still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build
and operate and yet provide less than 3% of Israel's rapidly growing
needs, which has led the finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to rubbish
the scheme as unworkable.
Whether or not the
deal goes ahead, Israel will continue to lie at the heart of growing
competition for limited supplies of water - and disputes about ownership
- that underpins the conflict with the Palestinians, afflicts negotiations
with Syria and poses some of the hardest challenges to peace in the
Middle East.
The region's three
major waterways - the Jordan, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile - serve
a few countries well. Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt do not want for water,
although that is sometimes at the expense of their neighbours: Syria
remains bitter over Turkey's construction of a dam on the Euphrates
that disrupted the river's flow across the border.
Jordan, Israel and
the Palestinian territories are not so fortunate. Israel has the highest
per capita consumption of water in the region and uses far more than
it produces. Since 1967, it has met much of the demand by drawing it
from the occupied territories while restricting Palestinian access,
and by clinging to the Golan Heights as much for its crucial source
of fresh water as any military strategic advantage from being able to
see all the way to Damascus.
"If the world
were to work on the basis of rationality, water should never be a cause
for war because for the price of a modern war you could probably desalinate
an entire sea," says Martin Sherman, a former adviser on intelligence
to the Israeli government and the author of a study on water and security.
"But rationality has rarely been applied to the causes of war and
water certainly could be a cause or an excuse for a future conflict
in the Middle East because Israel has to decide whether to rely on Arab
altruism to safe guard the most important sources of its water supply
as part of any future peace settlement."
Israel relies on
three key water sources: the Sea of Galilee and two natural underground
aquifers - the "mountain aquifer" in the occupied West Bank
and the "coastal aquifer" in Israel. One or two dry years
has a profound effect on the aquifers, along with Israel pumping far
more water than is provided by replenishment. The Sea of Galilee, which
is pumped as far south as the Negev desert, fell to its lowest level
in recorded history last summer and came perilously close to exposing
the pumps. Winter rains have replenished it to a degree, but the water
level still sits precariously close to the "red line" at which
the national water authority says the sea's ecological stability will
start to erode. However, not many take the red line seriously, given
that the authority has lowered it several times over the years so that
it is always kept below falling water levels. It is now 2.5m below its
original designation.
The coastal aquifer
has fallen so low at times that it is in danger of irreversible contamination
by salt water drawn in from the Mediterranean sea. As the water table
falls, sea water percolates through coastal soil into the fresh water,
making it undrinkable and useless for irrigation.
The chairman of
the national water company, Uri Sagie, recently warned a conference
of Israeli farmers that there is a growing and unbridgeable gap between
production and consumption. "The water sources are being depleted
without the deficit being restored, and there is no choice except to
create additional sources in order to close the gap," he said.
It is not a message
the farmers like to hear, but there are some who blame them for Israel's
predicament. The Jewish state has an abiding attachment to the kibbutz
dwellers who colonised the desert. They provided the foundations for
modern-day Israel and shaped the myth of a brave, small people struggling
against all odds. But today agriculture consumes two-thirds of Israel's
water while contributing to just 2.5% of its gross domestic product.
Irrigation, compounded by a growing number of swimming pools, is a leading
cause of the gap between production and consumption.
But it is the Palestinians
who are paying the price. Under the Oslo peace agreement, Israel retained
overall control of water from the West Bank. The Palestinians now regret
the deal. "The defect is in the Oslo agreement," says Amjad
Aleiwi, a hydrologist at the Palestinian Water Authority. "The
fact is we can't even drill a well without approval from Israel, while
they pump all the water they like into the settlements."
More than 80% of
water from the West Bank goes to Israel. The Palestinians are allotted
just 18% of the water that is extracted from their own land. Palestinian
villages and farmers are monitored by meters fitted to pumps and punished
for overuse. Jewish settlers are not so constrained, and permitted to
use more advanced pumping equipment that means the settlers use 10 times
as much water per capita as each Palestinian.
"This has caused
us huge problems," says Aleiwi. "Palestinians get less than
60 units a day when the international minimum is 150. The Israeli domestic
use alone is 300 to 800 units. It's worse in Gaza. Much of the water
is not potable. That's why they have a lot of health problems, a lot
of diseases in knees and kidneys. How can it be that Jewish settlers
get unlimited amounts of pure water and that just across a fence children
have to drink polluted water?"
The Palestinians
accuse Israel not only of plundering their water but polluting it. Some
Jewish settlements pump raw sewage straight into the streams of neighbouring
Palestinian villages, contaminating water once used for drinking, cooking
and irrigation. Others pipe waste into the ground, which inevitably
feeds into the aquifers. Palestinian villages also dump their sewage
into the ground. Aleiwi blames the Israelis for both problems.
"They took
this land in 1967 and they controlled it completely until 1995. During
that period they built a lot of settlements but they only built one
waste treatment plant for all of us, Jews and Palestinians," he
says. "Most of the sewage goes back into the ground. It's the same
with pollution from their agriculture. There are very high levels of
nitrate and chloride in the aquifers. It's very dangerous to health."
Israel also replenishes
the groundwater with treated sewage that some critics say has too much
salt and is contaminating the water supply.
Sherman does not
deny that there are problems. "It's certainly true that Israel's
management of water resources over the past three decades has been anything
but flawless. There have been a lot of mistakes made," he says.
"In settlements across the green line, treatment of waste water
leaves quite a lot to be desired and I think there's quite a lot of
truth in the Arab criticisms. As far as it goes for the Arab population,
I think there are quite a lot of mitigating circumstances. Israel was
not free to establish water treatment plants without being accused of
establishing sovereignty."
The situation is
most critical in Gaza, where the Palestinian Authority controls water
sources. The drilling of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of illegal wells
in backyards has greatly reduced the water supply and led to contamination
by the sea. The Israelis say it is the result of Palestinian mismanagement,
and evidence of why they cannot be trusted with such a crucial resource.
The Palestinians see it differently.
"Israel drilled
hundreds of wells out around the edge of Gaza, tapping the fresh water
before it gets there," says Aleiwi. "I agree the problem was
compounded by drilling many more wells since the Israelis left. It's
illegal, but people thought that because the Israelis had gone it's
their water. That caused the pollution to be severe, but the main reason
is the Israelis stopped the fresh water reaching the aquifer."
Compounding the
Palestinians' problems is the steel and concrete barrier carving up
the West Bank. The Israelis call it the security fence, the Palestinians
the apartheid wall. "The wall will cost us 30% of the wells and
water in the western area," says Aleiwi. "It's not just a
land grab, they are after the water too. If you look at the route of
the fence, it is planned to ensure that many of the wells now fall on
the Israeli side."
Boutros-Ghali recently
told IslamOnline that he believes water is now the principal obstacle
to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. "Water lies
at the core of the problems in Israel. This is why [the Israelis] are
interested in the occupied territories; not for the territory, but for
the water within that territory," he said.
Then there are the
Golan Heights, which the Syrians are keen to win back, in part to ease
some of their own water supply problems. Opponents of a deal with Syria
predict that relinquishing control of the Heights could cost Israel
about one-third of its fresh water if the flow into the Sea of Galilee
becomes contaminated, deliberately or otherwise. They also say that
if Syria follows through on plans to build homes for hundreds of thousands
of people on the Heights, it could badly pollute the entire sea.
Others see Israel's
agreements with Jordan as the model for future agreements with the Palestinians
and Syrians. The treaty provides a detailed breakdown for maintaining
and sharing water resources, including an agreement by Israel to provide
25 million cubic metres of water to Jordan each year. There have been
tensions, particularly when Israel said it was unable to deliver the
quota because of poor rainfalls. But Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian
hydrologists say that they have worked well together to try and clean
up the Jordan river and on planning desalination projects and monitoring
pollution.
But Sherman is not
alone in arguing that water is reason enough for Israel to continue
to cling to the West Bank and Golan Heights. "You really need a
giant leap of faith in Arab altruism to believe that they would behave
in a manner consistent with Israel's hydrological interests when their
behaviour would be diametrically opposed to their hydrological interests.
And even if you were to deduct the ingrained long term hostility between
the two sides, I really don't see how it is going to work.
"The Palestinians
see a great number of refugees returning to the territories with a huge
increase in water consumption. The Syrians would have to reach ecological
standards in the Golan far more advanced than they have in the middle
of Damascus, and all this to protect the water supply of the Zionist
entity. This is something worth fighting for."