Global Policy Forum

By Chris McGreal

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 allot ted 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 con trolled 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."

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