The Vanishing Waters of the Middle East

By Frank Collins

Israel and its neighbors are suffering one of the driest years in modern history. It follows three years of drought and declining water reserves. The Biblical Sea of Galilee is at the lowest level recorded in modern times and aquifers elsewhere are similarly depleted. It is now too late for spring rains to improve the situation very much. The Israelis conveniently forgot that in order to "make the desert bloom" ample water is required, and that overpumping in drought years can dangerously deplete water reserves. Overuse as much as the current drought is the cause of the present water shortage. The shortfall next year could be disastrous if rainfall again is scarce.

The water in the occupied territories is totally under the control of the occupiers.

By coincidence, California also faces a water shortage after five years of drought. The climatic conditions in Israel and Southern California are similar. Both are regions of semi-desert with rainfall confined to the winter period, so that agriculture, industry and domestic households must depend on large volumes of water stored in reservoirs and in natural aquifers to carry them through the dry season. Both regions also have rapidly expanding populations, some of whom depend for a living on agriculture using irrigation.

A Crucial Question

Politically, the resemblance ends there. California is a single administrative unit. Its water problem revolves around the diversion of water from agriculture to service the burgeoning cities and suburbs. Israel, however, depends on water diverted from its militarily occupied territories for one-third of Israeli consumption. More than 80 percent of the water in the occupied West Bank is either used by the Jewish settlers there, or else diverted from the West Bank for use in Israel.

Control of water is a crucial, although seldom mentioned, question that underlies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Confirming this point are the Israeli government's discriminatory and extraordinarily burdensome limitations on Palestinian access to water. The determination of the Israelis to retain full control of the water in the occupied territories is a hidden reason for their intransigence about withdrawing from the West Bank territories they seized in 1967. The present drought exacerbates the issue.

As in Israel at the present time, California's rapidly expanding population is placing new demands on the water supply. However, this only partially accounts for the acute water shortage. Eighty percent of California's water is used in agriculture, and at heavily subsidized prices, sometimes as low as one-tenth of the cost of producing it. Subsidization of water enables the growth of water-intensive crops such as rice and cotton that otherwise could not be profitably produced in California's semi-desert environment.

After five years of sparse rainfall in California, the major Oroville reservoir is down to one-quarter of capacity, the lowest in history for this time of year, while the small Gibraltar reservoir serving Santa Barbara is practically dry. With still another year of deficit rainfall a possibility, measures are being taken to cut agricultural water consumption as much as two-thirds.

Doing away with crops that are heavy water consumers would be an important step toward a long-term solution to water scarcity in California. In principle, this could be accomplished by eliminating federal and state government subsidies of water, letting the agricultural sector stand on its own economic feet. In practice, elimination of these subsidies would be difficult because of the power of the business interests involved.

The drought in Israel has persisted for a shorter period than in California, but its effect on water reserves has been at least as drastic. The Sea of Galilee and the underground aquifers have been depleted to the extent that the intrusion of waste water, sewage and, in the coastal area, salt water into the water supplies is a growing problem. Some Israeli hydrological experts warn that intrusions of this kind will be irreversible.

These conditions mandate immediate and massive cut-backs in water deliveries. Cuts of two-thirds in deliveries to agriculture and one-fifth to other users were proposed in the Knesset in January. Parenthetically, the additional water consumed by the Soviet immigrants is minor compared to the giant demands of agriculture.

The pattern of water usage is quite similar to California's. In Israel, 70 percent of the water consumed is for agriculture and is subsidized by the government to the extent that farmers, including collectives and cooperatives, pay about one-third of the cost of the distributed water. In Israel, the most water-intensive crops are cotton and citrus fruits.

The rationalization of Israeli agriculture to make it consistent with semi-desert conditions could be at least partially accomplished by the removal of government subsidies. The political obstacles to such a step are, however, almost insuperable. The Water Committee in the Knesset is composed of members of the Farming Committee. In the words of the Jerusalem Post (April 11 1990), "The result is that the Israeli taxpayer subsidizes, to the tune of $200 million a year, the European consumer's purchases of Israeli produce."

For the Palestinians, the drought, coming after years of discriminatory water restrictions, is an unmitigated disaster. Israeli Jews are permitted to drill wells to any depth, but few Palestinians are allowed to drill any wells, even shallow ones. The deeper wells drilled by the Israelis have, therefore, lowered the level of water in the underground aquifers, causing many of the surface springs and shallow wells used by Palestinians to run dry. The effect of the drought thus bears heavily on Palestinian villages not connected to the national water system.

Glaring examples of political discrimination are the water subsidies that the national water system makes available only to Jewish farmers. Palestinian agriculture on both sides of the Green Line long suffered from this form of economic discrimination, which predates the current drought.

This, however, is only one facet of the overarching fact that the water in the occupied territories is totally under the control of the occupiers, who restrict access to Palestinians and divert into Israel as much water as they please without consulting the Palestinians. Only one result of this discriminatory control was described by Reuben Pedhazur in Ha'aretz of April 25, 1989. Even then, he reported that fewer than 100,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank were allowed to consume more water than all the one million Palestinian residents of the same territories.

Frank Collins is a free-lance journalist specializing on the Middle East.