Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  Given the severe water scarcity and stark inequity in available supply between Israel and its Jordan basin neighbors, water was one of the contentious core issues in the regional peace negotiations that ensued from the famous handshake between PLO leader Yasser Arafat—himself a civil engineer with a professional understanding of water issues—and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993 on the lawn of the White House. Along with territorial borders, settlements, refugees’ right of return, and Jerusalem, water was one of the five central issues, and one of Israel’s top priorities, in the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process. The September 1995 interim accord affirmed the unequal four to one sharing of the mountain aquifers. Israel formally recognized Palestinians’ right to West Bank groundwater, including a small increase to alleviate immediate scarcity and a promise to help Palestinians develop the eastern aquifer—which in fact, the Israelis had unsuccessfully sought to develop themselves for years. The goal of sharing West Bank groundwater on a more equitable basis, however, was put off to the final-status stage; it fell by the wayside when the peace process collapsed in 2000.

  The Palestinian-Israeli peace talks provided political cover for the 1994 treaty between Jordan and Israel. The treaty included an Israeli concession to supply an additional 50 million cubic meters of water per year to help meet water-famished Jordan’s minimum needs, as well as commitments to cooperate on joint water resource development and to confront the challenge of regional scarcity. The fact that water experts from both nations had been secretly meeting for years since the collapse of the 1950s Johnston Mission along the banks of the Jordan River at regular “Picnic Table Talks” to exchange information and sometimes coordinate water operations facilitated the swift achievement of the peace treaty. Helpful, too, was the pragmatic, unwritten understanding the two nations had forged in 1969–1970 whereby Israel agreed to desist from further destruction of Jordan’s vital national aqueduct in exchange for the kingdom’s curtailment of PLO raids on Israel across the Jordan River—an understanding that preceded Jordan’s bloody expulsion of PLO guerrillas in the battles of Black September 1970. In contrast, progress in negotiating the return of the Golan Heights with Syria, with whom no similar back-channel measure of trust and pragmatic understanding had been built, stumbled in 2000 in large part over Syria’s insistence on regaining access to the receded shoreline of Galilee, Israel’s main renewable reservoir and a vital linchpin of its national water security.

  A near water crisis flared soon afterward, in 2001–2002, when militant southern Lebanese Shiites allied with Syria took advantage of Israel’s 2000 unilateral withdrawal from most of south Lebanon after eighteen years of occupation to immediately launch a pipeline to divert a modest amount of water from the Wazzani Springs on the Golan border. The Wazzani fed the Hasbani River, which in turn provided one-quarter of the supply for the Jordan River. With five times more supply per person than Israel, water-sufficient Lebanon could have chosen to divert surplus water from another source, such as the Litani River, that flowed entirely within its borders and would have required shorter transport to the villages the water was allegedly intended to serve. With overtones of events leading to the Six-Day War, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon warned that Israel regarded the Wazzani diversion as a deliberate provocation that was a potential cause for war; a timely international diplomatic flurry at the highest government levels of the United States, the U.N., and the European Union in the fall of 2002 averted a violent blowup. Renewed back-channel talks between Syria and Israel, brokered by non-Arab Muslim Turkey, came very close to a breakthrough over the Golan and the Jordan waters, but did not have sufficient American support and was overtaken by new regional Israeli-Palestinian violence in Gaza in the winter of 2008–2009.

  Israel’s response to its water scarcity challenge was unique among countries in the region. It went beyond simply struggling to secure dominance over as much of the region’s natural surface and groundwater supply as possible. It also positively embraced policies that promoted more-productive use of existing supplies and the pioneering use of innovative water technologies. In response to the drought-induced water crisis of 1986, for instance, Israel cut agricultural water consumption by nearly one-third within six years by sharply trimming water subsidies to more fully reflect the total cost of sustainable provision and delivery; subsequent cuts moved Israel closer toward its ultimate national goal of reducing irrigation consumption by 60 percent. Under the stress of a 2008 water emergency, most Israeli farmers agreed in principle to pay full market price to the state water company. Israel redirected its agricultural water savings toward higher economic return uses in industry and high-tech sectors, vital urban water systems, and low-water-intensive, high-value crops. Typical of advanced economies, agriculture’s share of Israel’s overall economic output was only about 2 percent, even though it consumed three-fifths of the nation’s water. The more efficient use of existing water enabled Israel to earn the revenue needed to import food and other virtual water goods it could not itself sustainably produce. Israel’s economic restructuring represented a paragon alternative development path for Egypt and other water-famished nations of the Middle East.

  Israeli farming’s global reputation for efficiency was also burnished by its leadership in using many advanced water technologies. Notable among these was the growing trend toward treating, recycling and then reusing wastewater, for farming and purposes where lower water quality sufficed. Three-quarters of treated sewage from Tel Aviv and other cities, for instance, was pumped to farms in the Negev and other areas to grow crops in the early 2000s. Much of the recycled wastewater was used in high efficiency, drip irrigation systems pioneered by Israeli engineers in the 1960s. Drip irrigation delivered water directly to the plant roots through underground, perforated tubes; modern techniques combined computer monitoring of soil conditions to deliver precisely calculated amounts for optimum crop growing. Through drip techniques, crop yields per unit of water input often doubled and tripled. Only about half the water in traditional flood irrigation, by contrast, ever reaches the plant roots, while much is wasted to evaporation as well. Two-thirds of Israel’s agriculture employed such microirrigation methods by the early 2000s; Israeli experts helped transplant the same techniques to neighboring Jordan, which applied it on over half its own farmland. Through the combination of drip irrigation and recycling treated wastewater, Israeli farmers quintupled their water productivity in the thirty years leading up to 2000.

  Water efficiency is a necessary, but not a sufficient, response for water-famished regions like the Middle East. New water supplies are also needed. To supplement its water supply, Israel was increasingly turning to state-of-the-art, large-scale desalinization of seawater. Although long employed in some extremely water-scarce, coastal regions where there was no alternative, desalinization had been prohibitively expensive since it required vast amounts of energy to evaporate water or, using more modern, reverse-osmosis techniques, to filter out the salt through a very fine membrane under high pressure. Until recent advances, desal water often cost a hundred times more than natural water supplies. From the 1990s, desal costs at reverse-osmosis plants began to fall sharply—by as much as two-thirds. By the turn of the twenty-first century, water scarcity and falling desal costs induced Israel to launch five large, state-of-the art desalinization plants along its southern Mediterranean coast north of Gaza. The first, at Ashqelon, opened in 2005. It delivers high-quality freshwater at under two times the cost of water pumped up from the Sea of Galilee to Tel Aviv. A drought emergency in 2008 spurred a further commitment to desal—by 2020 Israel expects to produce 750 million cubic meters of desalinated water each year, or more than the amount drawn from West Bank aquifers. Whether economical or not when measured in purely conventional market terms, desalinized water contains a potentially priceless political dividend if it delivers water security and one of the keys to peace with the Palestinians.

  To further bolster its long-term security, Israel
also began tapping a new, very expensive, but important strategic water source by buying a small amount from the Middle East’s rising water superpower, Turkey. In the early twenty-first century, non-Arab, Muslim Turkey looms as an increasingly pivotal regional power not only because it is the frontline between the West and the Islamic world, controls maritime access between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and is a formidable military power, but also because of its growing leverage as the Middle East’s water-wealthiest nation. Turkey’s many mountain rivers provide its population with at least 10 times the per capita supply of Israel and triple that of Syria. Of particular strategic significance, its snowcapped, mostly Kurdish-inhabited, southeastern highlands, control the headwaters of both the mighty twin rivers of ancient Mesopotamia, and with it the freshwater lifelines of thirsty modern Syria and Iraq. Some 98 percent of Euphrates water originates in Turkey, before passing through Syria and on to Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Nearly half of Tigris water also comes from Turkey, with most of the rest originating in tributaries from rugged, remote regions of Iran.

  For nearly all of history the prime beneficiary of the twin rivers’ waters had been the dry-land, downstream region corresponding to modern Iraq, whose fertile swath of soils it brought to life with agricultural abundance. Yet 80 percent of Iraq’s waters originate outside the country’s boundaries. When Syria acquired the wherewithal to build giant, multipurpose dams and divert a large share of its water in the 1970s, some of the traditional advantage conferred by upstream position migrated northward along the Euphrates. A decade later, the balance of power shifted even more decisively upriver to Turkey when it similarly began to master its abundant natural water resources.

  The linchpin of Turkey’s ambitious water development program is the Southeast Anatolia Development Project, or GAP, a multidecade plan for 22 dams, 19 hydropower projects, and multiple irrigation schemes. The GAP is intended to transform the poor, politically restless region of 6 million people, more than double national irrigated cropland and electricity output, and turn Turkey from a food importer into a food exporter. Its centerpiece is the monumental rock-and-earth Ataturk Dam—Turkey’s Aswan—which was completed in 1990. By itself, the Ataturk reservoir can hold five times the annual flow of the entire Euphrates.

  “The twenty-first century will belong to Turkey,” proclaimed Turkish leader Turgut Ozal from the ramparts of the 600-foot-high, mile-wide dam at its opening festivities. The prospect of restored Ottoman glory—and Turkish hegemony over the region’s water—however, was as alarming to Turkey’s downstream Arab neighbors as it was thrilling to the Turkmen. When completed, the GAP is expected to cut Syria’s share of the Euphrates’ water by as much as 40 percent and degrade its water quality, and leave only 10 percent of its historic flow for parched Iraq. Furthermore, the uncoordinated Euphrates dam and irrigation projects of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, when aggregated, will consume half again as much water as exists in the entire river—a physically impossible scenario in which upstream Turkey would be the ultimate arbiter of who got how much and when.

  In the early, euphoric anticipation of its water windfall, Turkish leaders in 1987 had grandly offered to sell some of its water surplus and deliver it through two 1,000-mile-long Peace Pipelines throughout the Middle East. One pipeline was envisioned to carry water south through Syria and the Jordan Valley—with a spur reaching Israel and Palestine—and on to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca in Saudi Arabia; the second was foreseen to run eastward through Iraq and Kuwait to the Persian Gulf. The price of freshwater transported through these immense pipelines was forecast at only one-third that of desalinized water. Turkey’s vision was that its waters would be the tonic of regional cooperation and peace—with Turkey’s hand on the strategic and diplomatic control valves.

  The Peace Pipelines never got off the engineering drawing boards, however. They were done in by the dry realities of Middle Eastern water politics. Syria and Iraq reacted with bellicose protests when Turkey, in a thinly disguised flexing of its water power, began filling the Ataturk Dam for three weeks in January 1990 and the Euphrates slowed to a trickle. To show its displeasure, militarily inferior Syria broke a 1987 unofficial agreement and began providing greater clandestine support throughout most of the 1990s to the Kurdish separatist rebels of southeastern Turkey, including their most wanted terrorist leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, moved diplomatically closer to Syria and saber rattled about bombing the Ataturk Dam. Cutting off Euphrates water was evaluated by U.N. members as a countermeasure to try to force Saddam to withdraw his invading Iraqi troops in the run-up to the first Gulf War. Although the plan was not adopted, water became part of the Gulf War battlefield: Iraq’s water supply and sanitation infrastructure was intentionally targeted and destroyed, while Iraq itself razed much of Kuwait’s desalinization plant as it retreated.

  The modern use of water as a tool of diplomacy and warfare on the twin rivers is as familiar as it had been in ancient Mesopotamia. In the mid-1970s, Iraq and Syria had amassed troops on each other’s border and narrowly averted war over Syria’s constriction of the Euphrates’ water as it filled the reservoirs of one of its giant dams—which Saddam also threatened to bomb—while Syria more than once intentionally slowed the flow during the critical sowing season to show its displeasure with Iraqi criticism of its policies. From 1985 to 2000, with special vigor following the Shiite rising against his regime after the first Gulf War, Saddam launched a targeted assault on the fertile, fish-rich marshland ecosystem along the twin rivers’ lower reaches north of Basra in historic Sumeria in the vicinity of the putative Garden of Eden that was home to a quarter-million, mostly Shiite, Marsh Arabs. Through massive drainage diversions—complemented by intentional pesticide contamination and high-voltage electrical shocks to the water to kill surviving fish life—the great marshlands shrank to one-tenth of its historical size. Its population fell in close proportion. Reflooding after Saddam’s final fall in the second Gulf War was able to restore only 40 percent of the marshes.

  The dispute over the waters of the twin rivers flared again in mid-1992 when Turkey’s prime minister, Süleyman Demirel, a hydrological engineer, stridently rejected Syrian and Iraqi objections to Turkey’s irrigation and hydroelectric projects with an implicit threat of withholding water as retaliation: “We do not say we share their oil resources. They cannot say they share our water resources. This is a matter of sovereignty. We have the right to do anything we like.” Throughout the early 1990s, reduced Euphrates flow idled seven of 10 turbines at Syria’s giant Tabqa Dam, contributing to Syria’s electricity energy crisis. By 1998, troop exercises were being carried out on both sides of the border. War was averted by third party diplomacy and Syria’s expulsion from Damascus of Kurdish radical leader Ocalan.

  Although some diplomatic progress over water sharing was made in the early 2000s, Turkey pointedly remained one of the three nations in the world—along with China and upstream Nile riparian nation, Burundi—to vote against the 1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention declaring that international waterways should be shared reasonably and equitably, and not cause unnecessary harm to neighbors. With population growing rapidly in all three Euphrates basin countries; soil salinization, pollution, and food shortages worsening in Iraq and Syria; and greater claims being made on the twin rivers than it had total water, the day of reckoning in the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization and location of history’s first recorded water war is drawing uncomfortably closer.

  In the age of scarcity, Turkey is well positioned to be the pivotal power broker in the great political issues of the Middle East. Iraq’s ability to rebuild from the second Gulf War depends much on the quantity and timing of freshwater that Turkey permits to flow downstream. Indeed to help alleviate the 2008 drought, prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggested that Iraq sell its oil at preferential prices to Turkey for more water. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogen, then visiting Iraq, demurred by observing that Turkey wa
s already supplying Iraq “with more water than what we had promised, regardless of the high need in our own country.”

  The degree of Turkey’s willingness to open the Euphrates’s spigot at the Syrian border is also a significant lever in determining Syria’s willingness to compromise on Golan water in its peace negotiations with Israel. Water trade strengthens Turkey and Israel’s own military and diplomatic cooperation in an Arab-dominated region, and makes Muslim Turkey a credible intermediary in the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—a role it has been assuming with increasing visibility. Yet Turkey’s exercise of water diplomacy risks elevating the domestic leverage—and potential countervailing international support—of its own independent homeland-seeking Kurds, since the Turkish part of Kurdistan is where the Tigris and the Euphrates originates. The Kurds’ brethen in neighboring northern Iraq on the Tigris are already using their control of Iraq’s largest hydroelectric dam to press their demand for more territory and autonomy in the post-Saddam Iraq as American troops begin to pull out. From a still-larger perspective, Turkey’s water supply represents a strategic resource that might, in time, offset some of the economic and political supremacy that oil delivers to the water indigent and ever more overpopulated Arab world.