The mountain spring that once nourished the banana and orange groves of this Arab village in the Jordan River Valley flows no more.
The life-giving stream began to falter five years ago, dwindling to a trickle during the dry months of the summer, returning to normal when the winter rains came.
But early last summer, it went completely dry and experts doubt that even this winter`s record rainfalls will be able to regenerate it.
As a result, the fruit trees have withered and died, and the livelihood of dozens of farmers has been ruined.
Many farmers have been forced to take the jobs they most resent-construction work on new Jewish settlements.
”The people blame the Israelis for this disaster,” said Ibrahim Naji, a 30-year-old former farmer.
It is not hard to understand why. The shallow aquifer that had been the source of the Al-Awja spring has been drained dry by a half-dozen deep wells dug by Israeli water authorities. The wells` pumps churn day and night, drawing water for dozens of new settlements that have sprouted like desert flowers over the last few years and lowering the water table in the arid hills of the West Bank.
The struggle over scarce water resources is hardly unique to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Indeed, it is the recurring theme of several intra-regional conflicts that have helped make the Middle East a political minefield.
During the Persian Gulf crisis, Egypt`s leaders became apoplectic when neighboring Sudan-at Iraq`s behest-reportedly aimed its missiles at the Aswan Dam, which regulates the flow of the Nile, Egypt`s sole source of water.
A year earlier, Syria and Iraq were muttering darkly against Turkey and its ambitious plans to construct a series of dams that would greatly reduce their share of the flow from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The Turkish military now guards those dams like the gold in Ft. Knox.
In Jordan, King Hussein has said he can envision only one circumstance that would compel him to go to war with Israel-a dispute over the headwaters of the Jordan.
Egypt`s late Anwar Sadat once said his country would not hesitate to go to war to defend the Nile. His threat was aimed not at Israel, with whom he made peace in 1979, but at Egypt`s upstream neighbors, Ethiopia and Sudan.
The consensus among diplomats in the region is that water is the next crisis waiting to happen. The problem is simple enough: The arid Middle East does not have enough water to sustain the current rates of population growth and economic development. Pollution, waste and mismanagement threaten the limited supplies that are available.
That`s one reason why water was at the top of the list of topics discussed in Moscow at last week`s multilateral Middle East talks.
”Water has become a strategic asset as well as an economic commodity,”
said Kamran Inan, the state minister in charge of Turkey`s ambitious plans to harness the Tigris and Euphrates. ”In 10 years, water will be more important than oil-if not more expensive.”
Water already has assumed paramount importance in the bitter political struggle between Israel and the Arabs. With the exception of Lebanon, none of the principals-Israel, Jordan, Syria or the Palestinians in the occupied territories-has enough water to meet current needs.
Israel, however, holds the upper hand. Territory seized from Jordan and Syria in the 1967 war and from Lebanon in the 1982 invasion has given Israel full control of the region`s main water resources-the Jordan and Litani Rivers and the aquifers that lie beneath the West Bank.
According to one U.S. study, nearly half of Israel`s water now comes from sources located outside its pre-1967 boundaries. This includes water that is drawn from the vital Yarkon-Taninim aquifer, which is replenished mainly by rains that fall on the slopes of the West Bank.
Not surprisingly, Israel`s agriculture minister recently took out full-page newspaper ads warning that Israel`s water needs precluded the
possibility of relinquishing a single inch of territory taken from the Arabs. He was not exaggerating. For years, Israel has been using up its water resources at 5 to 10 percent above the natural replenishment rate, a reckless practice that is lowering the water table and exposing the fragile underground aquifers to sea water.
Israeli per capita consumption is more than 300 cubic meters of water a year, low by standards of industrialized nations but triple the 100 cubic meter per capita consumption of West Bank Palestinians.
The reason for the discrepancy is simple. ”Israel has full control over the water resources; even on our own land, we can do nothing without their permission,” said Nader Khatib, a water engineer for the West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Palestinians in the occupied territories traditionally have drawn water from numerous shallow wells that skim the upper reaches of the underground aquifers. But Israeli authorities have sealed up some of these wells and imposed a strict ban on new Arab wells.
Meanwhile, Jewish settlers have been provided with deep wells-such as those near the spring at Al-Awja-that give the false impression of an unlimited supply of water.
During this summer`s drought, when many Arab villages had no water at all, residents of neighboring Jewish settlements were watering their lawns. The Israeli water authority gives residential customers a discount for watering shrubs and flowerbeds.
Palestinians complain that Israeli policies amount to outright theft of their resources. Some see it as part of a grand plot to destroy their agrarian society and force them into the low end of the Israeli economy.
Israelis counter that they have upgraded the overall water system in the occupied territories and that Palestinian per capita consumption has actually increased under Israeli rule.
While these issues provide tinder for the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, many in Israel are beginning to rethink the country`s attitudes toward water usage.
Israel currently allocates about 70 percent of its total water resources to its heavily subsidized agricultural sector-part of the Zionist dream to
”make the desert bloom.” At the same time, Israel, with a population of 4.3 million, hopes to absorb up to 1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union over the next five years. Simple arithmetic says it cannot do both.
Many authorities think it would be cheaper for Israel to import food rather than continue expensive agriculture subsidies.
”But agriculture is not just an economic issue-just ask the American farmer,” said Hillel Shuval, a water expert at Jerusalem`s Hebrew University. ”Agriculture is a very deep ideological issue in Zionism. It`s a bond to the land, and anything that results in its weakening is not just a cost-benefit analysis for us,” said Shuval.
Egypt is faced with a similar dilemma, but on a vastly larger scale. Egypt`s population is 55 million, and it increases by 1 million every 10 months.
The agricultural sector uses up 82 percent of Egypt`s water resources and employs 60 percent of its population, yet manages to meet only about half of the nation`s food requirements.
”If we don`t do something between now and 2005, we`ll be in real trouble,” said Mahmoud Abu Zaid, director of Egypt`s water research authority.
For Egypt, water policy is a juggling act that must measure the thirst of unrestricted population growth against ambitious plans to reclaim desert land for agricultural uses.
Like Israel, Egypt is up against the limits of its water resources. It already uses all 55.5 billion cubic meters of its annual share of the Nile-and them some. The extra water-about 5.7 billion cubic meters-is water that is recycled two or three times before it drains into the Mediterranean.
Since 1968, when the Aswan High Dam was completed, Egypt has reclaimed more than 1 million acres of land for farming and has plans to reclaim a 1.6 million more by 2000-barely enough to keep pace with the expanding population. The new lands are irrigated by water-saving drip and sprinkle technologies, but the vast majority of farmland in the Nile Valley and Delta is irrigated by inefficient canals that have been around since Pharaonic times.
”We do know quite a lot about water and conservation, but unfortunately we don`t have enough money to put it into effect,” said Magdy Sobhi Yosef, a water expert at Cairo`s Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
What most worries Egypt, however, is that 100 percent of the Nile`s flow originates outside its borders.
About half the Nile`s waters originate in the highlands of Ethiopia; the rest comes from the equatorial rainforests of central Africa, and all of it must flow through the Sudan before reaching Egypt.
None of these places is noted for political tranquility. And while none has the technical wherewithal to completely cut off the Nile, several countries including Ethiopia and Sudan are starting to come up with strategies to exploit the Nile for their own economic development. Inevitably, this will eat into Egypt`s share of the river.
Little wonder, then, that former Egyptian Foreign Minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali, now the new UN secretary general, framed Egypt`s national security as ”a question of water.”
Nor is Egypt the only Arab state that is vulnerable.
”Ninety percent of the Arabic speaking people receive their water from non-Arabic regions,” notes Kamran Inan, Turkey`s water czar.
Turkey, one of the few Middle Eastern countries with an abundance of water, hopes to do with water what Saudi Arabia has done with oil and position itself as the region`s water superpower.
The centerpiece of Turkey`s strategy is the $22 billion Southeast Anatolia Project, which calls for the construction of 22 dams along the upper Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
The completed project is expected to generate 27 billion kilowatts of electricity annually, irrigate 42 million acres of farmland and provide more than 3 million jobs in what is now Turkey`s most impoverished and backward region.
But already the ambitious scheme has Turkey`s Arab neighbors in a state of high anxiety.
In early 1990, when the first phase of the massive Ataturk Dam was finished, Turkey shut off the Euphrates for a month to begin filling the reservoir. Downstream, Syria and Iraq protested vehemently.
At this point, the Ataturk Dam has cut the flow from the Euphrates by about a third, and neither Syria nor Iraq are soothed by Kamran Inan`s assurances that ”we never plan to use water as a weapon, as the Arabs have done with oil.”
Indeed, Turkey is aggressively promoting its idea for a ”peace pipeline”-another $20 billion scheme that would carry Turkey`s water surplus to parched customers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and perhaps Syria, Jordan and Israel.
But already Syria has threatened to block the pipeline, denouncing it as a Turkish plot to ”steal” water from poor Arab countries-namely Syria-and sell to rich Arab countries.
More to the point are doubts about the economic feasibility of such a project.
Turkish officials claim that a pipeline could carry 6 million cubic meters a day at a cost of $.50 per meter compared to the $1.50 a meter it now costs countries like Saudi Arabia to desalinate seawater. But other experts say the costs would be about the same.
”Desalination is probably the best option politically, despite the cost, since third country cooperation would not be required,” said Hebrew University`s Shuval.
Either option is more feasible than some of the other far-out schemes that have been advanced-Saudi Arabia`s plan to tow icebergs from the Arctic;
Israel`s idea to float huge plastic waterbags across the Mediterranean.
But clearly, the key to resolving the Middle East`s chronic water problems lies in solid regional cooperation rather than the current political deadlock that Shuval accurately characterizes as ”a zero sum game in which nobody starts out with enough.”
At last week`s multilateral talks in Moscow, delegates representing nearly 40 nations agreed to form a permanent working committee of experts to take up the regional water crisis. Headed by the U.S., the committee voted to meet again in spring to set up a formal agenda.
But a few key players are not cooperating. Syria, which last autumn forced the cancellation of a major international water conference in Istanbul, boycotted Moscow. The Palestinians came to Moscow, but declined to take part in the talks after the conference co-sponsors refused to accredit some of the Palestinian delegates.
Still, Israel participated in the talks, as did Saudi Arabia, Jordan and a half-dozen other Arab states who previously had refused any nod to the existence of their Jewish neighbor.
The U.S. hopes the dialogue between the regional adversaries will be nudged along by the participation of Japanese and Western officials who can offer economic assistance for regional water projects.
Nobody expected immediate breakthroughs in Moscow-and none occurred. But the fact that longtime antagonists finally are sitting down to discuss regional issues is a significant achievement in itself.
