Water has been a source of political turmoil in the Middle East, but it may also become a source of political union.  Scientists at Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research believe that Israel’s water management strategies and new infrastructure could help other countries in the Middle East.  Over the past few years, Israel has produced water-saving measures and desalination plants that have eliminated the nation’s water scarcity, including new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment, and desalination pioneered by the Zuckerberg Institute.^[1]  As a result, Israel currently has a water surplus.  Its water treatment systems recapture and reuse 86 percent of drain water; and its existing desalination facilities ensure a sufficient water supply until 2025, even as the population grows and water consumption increases.^[2]

In 2008, after a decade of drought across the Fertile Crescent, Israel’s Middle Eastern neighbours fared much worse.  In Syria, farmers chased the plunging water table, “in a literal race to the bottom”; and eventually, “the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm.”  More than a million farmers moved to the overcrowded outskirts of major cities burdened by poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime; places that had been neglected by the Assad regime, places that became “‘the heart of the developing unrest.’”^[3] 

Across other countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, and Jordan, drought and agricultural collapse have likewise produced “water catastrophes.”  Israel’s good fortune is a solitary one in the region, and brings with it an important opportunity: “What to do with its extra water?”^[4] 

^{In 2008, water levels in Israel’s Sea of Galilee nearly destroyed the lake through irreversible salt infiltration}

^{Credit: Ilana Shkolnik, PikiWiki}

As reported in Ensia, the answer to this question might be in the notion of water diplomacy.  Dr. Edo Bar-Zeev, a scientist at the Zuckerberg Institute, is a keen believer in this sort of ecological diplomacy between Israel and Palestine.  The Oslo II Accords of 1995 ensure that the West Bank receives a certain amount of water from Israel—but this supply is insufficient.  In 2018, Bar-Zeev hopes to change this situation, perhaps through the Water Knows No Boundaries conference, which will host water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.  Signs of water diplomacy are already under way with the joint venture of Israel and Jordan, the Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal project, which will bring “these old foes” to drink “from the same tap.”^[5]