This is why the Wall is being built .... it is following the water table. That is why it ran through so many olive groves and farmers lands. Where there is a tree or a plant, there is water.
Water And The Current Peace Accords:
The next major conflict in the Middle East?
By Adel Darwish
June 1994
As the Palestine-Israel accord is heralding the end of one long dispute, with its prospect of a general peace between Israel and her Arab neighbours, it became obvious that water is in the heart of the dispute since other issues that obsecured water for years, proved to be of lesser significance to the parties of the dispute. Multilateral talks group concentrating on water - they met in Oman last month - still have reached no agreement on sharing water after almost three years of starting the talks.
During the research for the book, both my co-author and I, discovered that water was the hidden agenda for past conflicts and one major obstacle to reach a lasting and final settlement in the region. The conflicts over water is not just between Israel and her neighbours, but also conflicts among Arabic speaking nations.
In the past Arab dictators stifled their own disputes and faced the Jewish state as a common enemy. Soon, that constraint is likely to disappear and all the long-suppressed enmities - like water sharing quarrels - will come into the open.
Already water has played a part in causing wars, altering policies and changing alliances. As late as in 1987 & 1989 Senegal and Mauritania fought two limited wars across the Senegal river - when Mauritanian tribesmen followed the shrinking vegetation and crossed to the other bank, violating Senegalese sovereignty. As artillery exchanges raved across the river Senegal, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia became directly and indirectly involved.
Water was an early weapon deployed in the Arab Israeli conflict. In the 1960s cross border raids on water schemes' machinery raved between Israel, Syria and Jordan culminating in the Six Day war in 1967. In 1964, an Arab summit conference in Amman decided to divert the headwaters of the Jordan - in effect, depriving Israel of its main supply.
Few months before the 1964 Arab Summit, Israel built a giant pumping station on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and began to siphon water into systems of pipes and canals known as the national water carrier, all the way to the Negav Desert. By 1990, the carrier was diverting 440 million cubic meter a year of water that used to pass through the Jordan all the way to the Dead Sea. As a result the Dead Sea has now shrunk into a slain drying two lakes.
When Yasser Arafat founded Fateh guerrilla organisation, the group's baptism on new-year's-eve 1964/65 was an operation against the national water carrier in Israel.
To implement the 1964 Arab summit resolution, work began on the Syrian and Jordanian side of the border, despite Israel's warning that it would consider it an infringement of national rights. And though all the work was carried out on Arab or neutral land, battles, air raids and artillery duels occurred. In the end, Israeli air strikes deep into Syria forced the Arabs to call off their scheme by destroying the proposed dam site on the Yarmuk river. Had the two dams al-Maquarin and Al-Makhiyabat been completed, they would have deprived Israel of 550 million cubic meter per annum.( In fact Jordan and Syria are proposing to build a new Dam the Unity Dam further upstream, World bank linking the finance with an agreement with Israel, which has not been reached yet.)
General Ariel Sharon, later an Israeli defence minister, had no doubt what those skirmishes were all about. `People generally regard 5 June 1967 as the day the Six-day war began,' he said. `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.'
That brief conflict settled nothing, so once again war erupted in 1973. President Sadat of Egypt wanted to force Israel to the conference table, and to conclude a lasting peace. With the help of Henry Kissinger a peace treaty with Israel was reached in 1979, after the Camp David meetings and accords in 1978.
As the various Israeli-Egyptian committees met to settle the details of the treaty, Israeli delegates suggested that there should be co-operation on water projects. In particular, they wanted about 1 per cent of the Nile flow giving them about 800 million cubic meter to be diverted into a pipeline extending from the peace canal which takes water from the Ismaelia canal east of the delta to Sinai.
President Sadat saw this as providing a substitute for water from aquifers of the west bank and the Jordan, thus reducing Israel's dependency on the territories seen as Palestinian self rule areas. He also saw such project as basis for regional co-operation, eventually extending the pipeline to Lebanon or Jordan in later stages.
What president Sadat did not realise was the consternation that his ideas would cause at home, where the Nile is held in almost mystical regard; the prime duty of the Egyptian armed forces is to defend and preserve that source of all Egyptian life.
Following Egyptian intelligence leaking the information to senior army officers already restive at being forced to make peace with their old enemy, plots to oust Mr Sadat were laid, and he was saved only when the CIA learned of them - through an Egyptian officer who defected to the opposition in London - and warned the Egyptian president. Amazed that the army could plot against him, Mr Sadat questioned Field Marshal Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala, the defence minister, who said the loyalty of the Egyptian army could not be guaranteed if a coup was mounted `to stop Israel stealing the Nile'. The president quickly dropped the water-sharing idea.
http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curric/NEWGEOG/Africa/waterwa4.htm
