The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: fantasies and realities

Abstract

Most expert and public discourse on Middle Eastern water politics holds that water scarcities are of great, if often under-recognised, geopolitical importance. Pessimists and optimists alike tend to assume that water has, or soon will have, profound geopolitical implications. In this paper I argue to the contrary. Specifically, I contend that water problems should neither be understood in naturalistic nor in liberal – technical terms, but instead as questions of political economy; that water is structurally insignificant within the political economy of the modern Middle East; that in consequence water is generally unimportant as a source of inter-state conflict and co-operation; and that, notwithstanding this, water supplies are a crucial site and cause of local conflicts in many parts of the region. I submit also that given the worsening state of economic development within the Middle East, these local conflict dynamics are likely to further deteriorate.

Notes

‘A war crime or an act of war?’, New York Times, 31 January 2003. Thanks to Julian Saurin for drawing this piece to my attention.

Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, has the world's largest known oil reserves. Moreover, while Iraq no doubt has an ‘extensive river system’, on the Tigris and Euphrates it is downstream of Turkey (and also Syria on the Euphrates), it being Turkey which would be key to any water diversion project. Furthermore, under Turgut Özal's Peace Pipeline plan, water would have been diverted not from the Tigris – Euphrates but from the Turkish Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers that flow into the Mediterranean. Water would have been conveyed through two pipelines, one of them to Syria, Jordan and western Saudi Arabia, the other to the Gulf states. And neither of these pipelines would have journeyed via the Gulf states on their way to Israel. The New York Times was a crucial linchpin in the Pentagon's and Iraqi National Congress' propaganda war in the run-up to the recent war on Iraq. See, for example, James Moore, ‘How Chalabi and the White House held the front page’, Guardian, 29 May 2004.

John Cooley, ‘The war over water’, Foreign Policy, 54, 1984, p 3; Thomas Naff & Ruth Matson (eds), Water in the Middle East: Conflict or Cooperation?, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984, p 44; and John Bulloch & Adel Darwish, Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East, London: Victor Gollancz, 1993, p 34 (emphasis added).

Ibid, p 198; Ismail Serageldin, Financial Times, 7 August 1995; as quoted in Mustafa Dolatyar & Tim Gray, Water Politics in the Middle East: A Context for Conflict or Cooperation?, London: Macmillan, 2000, p 8.

Joyce Starr & Daniel Stoll (eds), The Politics of Scarcity: Water in the Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988, p ix.

Ibid.

Chris McGreal, ‘Deadly thirst’, Guardian, 13 January 2004.

David Mitrany, A Functional Theory of Politics, New York: St Martin's Press, 1975; and James Sewell, Functionalism and World Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Mustafa Dolatyar & Tim Gray, ‘The politics of water scarcity in the Middle East’, Environmental Politics, 9 (3), 2000, p 84.

Ibid, p 209.

Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden: The Struggle for Water and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p 283; Aaron Wolf, Hydropolitics Along the Jordan River: Scarce Water and its Impact on the Arab – Israeli Conflict, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1995, p 3; and Dolatyar & Gray, ‘The politics of water scarcity in the Middle East’, p 84.

I focus here on the Arab Middle East states and also, given their centrality to the region's hydro-politics, the non-Arab Middle Eastern states of Israel and Turkey (but not Iran), and the chief Nile basin players, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. These states aside, I do not venture into North Africa.

I discuss these issues at greater length in Jan Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East: The Other Israeli – Palestinian Conflict, London: IB Tauris, 2003, ch 1.

undp, Human Development Report 2003, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Although the phrase is widely used it is above all associated with Malin Falkenmark, whose ‘water stress index’ analyses ‘water stress’ as a simple function of natural resource base and population load. See Falkenmark, ‘Middle East hydropolitics: water scarcity and conflicts in the Middle East’, Ambio, 18 (6), 1989, pp 350 – 352.

Malin Falkenmark, ‘Fresh water: time for a modified approach’, Ambio, 15 (4), 1986, p 192.

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, New York: Viking, 1990. But this is not a recent development either: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made the same observation 150 years ago in The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965, p 59.

Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 1973; and Paul Sweezy et al, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London: New Left Books, 1976.

David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p 147.

World Bank, From Scarcity to Security: Averting a Water Crisis in the Middle East and North Africa, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995, p 1.

A Kanarek & M Michail, ‘Groundwater recharge with municipal effluent: Dan Region Reclamation Project, Israel’, Water Science and Technology, 34 (11), 1996, pp 227 – 233.

Konuralp Pamukcu, ‘Water trade between Israel and Turkey: a start in the Middle East?’, Middle East Policy, 10 (4), 2003, pp 87 – 99; and Amiram Cohen, ‘Work commences on desalination plant’, Ha'aretz, 12 August 2003.

Tony Allan, ‘Water in the Middle East and in Israel – Palestine: some local and global resource issues’, in Marwan Haddad & Eran Feitelson (eds), Joint Management of Shared Aquifers: The Second Workshop, Jerusalem: Palestine Consultancy Group and Harry S Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, 1997, pp 31 – 44. For fuller discussion see Allan, The Middle East Water Question: Hydropolitics and the Global Economy, London: IB Tauris, 2000.

Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli – Palestinian Conflict, 1882 – 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; and Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Unless otherwise stated, economic and development indicators are from World Bank, World Development Indicators 2003, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003. gnp figures used here are ppp-adjusted. On the correlation between economic growth and population growth in Israel, see Jonathan Nitzan & Shimshom Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, London: Pluto, 2002, pp 78 – 79.

Alwyn Rouyer, ‘Zionism and water; influences on Israel's future water policy during the pre-state period’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 18 (4), 1996, pp 25 – 47; Rouyer, Turning Water into Politics: The Water Issue in the Palestinian – Israeli Conflict, London: Macmillan, 2000, ch 3; and Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, ch 3.

Itzhak Galnoor, ‘Water planning: who gets the last drop?’, in Raphaella Bilski (ed), Can Planning Replace Politics? The Israeli Experience, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980, p 172.

This was even the case before the collapse of the Oslo process. During summer 1998 most areas of Hebron received water for just one day every 20, parts of Bethlehem were without piped water for three months, and some Palestinian villages went without for more than five months (this not even considering the hundreds of villages not connected to supply networks). See Amira Hass, ‘Cut and dried’, Ha'aretz, 31 July 1998; Douglas Jehl, ‘Water divides haves from have-nots in West Bank’, New York Times, 15 August 1998; and Selby, Water, Power and Politics, pp 1 – 4.

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress, 1970, p 20.

Giacomo Luciani, The Arab State, London: Routledge, 1990; Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge, 1992; Simon Bromley, Rethinking Middle East Politics: State Formation and Development, Cambridge: Polity, 1994; and Nazih Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris, 1995.

Leif Ohlsson (ed), Hydropolitics: Conflicts Over Water as a Development Constraint, London: Zed, 1995.

Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.

In 2001 per capita gnp in Jordan was $3880, in Egypt $3560. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Iraq Country Profile, December 2003 estimates Iraqi gdp in 2003 at $19.8 billion, implying a per capita gdp of only $789.

With total renewable resources of 149 billion cubic metres per year (bcmy) and a population of 32 million, Sudan has the most renewable water per capita in the region. Population figures (and in the rest of the article) from World Bank, World Development Report 2004; and Food and Agriculture Organisation (fao), AQUASTAT at: http://www.fao.org/waicent/faoinfo/agricult/agl/aglw/aquastat/main/index.stm.

Turkey has total renewable resources of 231 bcmy and a population of 70 million; Ethiopia renewable resources of 110 bcmy and a population of 67 million. Both are at the head of several important watersheds, most importantly the Tigris – Euphrates and the Blue Nile, and thus are minimally dependent on water flowing into their territories.

This description of Israel as ‘capitalist’ might surprise some, given Labor Zionism's reputation as an experiment in socialism. But Israel always had a flourishing private sector, and, as several recent studies conclude, was always structured more by nationalist than socialist imperatives. See Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998; Shafir & Peled, Being Israeli ; and Nitzan & Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel.

World Resources Institute, World Resources 2002 – 2004, Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

Figure for Israel from Economist Intelligence Unit, Israel Country Profile, December 2003.

World Bank, World Development Indicators 2003; and Abdul-Karim Saidik & Shawki Barghouti, ‘The water problems of the Arab world: management of scarce resources’, in Rogers & Lydon, Water in the Arab World, pp 1 – 37.

fao, Production Yearbook 2002, Rome: fao, 2003; and fao, Bulletin of Statistics, 4 (1), 2003.

Allan, The Middle East Water Question.

On the latter, see, for example, Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, London: IB Tauris, 2002, ch 3.

Paul Williams, ‘Turkey's H₂O diplomacy in the Middle East’, Security Dialogue, 32 (1), 2001, p 31.

John Waterbury, The Nile Basin: National Determinants of Collective Action, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, p 171.

I develop this case more fully in ‘Oil and water: the contrasting anatomies of resource conflicts’, Government and Opposition, 40 (3), forthcoming 2005.

Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Alan Gelb et al, Oil Windfalls: Blessing or Curse? London: Oxford University Press, 1988.

On the latter, see especially Sharif Elmusa, A Harvest of Technology: The Super-Green Revolution in the Jordan Valley, Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1994.

Ishac Diwan & Lyn Squire, ‘Private assets and public debts: external finance in a peaceful Middle East’, Middle East Journal, 49 (1), 1995, pp 69 – 89.

Hamad Al-Sheikh, ‘Water resources and development in Saudi Arabia’, in Kamil Mahdi (ed), Water in the Arabian Peninsula: Problems and Policies, Reading, UK: Ithaca, 2001, pp 295 – 328; and Jamil Al Alawi & Mohammed Abdulrazzak, ‘Water in the Arabian peninsula; problems and perspectives’, in Peter Rogers & Peter Lydon (eds), Water in the Arab World: Perspectives and Prognoses, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp 171 – 202. On the Saudi economy, see especially Rodney Wilson et al, Economic Development in Saudi Arabia, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

Chris Handley, Water Stress: Some Symptoms and Causes: A Case Study of Ta'iz, Yemen, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; and Gerhard Lichtenthaler, Political Ecology and the Role of Water: Environment, Society and Economy in Northern Yemen, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Miriam Lowi, Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch 5.

Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff, Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, p 167.

This position is supported by the bulk of work on the 1967 conflict, which unlike the literature on water and conflict generally gives only passing mention to the water issue. There are counter-views, of course. Thus Michael Oren in his Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 claims that ‘more than any other individual factor, the war would revolve around water’. However, he also adds, rather more judiciously in my view, that ‘one could just as easily begin with early Zionist settlement in Palestine, or with British policy there after World War 1. Or with the rise of Arab nationalism, or with the Holocaust’ (p 2). But Walter Laqueur's position is the more typical: the ‘Jordan water dispute’, he writes, ‘was not among the major causes of the [1967] Arab – Israeli conflict, certainly not one of the immediate reasons for hostilities’. Laqueur, The Road to War: The Origin and Aftermath of the Arab – Israeli Conflict 1967 – 8, London: Penguin, 1968, p 63. Thanks to James Vaughan for discussions on this issue.

Nurit Kliot, Water Resources and Conflict in the Middle East, London: Routledge, 1994, p 12.

Independent on Sunday, 6 May 1990.

See for instance Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War, London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Pamucku, ‘Water trade between Israel and Turkey’, p 96; D Knighton, ‘Middle East water: water fights’, World Today, 59 (7), 2003, pp 26 – 27; and Thomas Naff, in testimony to Congress, 26 June 1990, cited in Isam Shawwa, ‘The water situation in the Gaza Strip’, in Gershon Baskin (ed), Water: Conflict or Co-operation?, Jerusalem: Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, 1992, p 36.

Israel and the plo, Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, 13 September 1993, article 5.

While there were final status negotiations on final status water issues during this period (interview with Shaddad Attili, pa Negotiation Affairs Department, 2 June 2002), these were not significant enough to merit inclusion in the ‘Moratinos document’ (reproduced in Ha'aretz, 14 February 2002), which is generally taken as an accurate account of these negotiations.

Eran Feitelson, ‘Implications of shifts in the Israeli water discourse for Israeli – Palestinian water negotiations’, Political Geography, 21, 2002, pp 293 – 318; and Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, pp 188 – 190.

John Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979.

Waterbury, The Nile Basin, pp 131 – 132.

See, for example, Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument, Oxford: James Currey, 1999; and Michael Pugh & Neil Cooper, War Economies in a Regional Context: Challenges of Transformation, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004.

Williams, ‘Turkey's H₂O diplomacy’.

Formal accusation are presented in Government of Israel, ‘Palestinian Obligations as Per Note for the Record of the Hebron Protocol of January 15, 1997’, 13 January 1998, Annex V. For a rather different take on the use of sewage as a political tool, see Gideon Levy, ‘The sewage of Ma'aleh Adumin’, Ha'aretz, 22 February 1998.

Moshe Zak, ‘Israeli – Jordanian negotiations’, Washington Quarterly, 8 (1), 1985, pp 167 – 176; Adam Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War: Functional Ties and Futile Diplomacy in a Small Place, London: Macmillan, 1992; and personal communication with Dureid Mahasneh, former head, Jordan Valley Authority.

Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. See also Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, London: Croom Helm, 1987, ch 4.

Selby, ‘Dressing up domination as “cooperation”: the case of Israeli – Palestinian water relations’, Review of International Studies, 29 (1), 2003, pp 21 – 38; and Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, chs 4, 6.

Hassan Hamdan Al-Alkim, The gcc States in an Unstable World: Foreign Policy Dilemmas of Small States, London: Saqi, 1994.

Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley.

Undala Alam, ‘Water rationality: mediating the Indus Treaty’, PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1998, pp 263 – 264.

Hans Lofgren & Alan Richards, ‘Food security, poverty and economic policy in the Middle East and North Africa’, in Lofgren (ed), Food, Agriculture and Economic Policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Oxford: Elsevier, 2003, pp 1 – 31.

See, for example, Steven Graham, ‘Lessons in urbicide’, New Left Review, 19, 2003, pp 63 – 78; New York: Center for Economic and Social Rights, Special Report: Water Under Siege in Iraq, April 2003; and New York: Center for Economic and Social Rights, Thirsting for Justice: Israeli Violations of the Human Right to Water in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, May 2003.

Julie Trottier, Hydropolitics in the West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem: passia, 1999, pp 74 – 77; Trottier, ‘Water and the challenge of Palestinian institution building’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 29 (2), 2000, pp 35 – 50; and Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, chs 7, 8.

On the Palestinian political economy, see, for example, Sara Roy, ‘De-development revisited: Palestinian economy and society since Oslo’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 28 (3), 1999, pp 64 – 82; and Adel Samara, ‘Globalization, the Palestinian economy and the peace process’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 29 (2), 2000, pp 20 – 34. To give an idea of the costs associated with administering water, by 2002 the West Bank Water Department (which is responsible for bulk supplies to West Bank Palestinians) had debts to Israel of $24 million, these arising from local Palestinian non-payment for water supplies. For further discussion, see Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East, pp 108, 161 – 162.

Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State – Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988; and Migdal, Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Lichtenthaler, Political Ecology and the Role of Water, pp 96 – 98, 179 – 187.

‘Thirst for water and development leads to conflict in Yemen’, Choices: The Human Development Magazine, undp, March 2003.

Deborah Gerner & Philip Schrodt, ‘Middle East politics’, in Gerner (ed), Understanding the Contemporary Middle East, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000, p 90.

Peter Beaumont, ‘Conflict, coexistence, and cooperation: a study of water use in the Jordan basin’, in Hussein Amery & Aaron Wolf (eds), Water and Peace in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000, p 33.