This article appears in the May 2, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Water in the Middle East: Permanent Casus Belli, or Cornerstone of Lasting Peace?
[Print version of this article]
April 21—Karel Vereycken, researcher at the Schiller Institute–France, gave a presentation March 28 at the Académie de Géopolitique de Paris high level seminar titled, “What Destiny for Palestine?” Below is the edited translation of Vereycken’s presentation, “Water in the Middle East: A Permanent Casus Belli, or a Cornerstone of Lasting Peace?”
Mr. President, Your Excellencies, dear friends, first of all, thank you for this invitation. I quite agree with the previous speaker [Professor Michael J. Strauss] who said that it is very important to look at certain so-called “purely practical” aspects before constructing grand theories, because even beginning to resolve these practical aspects is perhaps the beginning of a process that can ultimately lead to peace. Among these topics, water, obviously, is the fundamental issue that I’m going to try to talk to you about. Of course, in reality, the issue is not water as such, but rather access to fresh water.
As we all know, Southwest Asia is an essentially semi-arid region. There is, of course, the “Fertile Crescent,” including Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. But, for Jordan, perhaps even more than for all of Palestine and Israel, the question of water and access to water remains a fundamental question, even a question of national security, with all the good and also the terrible things that entails. Because in the name of “national security,” of course, we exert powers that are exceptional powers.
However, water does not respect human-made borders. When a river flows between two countries, to whose territory does it belong? Are the Euphrates and the Tigris Turkish rivers or Iraqi rivers? There is no consensus on this.
As a result, water can become a source of conflict, an instrument of domination, and even a weapon of war. We’re seeing this right now in Gaza. In early March, Israel cut off power to seawater desalination units, reducing freshwater production to just a few thousand cubic meters per day. So, this is a feudal siege and clearly expresses genocidal intent.
Seeking Water Cooperation
But on the other hand, water can be a source of cooperation, provided that everyone commits, and I stress, “in good faith,” to envisioning a shared future, either within the framework of good neighborly relations—we don’t even need to make peace to live as good neighbors—or with a view to a shared and mutually beneficial future.
In the region, it is obviously the Jordan River that collects water from Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to fill Lake Tiberias (or the Sea of Galilee), the region’s main freshwater reservoir, although there are saline springs beside and below Lake Tiberias. This means that when droughts cause the lake’s level to drop, the salinity level increases dramatically.
In any case, historically, since the entire region depends on this “blue gold,” 90% of conflicts have been motivated by the control of water resources.
It is true that plans for the development of water and energy resources date back to before the creation of Israel in 1948. The most famous plan was that of the Russian hydrologist Pinhas Rutenberg, who in 1920 developed a plan for the construction of 14 hydroelectric dams on the Jordan River to supply the entire region with electricity.[fn_1] This is possible thanks to the strong difference in height that marks the succession of waterfalls typical of the Jordan Valley. Lake Tiberias, located 212 meters below sea level, is the second-lowest lake in the world, after the Dead Sea, which is located at 430 meters below sea level.
As envisioned by the Rutenberg Plan, a first dam was built on Jordanian territory near Lake Tiberias, on the Yarmouk River, the main tributary of the Jordan River, which flows from Syria and Jordan, where it demarcates the border between these two countries. This Tel Or [or Naharayim] Dam operated between 1932 and 1948, the year Israel was founded. From that date, with the first Arab-Israeli war, Israel began development work around Lake Tiberias, which rendered the dam inoperable.
From the beginning, Israel wanted to “secure” its water supply by depriving its neighbors of this resource with its “Grand National Aqueduct” [National Water Carrier, NWC] project. The aim was to carry fresh water from Lake Tiberias first to Jerusalem and then south to the edge of the Negev Desert at Beersheba, where [Israeli Prime Minister] Ben-Gurion wanted to make the desert bloom. Even today, 60% of Israel remains desert. So, 85% of the population lives in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or on the coast. But for me, Israel remains essentially a completely underdeveloped country. The NWC project came to be carried out in the greatest secrecy, with Israel well aware that it was to the detriment of its neighbors.
When the project was inaugurated in 1964, tensions erupted. From the Arab perspective, this project was a casus belli. First, because Israel was seizing water from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Finally, because providing access to water on this scale could only encourage the illegal establishment of Jewish settlements.
The Arab countries then developed a diversionary project to prevent Lake Tiberias from being filled with water from their countries, and, instead, sought diverting water back to their own countries. This would initially create, in Jordan, the so-called East Ghor Canal, later renamed the King Abdullah Canal.
It would take an entire evening to detail all the conflicts and wars surrounding these projects that then ensued. Israel will bomb Arab infrastructure, and Palestinians will blow up Israeli canals. The United States, which sourced its oil supplies from Saudi Arabia, transited through the Suez Canal, feared that the water wars could escalate into a wider conflict. If Egypt entered the conflict, U.S. energy security was jeopardized.
To stabilize things, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower sent his special envoy, Eric Johnston, in 1952.[fn_2] Johnston was a movie executive who knew very little about the subject but was capable of forging agreements, much as Steve Witkoff does today for President Trump.
In his pocket, Johnston had a comprehensive plan for equitable water sharing, developed by alumni of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal grand scheme to develop the Tennessee River Basin. The purpose was to provide water for American agriculture and electricity for rural areas and American industry, including the production of aluminum for airplanes.
The water-sharing quotas proposed by Johnston were extremely favorable to Arab countries. The joint technical committees, comprising Palestinians, Israelis, and experts of neighboring countries, validated the plan. But in the Knesset, the vote didn’t pass, and the Arab League, whose experts had validated the project, refused to adopt it. The reason was simple: Accepting such a major regional project implicitly implied recognizing the State of Israel and therefore would have deprived the Palestinian refugees of their legitimate right of return. These demands, despite being legally justified, unfortunately ended up maintaining the very sources of conflict.
High-Tech Desalination
In the 1960s, a major scientific discovery would change the game. In the United States, President John F. Kennedy’s Administration, faced with droughts, funded teams dedicated to new desalination techniques. Two Californian researchers invented the membranes that enabled reverse osmosis, a physical principle known since its discovery by Abbé Nollet during the French Revolution. This shifted the debate, because this technical invention would make possible things that were previously impossible.
In May 1967, Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, organized a major conference in Washington on the theme of “Water for Peace.” Six hundred and thirty-five delegates from 94 countries, and 2,000 observers participated. Several presentations addressed the issue of using civil nuclear power for desalination. Alvin Weinberg and Robert Oppenheimer’s friends wanted to show that the atom could be used for more than just the destruction of Japan. But two weeks later, Israel took the world by surprise by launching the Six-Day War, in part to secure its access to water by taking control of the Golan Heights in Syria.
In response, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission, and former President Dwight Eisenhower, put a nuclear desalination project back on the table for debate. The conflict will be endless, they thought, as long as two problems are not resolved: that of the Palestinian and Jewish refugees, and that of the sharing of water. Without water, there will be endless wars. Strauss, known as very tough on communism, even proposed that Americans, but also Russians and French, participate, making a regional peace project a lever to escape the logic of the Cold War. On July 18, 1967, Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild proposed, in two letters to The Times of London, the creation of three nuclear desalination units in the region, one in Jordan, one in Israel (on the Red Sea) and one in Gaza (at the time under Egyptian mandate). Obviously, in the Rothschild family, not everyone shared this idea and some believed that conflicts should be used as geopolitical levers, but that is another story.
Also in 1967, the Rand Corporation, the major American think tank funded by the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, published a study by Paul Wolfowitz, known for his explosive career as a neoconservative—meaning those people who fabricated the lies about weapons of mass destruction that would allow the war against Iraq to be launched. In his study, Wolfowitz said, of course, desalination is fantastic, but there’s still the second law of thermodynamics, which means that all of this will never be profitable. A few years later, the same Wolfowitz admitted that he had lied. My concern and fear, he said, was that the countries in the region, including Israel, would gain access to civilian nuclear power. All of them would then be monitored by the International Energy Agency, something to be avoided by Israel, which was then building its nuclear bomb.
Water-Food-Energy Nexus
Meanwhile, on the ground in this semi-arid region, people remained thirsty and lacked water for irrigation. This is where we must remember the importance of what is called the “water-food-energy nexus.” Without water, there is no food. But without energy, it is difficult to obtain fresh water in great abundance. Desalination requires a lot of electricity. Today, Israel, which produces 50% of its fresh water through desalination, uses 10% of its electricity for that purpose.
Now, we must understand that for geopolitics—the extreme British version, and people like Wolfowitz—men are like rabbits. You put a nice couple of rabbits on an island, and now, what do they do? The rabbits, they reproduce. In record time, they will eat all the grass on the island and assure their own disappearance.
Fortunately, men have something more than rabbits: creativity. No one has so far seen rabbits green the desert, or build airplanes to go elsewhere. So let us become aware of our specific human capacity.
On the issue of water, even without the use of nuclear power, the Israelis and the entire global scientific community mobilized to find solutions.
(1) The first solution is collection and recycling. Thanks to 120 water treatment plants, volumes of dirty, gray, rainfall and wastewater can be used and reused for irrigation. This rate is currently over 80% in Israel, while it is only 12% in Spain, 8% in Italy, and less than 1% in France, where people believe they do not need to collect it. As a result, Israel has become very economical with water. The dual-flush toilet is an Israeli invention. It may seem futile, but it has saved millions of liters of water. Water consumption per capita in Israel is one of the lowest in the OECD.
(2) The second major area of development is what we call “precision agriculture.” You know, when you irrigate—and this is the big criticism made by the Israelis, who have done everything to prevent the Palestinians from having the technology to do it—the Israelis say to the Palestinians: you irrigate as in Antiquity. You water your plants. There, 50% of your water goes into the atmosphere. If you water at ground level, we still lose.
What do we do then? We use drip irrigation in the subsoil. We now use drip irrigation 40 centimeters [16 inches] below the surface. And better still, researchers have managed to understand the language of plants. We know that a tomato, at a given moment, sends a signal saying, “I want water, and I want it now.” And if you irrigate the tomato, but it’s not at the right time, it doesn’t drink. I’m not talking about science fiction here. These are current developments.
There are teams in Beersheba; there are African, Russian, Israeli researchers, etc. These are important things. If we want to solve the water problem, it’s not just by increasing the amount of water available, it’s also by improving the efficiency of its use. I saw this in Central Asia, where Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan are fighting over the waters of the same river, the Amu Darya. But when this river reaches Turkmenistan, its water is used to flood vast plains! So, there are enormous losses. Humanity can solve a lot of problems by modernizing irrigation techniques. In Israel, it was the Polish Jew Simcha Blass who advanced the science of precision agriculture with the administration of both water and fertilizers through micro-irrigation and drip irrigation.
(3) The third point is the desalination of seawater, made possible by the reverse osmosis process, thanks to the mobilization of President Kennedy which I mentioned. Since 1999, Israel has built five large desalination plants: Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Sorek, and Ashdod. And other desalination plants are due to open soon. Here, too, Wolfowitz actually reprimanded Israel, saying, well, you’re doing this, it’s very good. But that’s just for you. It must definitely not be done elsewhere. It must not be a model, especially not the same one as backed by the United States.
Then there is another factor that will come into play. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics predicts that the population will grow from 9.5 million to 15 to 25 million by 2065. So, at this rate, Israel would have to desalinate up to 3.7 billion cubic meters per year, compared to 0.5 billion cubic meters today. Meeting the demand in 2065 would mean building 30 new desalination plants. However, a desalination policy will lead to an increase in electricity demand, because it consumes electricity.
(4) Finally, there is the fourth area of research, that of water transfer projects, either from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, or from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. Several feasibility studies have been conducted, notably allowing energy to be recovered along the way.
Oasis Plan
With the Oasis Plan proposal I advocate, with the Schiller Institute, we project bringing seawater to the shores of the Dead Sea in a large reservoir. At the bottom of this reservoir, you let the water drop into a deep shaft. And when the water falls 400 meters, it drives a turbine, generating electricity. There is a hydroelectric power plant of this type in France, and it produces the equivalent in electricity of a nuclear power plant. Then, at the outlet, you move on to desalination.
This will eventually be an opportunity to completely rethink the exploitation of the minerals that make up the water of the Dead Sea. Its water contains potash, salt, lithium, in total some 21 minerals. The Dead Sea isn’t just a vacation spot for Tel Aviv’s hipsters; it’s a source of wealth to be shared between Palestinians, Israelis, and Jordanians. With a small high-temperature nuclear reactor, which produces electricity but also industrial heat, the water can be “decomposed,” and its useful elements extracted, both freshwater and minerals.
In 1975, a German study partially considered this type of infrastructure. But in 1981, a vote by the United Nations General Assembly banned Israel from carrying out this project. Why? Israel occupies Palestine. It has an obligation to take care of the people living under occupation. But it doesn’t have the right to install large-scale, sustainable infrastructure there. So, once again, the same stupidity we saw before, the same mistake made in 1952 by blocking the Johnston Plan, was committed again.
Common Interest in Water, Peace
And this is where my argument is twofold, that is, instead of saying “this proves that nothing can be done,” it demonstrates forcefully “that creating these projects is consubstantial with the creation of a Palestinian state.” Because when we create this state and Palestine becomes a partner in a common project to solve the water problem, it will benefit everyone.
So, with Jacques Cheminade and Lyndon LaRouche, with whom I have worked for about forty years, we redesigned the water transfer projects under the name “Oasis Plan.” Desalinating seawater at the Dead Sea has several advantages. First, we must accept the fact that desalination poses waste problems. When you desalinate 100 liters of seawater, you will certainly obtain 52 liters of fresh water, but also 48 liters of brine (with a salinity of about 3.5%). If you dump the brine into a field, it [the field] will be damaged. For now, the Israelis have built pipes that go several kilometers into the sea to deposit the brine from their desalination plants, but it harms biodiversity. Whereas in the approach I advocate, the brine will fill up the Dead Sea. The latter currently has a salinity of 27% and, as you know, because it is not fed by the Jordan River, from which all the water is diverted, it is in the process of “disappearing.” Adding brine to the Dead Sea is like giving it a rejuvenating treatment
So, we can desalinate at the edge of the Dead Sea, extract fresh water for Jordan, for Palestine, and for all of southern Israel. Today, according to my Palestinian sources, there are not 700,000 [Israeli] settlers, there are probably more than a million—according also to the latest news reports. If this project can bring water to southern Israel, to the Negev, where currently only 13% of the country’s total population lives, we can welcome settlers from the West Bank. We can offer them cheap rents there. We can free them from their hateful visions and offer them a future in industrial and agricultural jobs. But for that, we have to bring water to the desert.
Our project ticks all the boxes to provide a solution. It’s like a hotel room with windows offering views of several horizons, several potential solutions. In the Schiller Institute’s 38-page study, you can explore all of this in detail.
Precedents for Cooperation
In addition, on the issue of water, there are several precedents for cooperation that I have reviewed:
(1) First, there is Annex No. 3 of the 1993 Oslo Accords, between Palestine and Israel.
(2) Then there is Annex 2, Articles I to VII, and Appendix B of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian agreement. The language used is very important. It recognizes that there is “a common problem,” that it must be resolved “without prejudice to the other,” and so on.
(3) And finally, there is, in Appendix B, the declaration on water and wastewater on Gaza and the West Bank of September 2, 1995.
So, despite the horrors that have taken place and continue to take place, there are people of good will who are trying to make the coexistence of Palestine and Israel possible. I find it hard to be “against” the Oslo Accords, for the simple reason that not even 10% of them have been implemented, because Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated [Nov. 4, 1995]. And today, no one—of all these people who are lecturing us on international law in Ukraine—no one has demanded that Israel implement the treaties it signed![fn_3],[fn_4]
Currently, in Gaza, Gazans dump all their untreated wastewater into the sea. So, the problem is that you have infiltration back into Gaza. There are aquifers beneath the Gaza Strip. There are wells. They pump the water and empty the aquifers. But the dirty water and salty seawater penetrate the aquifers. As a result, the inhabitants of Gaza end up drinking the toilet and polluted water that they themselves dumped into the sea. So, you have epidemics. And even today, we have Israelis complaining that it’s so dirty now that it risks disrupting the sea water desalination plants.
The good news is that, at least formally, the Joint Water Commissions (JWC), the technical advisory committees, continue to exist, bringing together Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians. However, their functioning is being sabotaged. For eight years, all projects proposed by the Palestinians have been rejected by Israeli vetoes, while all Israeli projects have been approved.
I would even be willing to have representatives from the BRICS nations, a Russian, a Chinese, and even an American or a Frenchman on these water commissions to ensure that there is an outside view on them, and that they can return to honesty. Because the situation is so unfair; the Israelis have so much technology that they can dominate everything.
And that is only one of the many places where the balance of power has to change.
Endnotes
[fn_1] Pinhas Rutenberg’s electrification plan for Israel is reported in Current Flow, The Electrification of Palestine, by Ronen Shamir, 2013, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. [back to text from fn_1]
[fn_2] The Johnston Plan for the Trans-Jordan, and Eisenhower policy, are reviewed in Karel Vereycken’s article, “When ‘Water for Peace’ Was at the Center of U.S. Politics—1953-1968,” June 28, 2025, in EIR.news. [back to text from fn_2]
[fn_3] Three important water agreements:
(1) The Oslo Accords, signed on September 13, 1993. As covered in the media, Annex III, titled “Protocol on Israeli-Palestinian Cooperation in Economic and Development Programs,” includes the following points:
The two sides agree to establish an Israeli-Palestinian continuing committee for economic cooperation, focusing, among other things, on the following:
A. Cooperation in the field of water, including a water development program prepared by experts from both sides, which will also specify the mode of cooperation in the management of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and will include proposals for studies and plans on water rights of each party, as well as on the equitable utilization of joint water resources for implementation in and beyond the interim period.
B. Cooperation in the field of electricity, including an Electricity Development Program, which will also specify the mode of cooperation for the production, maintenance, purchase and sale of electricity resources.
C. Cooperation in the field of energy, including an energy development program, which will provide for the exploitation of oil and gas for industrial purposes, particularly in the Gaza Strip and in the Negev, and will encourage further joint exploitation of other energy resources. This Program may also provide for the construction of a petrochemical industrial complex in the Gaza Strip and the construction of oil and gas pipelines.
(2) The Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, 1994, Article 6.
(3) The Oslo II Accord, signed September 28, 1995, Annex III, Article 40. For more information, see the Jan. 2, 2022 article in the Israel Diaries blog by Sheri Oz titled, “Oslo II—Article 40, Water Management.” [back to text from fn_3]
[fn_4] Among reports of how Israel sabotaged agreements it had signed on water, and used water as a weapon, is one provided by the International Criminal Court (ICC), August 6, 2024, in Article 3, “Selective Implementation: Water Management in the West Bank,” pages 8-9 and 10-11. [back to text from fn_4]
