Water politics in the Middle East
Especially the Nile and the Tigris–Euphrates formed the Fertile Crescent, a cradle of civilization and birthplace of agriculture (and agrarianism) dating back 10,000 years.
[1] In the modern era, water politics in the region intensified with the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 14 May 1948, a central event of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The involvement of the USSR in Middle Eastern political affairs was seen to have had a constraining effect upon this process, in terms of claims and recognition in the Cold War era.
The consequence of this has been that 'non-agreed water sharing is an unavoidable reality in present Middle Eastern international relations', with attendant political problems invariably surfacing.
As with the other major Middle Eastern river systems, political agreements over access to the water of the Nile have been few and far between.
However, this was an agreement that largely represented the nature of world geopolitical realities at that time, rather than being a mutual expression of accord between the participating parties of the region.
The priority of the United Kingdom, as part of its strategy as the dominant contemporary political and economic power in the Middle East, was maintaining secure supplies of water to Egypt, and this was what the agreement primarily provided for.
When Free French and Indian forces invaded Syria in the Battle of Kissoué[15] In 1946, France and Britain signed a bilateral agreement to hand over control of the Banias to the British Mandate authorities although the Syrian government declared France's signature invalid.
On 26 April, the Israeli cabinet met to consider the Syrian suggestions; with head of Israel's Water Planning Authority, Simha Blass, in attendance.
Blass noted that while the land to be ceded to Syria was not suitable for cultivation, the Syrian map did not suit Israel's water development plan.
Blass explained that the movement of the International boundary in the area of Banias would affect Israel's water rights.
[citation needed] On 13 April, the Syrian delegates seemed very anxious to move forward and offered Israel around 70% of the DMZ's.
Significant results were achieved and a number of suggestions and summaries put in writing, but they required decisions by the two governments.
In September 1953 Israel advanced plans to divert water to help irrigate the coastal Sharon Plain and eventually the Negev desert by launching a diversion project on a nine-mile (14 km) channel midway between the Huleh Marshes and Lake Galilee (Lake Tiberias) in the central DMZ to be rapidly constructed.
The preamble to its decision stated that "the establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall.
[20] This led to military intervention from Israel, first with tank fire and then, as the Syrians shifted the works further eastward, with airstrikes.
Water quality was further reduced as the flow of the river Jordan consists run-off from agricultural irrigation and saline springs.
[23] The agreement between Jordan and Israel is the only one in the Middle East region to lead to recognition of water rights on both sides.
[25] Constant conflict in the Middle East has seen some major environmental consequences of water related damage.
A report[26] by Strategic Foresight Group, a think tank in Asia, details in the damage and destruction done to water systems and resources.
By the 1990s, rapid extraction of water, reaching trillions of gallons annually, had severely depleted the country's aquifers.
