Water
Theft In Palestine
By Fred Pearce
21 June, 2004
The New Scientist
Israel
has drawn up a secret plan for a giant desalination plant to supply
drinking water to the Palestinian territory on the West Bank. It hopes
the project will diminish pressure for it to grant any future Palestinian
state greater access to the region's scarce supplies of fresh water.
Under an agreement
signed a decade ago as part of the Oslo accord, four-fifths of the West
Bank's water is allocated to Israel, though the aquifers that supply
it are largely replenished by water falling onto Palestinian territory.
The new plans call
for seawater to be desalinated at Caesaria on the Mediterranean coast,
and then pumped into the West Bank, where a network of pipes will deliver
it to large towns and many of the 250 villages that currently rely on
local springs and small wells for their water.
Israel, which wants
the US to fund the project, would guarantee safe passage of the water
across its territory in return for an agreement that Israel can continue
to take the lion's share of the waters of the West Bank. These mainly
comprise underground reserves such as the western aquifer, the region's
largest, cleanest and most reliable water source.
For Israelis, agreement
on the future joint management of this aquifer is a prerequisite for
granting Palestine statehood.
Global funding
The first public
hint of the plan emerged earlier in May in Washington DC. Uri Shamir,
director of water research at the Technion, the Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa, told the House of Representatives Committee on
International Relations that the desalination project was "the
only viable long-term solution" for supplying drinking water to
the West Bank.
Shamir told New
Scientist this week that the project could be complete in five to seven
years. "The plant will be funded by the world for the Palestinians.
Israel will not be willing to carry this burden, and the Palestinians
are not able to."
But other leading
hydrologists contacted by New Scientist point out that desalinating
seawater and pumping it to the West Bank, parts of which lie 1000 metres
above sea level, would cost around $1 per cubic metre.
"The question
is whether an average Palestinian family can afford it," says Arie
Issar, a water expert at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Sede
Boker, Israel, who helped green the Israeli desert a generation ago
by finding new water sources in the region. "It would be foolish
to desalinate water on the coast and push it up the mountains when there
are underground water resources up there, which cost only a third as
much."
Tony Allan of King's
College London, a leading authority on Middle East water, agrees: "Pumping
desalinated water to the West Bank is not the best technical or economic
option."
But the project
is being supported by Alvin Newman, head of water resources at the Tel
Aviv office of USAID, the US international development agency, which
would fund the desalination project. "Ultimately it's the only
solution," he said in an interview with New Scientist.
Unusual cooperation
Water supply is
one of the few areas where cooperation between Israel and Palestine
has survived the current intifada. Every day on the West Bank, Palestinian
engineers help repair and maintain Israeli water pipes, and vice versa.
But Palestinian
water negotiators are deeply uneasy about the plans being drawn up on
their behalf, especially if they involve abandoning claims to the water
beneath their feet. "We cannot do that. We don't have the money
or the expertise for desalination," Ihab Barghothi, head of water
projects for the Palestinian Water Authority, told New Scientist.
Palestinians badly
need more water. Under the Oslo agreement they have access to 57 cubic
metres of water per person per year from all sources. Israel gets 246
cubic metres per head per year. And in the nearly 40 years that Israel
has controlled the West Bank, Palestinians have been largely forbidden
from drilling new wells or rehabilitating old ones.
The region's sources
of water are the West Bank aquifers; the river Jordan, which rises in
the Golan Heights and flows into the Sea of Galilee, where it is largely
tapped by Israel; and the coastal aquifer, an increasingly polluted
reserve of underground water that extends south to the Palestinian territory
of the Gaza Strip.
Sewage effluent
Over the years,
Israel has developed a good reputation for using water efficiently,
and in the 1980s it began recycling sewage effluent for irrigation.
In 2004, Israel signed a deal to buy water shipped by tanker from Turkey.
Meanwhile, Palestinians
in the Gaza Strip depend almost exclusively on small wells tapping the
coastal aquifer. As the water table falls, the aquifer is becoming increasingly
polluted by salt water from the sea. UN scientists say Gaza will have
no drinkable water within 15 years.
Despite earlier
efforts to develop desalination, the Israel government only decided
to invest heavily in the technology in the past four years. Some, including
Israeli liberals and Palestinian optimists such as Barghothi, believed
that once Israel began desalinating seawater for its own use it would
be prepared to relax its grip on the West Bank aquifers.
But now it appears
that Israeli water planners see desalination as a means of retaining
control of those aquifers.
The desalination
plant to supply the West Bank would parallel a similar US-funded reverse
osmosis plant to fill taps on the hard-pressed Gaza Strip. The scheme
has already been approved and funded, but is currently on hold because
of continuing conflict in Gaza. Taken together, the two schemes would
leave an independent Palestine more dependent on desalination than almost
any other nation in the world.