Middle East: Water

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech]

Like others of your Lordships, I welcome and feel privileged to have been here for the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Baglan. We can readily see that the House will benefit from his wide experience and I wish him a long and happy career here. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and agree with all the encouraging words and actions that he has described, stemming from his own experience. I express an interest as a trustee of the Jewish National Fund, which invests inter alia in environmental projects in Israel.

I welcome the fact that the international community is addressing in a constructive way, in the excellent report The Blue Peace, the issue of transforming water supply into a trigger for collaboration and peace in the Middle East. As I will show, there are some grounds for hope. Already, as a result of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994, Israel provides Jordan with a significant contribution to Amman’s water supply, plus a storage capacity, and in return Israel is allowed to pump groundwater from the Arava basin from wells in Jordan. Israel and Palestine have an active joint water committee that meets regularly and Israel supplies water to Gaza, although maintenance is another issue.

The entire region is beset by common problems; a growing population, a diminishing supply of water and elevated expectations coming with higher living standards. Syria is drought-hit, through climate change, manmade desertification and lack of irrigation. One has to think long-term, for the alliances and enmities in the Middle East may change. Alongside the massacres inflicted by Syria’s Government on their own people, their mismanagement of agriculture and irrigation add to their woes. Israel can hardly be expected to reach a deal with Syria over Lake Kinneret while that country is in a state of uprising. Iraq accuses Syria, Iran and Turkey of practices that reduce the flow of water to the Tigris and Euphrates. The political instability of these countries exacerbates the environmental concerns. Turkey is unlikely to be a reliable partner in relation to the export of Turkish water to the Jordan Valley, a project which has been considered, because of Turkey’s changing needs.

However, there is good news too. At Ben Gurion University in the Negev there is funded a joint project between Israelis and Palestinians to address clean water issues in the West Bank area of Nablus; the team includes one person from Ben Gurion University, a professor from the Biodiversity and Environmental Research Centre in Nablus and an American. They are working on purifying secondary waste water, an immediate resource for irrigation. Also at Ben Gurion University, researchers have an award from the NATO Science for Peace programme to work on desalination in Jordan and in Israel; they work in collaboration with colleagues from the Hashemite University of Jordan and from the US. Ben Gurion University has its first Jordanian PhD student. Having completed his first degree in Jordan, he went on to earn his masters degree at the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research and then on to the PhD program there in the Negev and it has resulted in published research by Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian authors together. Israeli technology is being introduced into Jordan.

There is a project known as the Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal project, already mentioned this afternoon—sometimes called the peace conduit—which, if it comes to fruition, will be a joint Israel-Palestine-Jordan undertaking. It envisages a pipeline from one sea to the other that would carry up to 2 billion cubic metres of seawater per annum to the Dead Sea, of which half could be desalinated and the rest would replenish the Dead Sea. The water level there has dropped in 50 years by almost 30 metres and the surface area has shrunk by a third in a century. There are environmental concerns with the project, which the World Bank is considering at the moment, but if it worked it would be a splendid demonstration of regional co-operation. The potential donors to this are Italy, France, Greece, Korea, Japan, Holland, Sweden and the USA. One can but hope that the current euro financial crisis does not weaken this venture, one I hope that the UK Government will encourage. Its success would arrest the deterioration of the Dead Sea environment and provide drinking water to the Middle East.

Israel, Jordan and Syria have all diverted water from the upper Jordan Valley and deprived the Dead Sea of the input of water. But the situation is not necessarily a manmade problem. Research has estimated that today’s low level of the Dead Sea was also the case in about 800 AD. The temperature in the Middle East over the centuries has oscillated between calamity and abundance, the researchers say. We should not always blame human activity, for over time climate change has affected human behaviour in migration and agriculture as much as the other way round. Nevertheless, at this time drought is increasing in the Middle East.

It does not help the situation for accusations to be flung by one country at another. They are all in it together. Amnesty International rather predictably whipped up what has been called hydro-hysteria in its report Thirsting for Justice in 2009, which took a one-sided approach to the evidence on water resources between Israel and Palestine.

The Palestine Water Authority has had much responsibility for water delivery since the mid-1990s and is beset by accusations of mismanagement, although it is in receipt of grants from the World Bank and others. Before 1967, only 20 per cent of the Occupied Territories was connected to a water network; now 90 per cent has running water. Israel has stuck to its commitment under the Oslo peace accord and has even increased the committed allocation, with the result that the water supply for Palestinians is better than that provided in Jordan and Syria. However, 30 per cent is lost through leaks in the West Bank.

What are the solutions? First, the UK Government should urge the World Bank to progress the Red Sea-Dead Sea project and join in themselves, if they can. They should encourage the joint Palestinian-Israeli meetings taking place through the joint water committee. They should publicise and, if possible, assist in grants to the outstanding initiatives of the Ben Gurion University, with especial emphasis on desalinisation and joint working; there is already one scholarship for a Ben Gurion University student to Oxford and a project to create another at Oxford Brookes. They should note that the Palestinian National Authority is the world’s largest per-capita recipient of international development assistance, and try to ensure that some of that largesse is devoted to water management and improved water delivery.

The thinking behind the Blue Peace report and all the many studies of the water issue rests on an assumption that people want to live in peace and use water as a natural way of sustaining life. If martyrdom is preferred, then all assumptions collapse. There is an old fable about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung during the trip but the scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog agrees and begins carrying the scorpion, but mid-way across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature. There is a variation on the ending in which the scorpion says, “It is better that we should both perish than that my enemy should live”. This is what I feared might apply to water in the Middle East, but I am cheered and wish to end with the words of the Jordanian PhD student at Ben Gurion University, who maintains that water is a great conduit for peace in the region. He says:

“The problem in what’s happening right now in the region is that there’s no trust at all between our leaders—but between our scientists there is trust”.