« With water you can make politics. With land you can make war! », Benyamin Netanyahou (prime Minister of Israel)

JERUSALEM from  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Today I would like to highlight a very famous conflict about freshwater. The conflict between Israel and  Palestine  has received some attention from the press.

In their public statements, Israeli and Palestinian rulers only mention the issue partially of water compared to the issue of security for refugees or the status of Jerusalem. However, we do not have to be naive about the strategic intentions of Israeli Prime Minister when he utters this sentence. Such a position is characteristic of the symbolic value placed on the land and the instrumental value given to water.

Water doesn't rarefy! (Pierre-Alain Clément, 2010)

From a purely physical point of view, the amount of water on Earth is constant, unlike the amount of oil: water is a  renewable resource. According to Pierre Alian Clément, for these States, the issue doesn't arise in terms of the gap between demand and supply but between demand and resource renewal rates. Competition among states involved in this framework and was strengthened with increasing population pressure. This in practice means an accessibility issue with drinking water.

This is also the Ricardo Petrell (2011) reasoning, economist and founder of the International Committee for the World Water Contract. For him, the discourse of water scarcity in the image of a scarcity of oil serves to legitimize the privatization of the production and distribution of water, supposed to regulate consumption.

As we see, the issue of water is not an issue, at least not in the near future, in terms of overall quantity but in terms of local accessibility to quality water. In addition, human use tends to gradually deteriorate the quality of the water and to disrupt the cycle. Dramatic illustration of this impact can be illustrated by the environmental and health disaster of the drying up of the Aral Sea due to the diversion of two rivers tributaries

The "Peace Canal", a solution for tomorrow?

In 2007, the World Bank launched a tender for a feasibility study of a canal linking the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.

The Peace Canal project aimed to solve the water shortage in the region and seeks to respond to the reduction in the size of the Dead Sea and to avoid its virtual disappearance by 2050. The channel would be able to capture the water of the Red Sea and it would refill this water in the Dead Sea. Designed to prevent the disappearance of the Dead Sea, the current project has however received criticism from environmentalists, about the fact that the Dead Sea has always been fed with fresh water, and not sea water. Filling the Dead Sea with the waters of the Red Sea cannot bring it back to its original conditions. (Trottier, 2008) If it is finally realized, this project will result in a total transformation of the ecology and water management  in the region.

Can we really talk about water wars?

I wanted to show you the gravity of the situation and the tensions it creates. However, in my opinion, it is clear that the water appears as an indicator of these tensions more than a factor of war. In the Middle East, each of the parties to the conflict bound is well known that water issues are quite central to the settlement of the  Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel may propose to move from tension to cooperation in promoting the canal project, for instance.

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