Anybody who questions the importance of water in Middle East geopolitics need only look at the cause of many of the heightened tensions throughout the region. Whether it is Israeli settlers in the West Bank being allocated far more water than the Palestinians whose land they are occupying, or Turkey’s abstraction of water relied upon by Iraqi farmers, or Egypt’s disputes with nations upstream on the Nile, water has a profound influence on the region’s stability and security.
All this makes the extreme drought conditions experienced by much of the region this winter a matter for genuine concern. With the wettest part of the year over and the summer heat on its way, a poor harvest raises the prospect of diminished food security and higher prices being faced by many people who will struggle to pay. A spike in the price of staple foods at the end of the 2000s, most will remember, was identified as a major cause of the uprisings of the Arab Spring and elsewhere.
Droughts are one thing but many of the tensions that are present in the Middle East right now are due to policy decisions about water resources shared across borders rather than the vicissitudes of the weather.
Turkey is a case in point. The Tigris and the Euphrates both begin in the mountains of south west Turkey before crossing Syria and Iraq to reach the Gulf. With poor rainfall this winter, farmers downstream on both rivers are particularly reliant on the water for the success of their crops but Turkey has recently increased how much it takes before the rivers leave its territory and deems it has sufficient overall water reserves to pipe water from another Turkish catchment to northern Cyprus. The result is likely to be a water crisis in Syria and Iraq – nations that already face more than enough challenges from civil war and an entrenched Sunni insurgency.
A similar dispute is happening for the Nile, with in this case Egypt having to lobby nations upstream, such as Sudan and Ethiopia, about their extraction of water and plans to build dams. As in Syria and Iraq, the majority of Egyptians would struggle to cope with any significant increase in the price of basic foods.
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has seen illegal settlers receiving about three times as much water per person as the Palestinians. The inequity of settlements having swimming pools when Palestinians cannot dig wells is one more humiliation of occupation.
International law has proven mostly toothless in resolving such disputes, leaving upstream nations with the whip hand, albeit at the cost of stability and security in the region. If in the literal sense, water disputes flow only in the direction that rivers travel, their effects reverberate indiscriminately.