Water politics in the Middle East
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Water politics in the Middle East deals with control of the water resources of the Middle East, an arid region where issues of the use, supply, control, and allocation of water are of central economic importance. Politically contested watersheds include the Tigris–Euphrates river system which drains to the south-east through Iraq into the Persian Gulf, the Nile basin which drains northward through Egypt into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and the Jordan River basin which flows into the Dead Sea (400 m below sea level), a land-locked and highly saline sea bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel to the west.
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. Farmers in the Mesopotamian plain practiced irrigation from at least the third millennium BCE.[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. Soon thereafter, Israel initiated a unilateral water-diversion project within the Jordan River basin in development of Israel's National Water Carrier. Concurrently with these actions, the Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan was negotiated and developed by US ambassador Eric Johnston between 1953 and 1955 and approved by technical water committees of all the regional riparian countries—Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria[2]—though rejected by the Arab League. Armed conflict resulted in the 1960s, culminating in the Six-Day War of June 1967. A broad political treaty between Israel and Jordan signed in 1994[3] is the only such agreement in the region to lead to recognition of water rights on both sides, though diplomatic tensions around this treaty continue to flare up due to subsequent drought conditions.