Prime Minister's Office director general Avigdor Yitzhaki returned from Turkey without an agreement to supply Israel with water. No agreement with the country that control’s the Middle East’s water tap is easy under the current circumstances, and Turkey is torn between its traditionally warm relations with Israel and its sympathy towards the Palestinians.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Turks he views the water agreement as a personal and strategic commitment.
The problems at the moment are price and transportation. The final price is still undecided, but the Prime Minister’s Office believes it will be less than desalination. A $15 million investment will be needed to build an unloading station at sea for the water tankers, and construction will take at least a year from the time a decision to build it is made.
In the best case scenario, two years will pass before Turkish water comes to Israel, concurrent to production from the first of a series of desalination facilities that will produce 100 million cubic meters of water a year at $0.52 per cubic meter.
The Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on the Issue of Water, headed by MK David Magen, will publish its report today. The report criticizes the delay and time wasted by the authorities who were supposed to develop water sources, and makes a series of recommendations, beginning with declaring a two-year water emergency situation, centralizing water issues in the Prime Minister’s Office, and establishing a special status for the Water Commissioner.
The report is the season opener for our annual summertime gloom and doom scenarios. The figures are scary. There is a deficit of 2 billion cubic meters of water in a country that wants millions of Jews to immigrate to a semi-arid climate that has a good rainy season once a decade.
It is possible to argue about the recommendations, and say the report went too easy on past sins, especially the agriculture lobby's domination of the Water Commission, and the conflicts of interest in setting water prices. The reports neglects to mention the worst fact of all: agricultural communities waste immense quantities of water for non-agricultural purposes at subsidized rates. This amounts to at least 50 million cubic meters a year. On the other hand, former Minister for National Infrastructures Avigdor Lieberman is lauded for being the driving force behind the water desalination tenders and standing firm against the agriculture lobby.
Even if an agreement to import 300 million cubic meters of water a year is reached within three years, the basic problem is that the calculations ignore regional realities. It is as if there is no dispute over water allocations with the Palestinians, as if pressure from Jordan will not intensify, and as if the mountain and coastal aquifers belong only to Israel. It is odd that the country that produces some of the world's greatest water management experts, people who design and build regional projects around the globe, is not able to do the same for the Middle East.
The only solution is a regional water pipeline from Turkey, with the joint investment and consumption of Syria, Jordan, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Israel, and maybe also northern Sinai and Saudi Arabia. It might also be possible to save the Dead Sea from evaporating. The time has come for engineers to start charting the pipeline's course.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on June 2, 2002