Ha’aretz reported June 25 that the Israeli Finance Ministry is recommending Israel cancel plans to allow Turkish water to be imported to Israel. The bureaucrat sent to Turkey to negotiate the price of water was unable to come to an agreement with the Turks, and has concluded that the imported water would be twice as expensive as desalinated water.

IASPS research has played a major role in putting Turkish water on the Israeli agenda. A major conference on this subject with the participation of the then minister of infrastructure, Avigdor Liberman, as well as the current acting minister, Naomi Blumenthal, and the then minister for regional cooperation, Tsippi Livni, Turkish dignitaries and aacdemics, and businessmen from 3 continents, was held by IASPS last year in Jerusalem. IASPS has published several research studies focusing on Israel’s water crisis (which IASPS called a “crisis” long before anyone else did) and the geopolitical importance of water, and IASPS analysts have published op-eds and articles in major newspapers on the subject.

Can it really be that a country such as Israel, whose wells are dry and whose rain is insufficient, is willing – indeed, apparently eager – to forego an almost infinite source of available water? Here are the facts:

The Finance Ministry for years, all through the 1990s, opposed desalination…which it now champions. The ministry’s delay in approving desalination cost Israel years of lost development, years of wasting water, and years of lost direct foreign investment that would have built the desalination plants. Just this week Ha’aretz revealed that even now, the ministry has just taken a full six months just to report to the six groups that applied for a January desalination tender – and its conclusion was that that their bids – all of them - were unacceptable!

Earlier desalination tenders could have been an opportunity to introduce some competition to the water market in Israel – yet despite an attorney general’s ruling, the state Mekorot water monopoly unilaterally took responsibility for the tenders, thereby assuring its control over both local water resources and, now, the new sources. The Finance Ministry and government went along with this power grab.

Now to Turkey:

IASPS strategic analyst Paul Michael Wihbey has made the following points, in various forums:

1. Turkish government officials consider Israel’s importing water as a test, showing that Israel wants to improve relations and expand them beyond security matters, into more normal relations.
2. An agreement to import water would thus be a blow to anti-Israel and anti-Western elements in Turkey.
3. Turkey has allocated about $800 million for agricultural development in south-eastern Turkey, and Israeli companies could win a larger share of the work there, if relations improve and become more and more commercial.
4. Turkey has already been upset by strange Israeli behavior in the past – as, for instance, when some Israeli politicians bent on pushing fantasy-driven peace plans suggested that Turkey export water to Syria in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. Nobody bothered to check with Turkey, which opposed that idea.
5. Turkey has already canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of business with Israeli firms, in the past, as Israel has repeatedly promised to import water and repeatedly failed to do so.
6. An Israeli-Turkish water accord could be the basis for a new regional geopolitical alignment, of pro-Western democratic states, against fundamentalist corrupt regimes. Such water could also flow to Jordan and the PA and alleviate the entire region’s acute water shortage.

The end result of all the Finance Ministry shenanigans is: years without desalination – which is now trumpeted as salvation; further delays and impediments by the trumpeters to that very desalination; broken promises to import water from Turkey, after dragging out the negotiations over literally years, while the Turks were anxious to conclude a deal long ago; losses of investment in Israel by foreign businessmen and angry Turks; water reservoirs that long ago passed the dry stage; and cemented state domination of the water industry. Given the manner in which the state has handled all the aspects of water policy, this last point is an especially ominous one.

For, if not for state monopolistic control, private businessmen would long ago have built huge desalination plants, water would be imported from Turkey by any businessman who thought he could make a profit, Israelis wouldn’t be wondering how they are going to wash their cars next year, and a strong Western alliance would be dominating the Middle East.

Won’t someone please take water policy away from the state, before it is too late?

Printer-Friendly Version