Can the Environment be a Peacemaking and State-building Tool?

Avner Vengosh and Erika Weinthal View Solving the Water Crisis in Gaza as a Potential Step Toward Collaboration p.3

In a similar study, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (US-AID), Vengosh and a team of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian scientists used isotopic and geochemical tracers to prove that natural groundwater discharge is the principal source of the severe salinity problem in the Jordan River, which provides water for Israel and Jordan.

Currently, most freshwater tributaries of the Jordan are dammed, and the major source of inflow is sewage effluent, Vengosh says. A peace treaty between Israel and Jordan calls for removing this sewage to improve the water quality.

But Vengosh’s research suggests that, counterintuitive as it may sound, “the removal of sewage would cause further deterioration of the river’s water quality, since saline ground water discharge would then become the predominant source of inflow.

“Our scientific findings may imply that the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan cannot be implemented, or, worse, can cause further harm to the environment,” he says.

To compound the region’s water woes further, additional research by Vengosh also has shown that some of the Negev’s fossil groundwater reserves are naturally radioactive.

“This area sits on Nubian sandstone, a type of sandstone found in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa,” he explains. His isotopic tracer studies show that the radioactivity is caused by water washing away a naturally occurring radioactive metal, radium, found in the sandstone.

The discovery of high radioactivity in ground water in the Negev may imply that many other ground waters in the Middle East suffer from the same problem, he says.

Vengosh’s findings support the need for increased international cooperation on water issues in the troubled region, Weinthal says, especially in places where the crisis is already dire, such as the Gaza Strip.

“If the Palestinian Authority continues to pump from the coastal aquifer, boron-laden saline ground water from the eastern side will continue to spread, further reducing the amount of available water,” she says. “The only plausible solution is to increase the supply of external water brought into Gaza.”

The most cost-effective way to do that, she believes, is for Palestinian and Israeli authorities to develop a joint water management plan. “The reality,” Weinthal says, “is that resolving this crisis will require cooperation with Israel, not further separation from it.”

Israel would benefit from the collaboration, too, she adds. By helping to solve Gaza’s water woes, it gains international goodwill and could, ultimately, help protect its own sizable investment in water treatment technologies. The nation’s largest and newest desalination plant is located just 10 kilometers up the coast from Gaza, she notes. When conditions are right, the prevailing coastal current could carry contaminated wastewater straight from Gaza to the plant.

• • •

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5