On water, statehood and interdependence - Is water an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: Distinction (Very good), King`s College London (University of London), language: English, abstract: This paper looks at the role played by water in the context of the Palestinian Territories. In the course of the ongoing dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, negotiations over a political settlement focus at large on five main issues: refugees, Israeli settlers, defining the borders, the final status of Jerusalem, and water. While the first four issues have taken a relatively prominent role in the public debate, the fifth one has often been sidelined in favour of more emotional and ¿obvious¿ topics. This is however not to say that water would not play a crucial role in finding a peaceful political solution to the ongoing dispute. In fact, as we will show, the regional water scarcity and related problems pose outwardly intractable problems going hand in hand with ideological and geographical disputes in a wider matrix of conflicting riparians of the Jordan River basin. We will further show that water has the ability to act both as an aggravator to conflict and as a solution to hostility and mistrust and can in fact be part for a first step towards a solution to the entire regional conflict. However, while water clearly is a regional issue, we will, in order to keep this work concise, concentrate on the geographical region of Palestine, illustrating the interrelationship between ecology and security in the context of the ongoing conflict.