By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed Israeli Foreign Affairs and National Infrastructures Minister Ariel Sharon called off a meeting that was to have been held in Washington towards the end of November, at which he was meant to illustrate an ambitious plan to desalinate water from the Mediterranean Sea by means of nuclear energy. The plan, which calls for the construction of a nuclear plant with the capacity to desalinate 50 million cubic metres of sea water annually in Rafah, on the border between Egypt and Gaza, will take some ten years to complete at a cost running into many billions of dollars. According to the Italian news agency, ANSA, the United States is available to contribute towards financing the project, probably together with Japan. In addition to the Israeli team, the meeting was to have included representatives from the United States, the European Union and the Palestinian Authority. No other Middle Eastern state was invited to attend. Sharon's last-minute cancellation of the meeting in no way implies an abandonment of the project; rather, it was an expression of the Israeli government's displeasure with the Palestinian Authority's alleged instigation of demonstrations throughout the occupied territories in protest at Israel's non-compliance with the Wye Plantation Accords. The project is only part of a much wider project involving the construction of four desalination plants in Israel itself, possibly based on new technologies. Completion of the entire project is scheduled for 2010, just in time to face the water shortages that are expected to affect not only Israel but also the self-rule territories and Jordan in the near future, raising the spectre of new types of wars provoked by scarcity of water, not only of land. Although a plan of this magnitude has enormous implications for the region as a whole, it has received scant media coverage. This begs the question of whether the Israelis are deliberately downplaying its significance in order to deprive the Arabs of the opportunity to come up with a counter-plan. I for one was dismayed to learn of the proposed Israeli desalination project, for I have for long been urging an Arab initiative in this area. Since my book, Peace or Mirage?, was published in 1995, I have been calling for an initiative to preempt the growing threat of water wars. I even argued that water scarcity throughout the region need not be seen only as a negative development but that it could eventually have beneficial effects, in the sense that if the Arabs make a concerted effort to rise to the challenge they could kill two birds with one stone: overcome water shortage and, at the same time, improve their bargaining position in the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the summit conference on ecological issues held at the United Nations in New York in 1996, French President Jacques Chirac drew the attention of international public opinion to the growing threat of global water scarcity. Taking the issue further, he hosted an international conference in Paris last March to address the looming threat and propose concrete steps to surmount it. When Netanyahu came to power in Israel and effectively brought the peace process to a complete standstill, it appeared to me that the time had come to probe whether the water crisis, and Chirac's personal interest in finding a solution, could not be used to mobilise Arab resources to face the challenge. Such an endeavour could, at the same time, serve the cause of peace, by correcting distortions in the balance of power between the Arabs and Israel and negating Israel's claim that it is an island of high technology in a desert of backwardness. To that end, I proposed the launching of a giant project to desalinate water from the Mediterranean Sea through discovering new technologies based on solar, not nuclear, energy, capable of displacing vast amounts of desalinated water to the Arab deserts stretching from Morocco in the west to the Gulf in the east. Egypt could play a central role in putting the project together. On the one hand, by using the occasion of the bicentennial celebrations of Franco-Egyptian relations to invite France to undertake the task of pooling international expertise and resources in the aim of discovering an economically viable means of desalinating sea water; and, on the other, by inviting the Arab Gulf states to finance an Arab organisation along the lines of the European Coal and Steel Community which became the nucleus of the European Union. As a pan-Arab institution, the organisation, which could be called the Arab Water and Petroleum Community, would allocate the interest generated from funds received as an endowment from Arab Gulf states rich in oil but poor in water to the discovery of new water sources. In the absence of a central role for France and Egypt, it would be difficult for those states to ensure that desalination of sea water could be made cost-effective. However, it is now clear that Israel has moved first, and that it is actually in the process of setting up a major desalination project while we continue to drag our feet, thereby turning what could have been a valuable asset into a serious liability. With the initiative passing over to Israel, the project will not serve to redress the imbalance in the negotiating power of the protagonists but will deepen it still further. Indeed, the whole idea behind Israel's construction of a desalination plant in Gaza is to force the Arab parties to resort to Israel, via Gaza, to overcome their water crisis. So far, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been over land, its scope limited to the Arab territories within Israel's reach. The addition of a water dimension to the conflict could, thanks to the Rafah desalination project, extend Israel's hegemonic status to the Arab deserts as a whole, in other words, to the entire Arab world. Until Israel's actual endeavour in this field, it could have been argued that my proposal to use solar energy to evaporate considerable amounts of Mediterranean sea water and condense it for use as potable water was more a science-fiction dream than a viable proposition, useful at best as a bargaining chip in creating a more balanced relationship between Arabs and Israelis. This argument has been effectively rebutted by the recent news from Israel, which has placed the issue of water high on the agenda of critical regional concerns. Should we have kept our ideas on the matter secret, as Israel seems to be doing? I do not believe the critical factor is secrecy, but rather the actual balance of power. If we aspire to some form of parity with Israel in the field of technological innovation, we have all to gain from transparency. This takes us to a second question: is the issue, in the final analysis, one of development versus underdevelopment? While the question does bear looking into, it is a fact that Arabs are perfectly capable of achieving impressive results in the fields of science and technology as long as the determination is there. A professor at the faculty of engineering of Alexandria University, Dr Mona Mahmoud Naim, recently wrote to tell me that she had spent a sabbatical year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States on a Fulbright grant. In the course of her research, she and an American fellow scientist discovered a new technique for desalinating sea water through liquid membranes, which they are now seeking to patent and adapt for industrial use. Efforts such as this deserve to be encouraged in every possible way, for they can be vital assets in the technological race whose outcome will determine the future of the entire region.
