A Middle East Accord—No Diplomats Needed

A Middle East Accord—No Diplomats Needed

 

Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians agree on a project to address water scarcity.

 

By Seth M. Siegel in the Wall Street Journal

In what passes for humor in the world of water, Israeli President Shimon Peres never fails to get a chuckle when he says, "Israel has two lakes. One dead and one moody." The lakes he refers to are the misnamed Dead Sea—the world's saltiest body of water—and the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus performed his miracles. Neither is a sea, and in recent years both have been victims of drought and evaporation.

But there's good news for both of these bodies of water—and thus for the Jordanians, Israelis and Palestinians who rely on them. While media were reporting the familiar stories about the stalled Middle East peace process, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority quietly announced in December the first phase of the Red Sea-Dead Sea Project to rehabilitate the dying Dead Sea and build a desalination plant on the Red Sea and a pipeline to share that water.

The parties came to this agreement after years of quiet negotiations among themselves. No American or European Union diplomats prodded them along, and there were no high-profile news conferences. The agreement to this generation-long construction project suggests that these parties, in addition to being able to speak with each other, can also work together to transform the region when they believe that their interests are being served.

Even in its early stages, the project is scheduled to accomplish several important goals.

In Aqaba, a Jordanian port on the Red Sea, a desalination plant estimated to be completed in 2017 will provide new freshwater supplies to one of the most water-stressed regions in the world. This water production will require goodwill and cooperation: Israel will take water from its Mediterranean desalination plants and transfer it to the populous Hebron area in the West Bank, serving as an economic spur for local industry and some agriculture. Israel will also provide Amman, Jordan's capital, with water from the nearby Sea of Galilee. In return, Jordan will provide Israel with half of the Aqaba desalination plant's output for Israel's bone-dry Negev desert, keeping the rest for itself in southern Jordan.

The desalination plan should appeal to environmentalists. Desalination plants ordinarily return the brine from the purified water to the sea, which makes no use of the brine. Not here. Instead, a 125-mile pipeline, estimated to be completed in 2017, will transfer that brine to the Dead Sea, a waterway jointly shared by the three parties. The audacious goal is to stabilize the Dead Sea's borders, which have been receding due to reduced flow from the Jordan River and evaporation, and by doing so give investors incentives to build more hotels, roads and factories at this lowest place on Earth.

But the most important part of the water agreement is its role in collaborative, regional development. Although the project in its final form will take decades to complete, the first phase will immediately provide construction and engineering jobs. This will show the Palestinian people that their leadership can create large projects that will improve their lives in a way that Hamas does not. Jordan can point to the benefits of cooperating with Israel and gain bonus points for doing so in a way that also directly benefits the Palestinians. For the Israelis, it opens a pathway for economic and population growth in an uncontested area and helps to further remove water as a point of tension in the final-status negotiations with the Palestinians.

In later stages of the project, some 20 years from now, the amount of water and brine from Aqaba will grow at least fivefold. The large drop in altitude from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea can also be used for long-term green hydroelectric power that would spur industry in Jordan's south.

Some naysayers will claim that this agreement is fragile, and will surely point to the gas pipeline from Egypt to Israel that was repeatedly blown up after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Of course, any infrastructure project anywhere in the world is subject to terror attacks. But with the Palestinian Authority as a partner with Israel, an attack on Israel would be an attack on Palestinian interests. All three beneficiaries have a common interest in seeing the project running securely, and this, too, will bind them together.

Peace negotiators will say that negotiating an infrastructure project is easy compared with issues like security, borders and refugees. Still, the parties achieved a valuable goal by speaking directly with each other, away from artificial time constraints and the pressure that comes from having high-ranking officials managing the talks. The World Bank and some donor nations, especially France, helped the project come together, but only when requested—jointly—by the parties. All told, the project is currently estimated at $12 billion, with the costs for the first phase being shared between Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the World Bank.

Working together successfully is the ultimate confidence-building measure. Anyone interested in regional peacemaking efforts would do well to keep a close eye on the progress of the Red Sea-Dead Sea Project.

Mr. Siegel, an entrepreneur and the co-founder of the marketing company Beanstalk, writes and lectures on water scarcity in Israel.