Water Cooperation and Peace in the Middle East

Water cooperation in the Middle East has outlasted nearly every other channel of dialogue between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. Wars have closed borders, embassies have been recalled and negotiations have collapsed, yet technical talks over shared rivers and aquifers have continued through most of it. In some of the worst years, a water committee was the only official forum in which the parties still sat at one table.

That persistence is not sentimental. The region is among the driest inhabited places on earth, populations are growing, and climate change is cutting rainfall across the eastern Mediterranean. No riparian on the Jordan River can secure its supply alone. Practitioners call the result water diplomacy: shared water problems used deliberately as an entry point for negotiation, confidence-building and, eventually, political cooperation.

Why water cooperation in the Middle East endures

The starting point is hydrology. The Jordan River basin is shared by five riparians: Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. The Yarmouk, the Jordan’s largest tributary, rises in Syria and forms part of the Jordanian-Syrian and Jordanian-Israeli borders. Groundwater complicates matters further: the Mountain Aquifer underlies both the West Bank and Israel, while Gaza depends almost entirely on an over-pumped coastal aquifer.

Interdependence of this kind tends to produce negotiation rather than war. Researchers at Oregon State University, cataloguing interactions between states sharing river basins from 1948 to 1999, found that cooperative events outnumbered conflictive ones by roughly two to one. UN-Water documents the same pattern globally: most transboundary basins are governed by agreement rather than by force.

The Middle East fits the pattern, uncomfortably. Water has been a source of grievance, sabotage and occasional armed skirmish, most notably around Jordan headwater diversions in the 1960s, but it has never on its own caused a war between the basin states. It has repeatedly given adversaries a technical language in which to keep talking, which is the modest core of what mediation and structured dialogue are meant to achieve.

Treaties and committees: the Jordan basin’s legal architecture

Two agreements from the 1990s still define formal water cooperation in the basin. The first is the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, whose Annex II deals entirely with water. It sets agreed allocations from the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, provides for joint storage and Israeli transfers of water to Jordan, and establishes a Joint Water Committee. Annex II is often cited as one of the more successful water annexes in any modern peace agreement, because it converted a zero-sum dispute into a schedule of quantities, dates and joint institutions.

The second is the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, Oslo II. Article 40 of its third annex recognised Palestinian water rights in the West Bank, deferred their definition to final-status talks and created a separate joint committee to approve wells, pipelines and sewage projects. The committee kept meeting long after the political track froze, but an arrangement designed for five years has now governed for three decades, and its approval system gives the stronger party an effective veto over most Palestinian water infrastructure. The World Bank documented these asymmetries in a widely discussed 2009 assessment of the West Bank and Gaza water sector.

A comparative study of EU-supported regional cooperation initiatives reached a blunt conclusion about the basin: unilateral approaches to water management are inefficient given the interconnectedness of river systems, and can actively do harm when water is treated as a zero-sum game.

The same research documented how asymmetry corrodes cooperation in practice. In one project meant to share water data among Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian experts, Palestinian participants at times could not attend meetings because travel permits were not issued. Cooperation existed on paper; trust did not follow automatically.

The Dead Sea and the limits of grand infrastructure

Nowhere is the cost of fragmented management more visible than at the Dead Sea. Upstream diversion of the Jordan River, together with mineral extraction, has cut the river’s flow into the sea to a small fraction of its historical volume. EcoPeace Middle East, the trilateral environmental organisation with offices in Amman, Ramallah and Tel Aviv, reports that the water level has been dropping by roughly a metre a year, leaving behind sinkholes that swallow roads and farmland.

The flagship answer was the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance, a plan to pump seawater from the Gulf of Aqaba, desalinate part of it for Jordan and discharge the brine into the Dead Sea to slow its fall. After a World Bank-facilitated feasibility process, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed a memorandum of understanding on a first phase in 2013, but the project never reached construction. In 2021 Jordan abandoned the scheme, citing years of delay and a lack of Israeli commitment, and turned instead to a national desalination line from Aqaba to Amman.

The episode carries a lesson that recurs in regional environmental cooperation more broadly: infrastructure on a heroic scale cannot substitute for political trust. When the politics soured, the pipeline died, and the Dead Sea kept falling.

Water diplomacy from below: EcoPeace and Good Water Neighbors

Alongside the state-to-state track, the basin has produced one of the best-known experiments in bottom-up environmental peacebuilding. EcoPeace, founded in 1994, is jointly led by Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli directors. Its Good Water Neighbors programme, launched in 2001, pairs communities across borders that depend on the same water source and uses concrete local problems, a polluted stream, a failing sewage network, as reasons for neighbours on opposite sides of a conflict to meet.

The theory treats water less as a resource to divide than as a relationship to manage. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), which hosts the International Centre for Water Cooperation, describes water diplomacy as the use of diplomatic instruments in disputes over shared waters, to prevent conflict and enable joint management. On this reading, a functioning wastewater agreement between two towns is a small piece of peace, close kin to the human security needs that formal peace processes overlook.

Comparative research on regional cooperation warns, though, that peacebuilding is never an automatic side-effect. Initiatives contribute to peace only when trust-building, inclusiveness and conflict-sensitivity are designed in from the start; poorly conceived cooperation can entrench asymmetries and deepen resentment.

Desalination and the water-for-energy bargain

Technology has shifted the terms of the dispute. Israel now covers a large share of its municipal supply from Mediterranean desalination plants and reuses most of its treated wastewater, which has softened the old logic of absolute scarcity on one side of the ledger. Jordan remains among the most water-scarce countries in the world, a situation the World Bank and UN agencies have repeatedly flagged as a threat to the kingdom’s stability, made worse by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

This imbalance produced a new form of exchange. In November 2021, during the COP26 period, Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates signed a UAE-brokered declaration of intent for a water-for-energy swap: solar power generated in Jordan for Israel, desalinated water from Israel for Jordan. The declaration remained a framework rather than a binding contract, and regional escalation after 2023 has placed its future in doubt, but it marked the first time the two states treated water and clean energy as a single, tradeable package.

Gaza stands as the counter-example. Its coastal aquifer has been over-pumped and contaminated by seawater and sewage for decades; United Nations agencies, including UNICEF, reported well before the current war that the overwhelming majority of its groundwater was unfit for human consumption. Repeated destruction of pumping and treatment infrastructure has since turned chronic scarcity into an acute emergency. Where cooperation collapses entirely, water is among the first casualties.

What the Jordan basin teaches other regions

Three lessons travel well beyond the Middle East. First, water agreements can survive political rupture if they are precise, technical and mutually useful; Annex II outlived repeated crises because both sides needed it to work. Second, asymmetry is the central design problem: committees that formalise unequal power preserve contact but can freeze injustice in place. Third, civil society gives water diplomacy depth that ministries cannot, by building constituencies for cooperation that persist when governments stop talking.

These findings echo experience from other basins, from the Nile to the African Great Lakes, where regional cooperation initiatives have faced the same mixture of shared need and mutual suspicion. Shared water does not make peace by itself. It makes conversation unavoidable, and what parties build on that conversation is a political choice.

Frequently asked questions

What does water cooperation in the Middle East actually involve?

It spans treaty allocations such as Annex II of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, joint water committees, technical data-sharing projects and cross-border community programmes such as those of EcoPeace Middle East. Water cooperation in the Middle East continues even when political relations freeze, because no party can manage the shared basin alone.

What did the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty say about water?

Annex II of the treaty sets agreed annual allocations from the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, provides for storage and for Israeli water transfers to Jordan, commits both sides to protect shared waters from pollution, and establishes a Joint Water Committee that has kept operating through repeated diplomatic crises.

What was the Joint Water Committee under Oslo II?

The 1995 Interim Agreement created an Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee under Article 40 of Annex III. It recognised Palestinian water rights, deferred their definition to final-status talks and required joint approval for water projects. The World Bank noted in 2009 that the arrangement gives Israel an effective veto and was designed for a five-year interim period.

Why is the Dead Sea shrinking?

Upstream diversion of the Jordan River by Israel, Jordan and Syria has cut inflow to a small fraction of its natural volume, and mineral extraction evaporates additional water. EcoPeace Middle East reports the level has been falling by roughly a metre a year, producing retreating shorelines and thousands of sinkholes.

What was the Red Sea-Dead Sea project and why was it cancelled?

The plan was to pump seawater from the Gulf of Aqaba, desalinate part of it for Jordan and release the brine into the Dead Sea. Despite a World Bank-facilitated feasibility process and a 2013 memorandum of understanding, construction never began. Jordan dropped the scheme in 2021, citing delays and insufficient Israeli commitment.

What is water diplomacy?

Water diplomacy is the use of diplomatic tools, negotiation, mediation and joint institutions, to manage disputes over shared water and turn them into cooperation. The Stockholm International Water Institute applies the term to engagement that prevents conflict over transboundary waters and enables their joint management.

What does EcoPeace Middle East do?

EcoPeace Middle East is a trilateral environmental organisation founded in 1994 with Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli co-directors. Its Good Water Neighbors programme pairs cross-border communities that share a water source, and its Green Blue Deal advocacy anticipated the 2021 water-for-energy declaration between Israel, Jordan and the UAE.

How severe is water scarcity in Jordan and Gaza?

Jordan is described by the World Bank and UN agencies as one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, with demand raised further by refugee arrivals. Gaza is graver still: UN agencies including UNICEF reported before the current war that the overwhelming majority of its groundwater was unfit for human consumption.

Has water ever caused a war in the Middle East?

Water has fed grievances and violent incidents, including clashes over Jordan headwater diversions in the 1960s, but no modern war between the basin states has been fought over water alone.

Can water cooperation lead to wider peace?

The evidence suggests it can support peace but cannot manufacture it. Comparative research on regional cooperation found peacebuilding effects are never automatic; they depend on trust-building, inclusiveness and attention to power asymmetries designed in from the start. Water cooperation keeps channels open; converting them into political settlement remains a separate task.