From the Beirut Daily Star: Israel and Palestine must resolve the water problem together. Written by the Israel director of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), an environmental organization made up of Palestinians, Jordanians and Israelis, with offices in Bethlehem, Amman and Tel Aviv. This commentary is taken from bitterlemons.org.
"The willingness to cooperate on water at the community level exists because all our peoples understand that water is essential to life. Due to the trans-boundary nature of the water resource and regional water scarcity it is well understood by the general population that when it comes to water we are all dependent on each other to protect the resource and have a responsibility to share it."
Ghassan Khatib, writing on the Bitter Lemons site, sees the same truth in a different light.
I think any long-term solution will have to involve going beyond scarcity and increasing the size of the pie so that division of water resources is not a zero-sum game. The obvious way to do this, albeit expensive, is seawater desalination; some of my thoughts on the subject are here:
http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024511.html
Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein | August 20, 2004 at 08:17 AM
Take a look at the series of articles on water and it's importance in: www.environment-solutions.com
Keep up the good work! Ben
Posted by: ben | September 08, 2006 at 02:47 PM