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October 10, 1993, Page 001001Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

Beyond all the hopeful talk of peace in the Middle East, a battle is shaping over an issue as powerful as land, as basic as oil: the region is running out of water, and no one, Israeli or Arab, is prepared to do with less so others can have more.

In a region where barren deserts and cloudless skies make water life's most precious commodity, the dispute may prove even more complicated than the brave new steps promised by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

"At present it's a zero-sum game," Munther Haddadin, Jordan's chief negotiator on water rights, said in an interview in Amman. "What is taken by Israel is taken away from other people. And what is taken by other people is taken from Israel."

Since the Middle East peace talks began in 1991, regional discussions on water rights have proved frustrating and inconclusive. But the issue is gaining urgency as the agreement on Palestinian self-rule prompts Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to seek separate accommodations with Israel.

"We say, you will not take water from us," said the Israeli negotiator on water, Avraham Katz-Oz, who spars with Mr. Haddadin in the regional water talks that are supposed to accompany progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. "But we are ready to work with you because water is money. We don't say, no, you will not get water. We say, yes, we can work together."

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As might be expected in a region steeped in hostility and mistrust, the dispute is viewed through utterly different prisms.

What Arabs depict as Israel's disproportionate use -- even theft -- of water, Israelis portray as the result of foresight, technological advances like computerized irrigation and good management in securing and exploiting supplies.

And what some Arabs prefer to cast as a straight fight between them and Israel over water rights, Israelis and some foreign experts depict as a situation in which Arab has taken from Arab, where offers of regional cooperation have been spurned and even basic estimates of who gets what now are as deceptive as the starting price set by a rug-seller in a bazaar.

Whatever their differences, there is a profoundly held view, particularly in arid Jordan, that water sharing will be central to any peace deal beyond the accord signed in September by Israel and the P.L.O.

"If there's no agreement on water, there'll be no peace settlement," said Dr. Elias Salameh, a hydrologist at Jordan University in Amman. "Unless we come to terms on the redistribution of water, nothing will happen."

The reasons for worry are clear. The Israeli and Arab populations have expanded, but water resources have not.

In Jordan, Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, rivers and aquifers have been so heavily tapped that some have been exhausted or spoiled. The desert horizons offer neither the prospect of more generous rain nor the terrain to utilize the rain that does fall.

When generous rains do come, as they did in 1991-92, they may offer only temporary respite because storage sites are limited and some aquifers are already brackish.

From the Arabs' point of view, the issue resembles their demand for territory in return for peace. To feed Tel Aviv and the Negev region, Israel consumes more than twice Jordan's supply from the same rivers -- the Jordan and the Yarmuk -- though the population of Israel outstrips its neighbor by only about one-third.

Under Israel's rationing system, according to Jordanian figures, each Israeli is entitled to almost four times as much water as a Palestinian on the West Bank -- even though rain gathers in aquifers beneath the West Bank. Israel also controls water that rises in the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967.

Though it acknowledges some disparities, Israel resents the suggestion that it is a water thief, arguing that its investment in water-management over the decades has totaled some $30 billion, only to be challenged by interpretations of who is entitled to what.

"There is no reason for Palestinians to claim that just because they sit on lands, they have the rights to that water," Mr. Katz-Oz said. "The mountains do not own the water that fall on them. It's the same with Canada and the United States. It's the same all over the world."

But the pressure for concessions is growing. An agenda that was formally initialed by Jordan and Israel on Sept. 15 specifically identifies water rights as an issue that must be resolved in negotiations before a comprehensive peace treaty for the region can be reached. The View From Jordan Lack of Water, Risks in Farming

In this farming area 20 miles southeast of Amman, where crops are coaxed from stubbly land, Princess Nafaa Ali, has come to accept that neither wealth nor technology can produce water if there is none.

A member of Jordan's royal household who farms family holdings on a bald hillside, she sank a well two years ago to irrigate fields of barley to feed her sheep and garlic to send to market. Without the well, she said, there is no guessing how the spring rains might treat her crop. She has experienced everything from drought to flash floods that turn the dry stream-beds, or wadis, to sudden torrents.

Even with the well, whose waters are too steeped in iron for humans to drink, there is no guarantee how long the aquifer it taps will survive to feed the long, black lines that stretch across her fields to provide drip-irrigation to the seeds.

"It's still a gamble," she said.

Indeed, for the country as a whole, farming is a gamble with virtual no-win odds.

"The Jordanians have tapped most of the water in the country," a Western specialist said. "They have tapped the aquifers so that they are depleted or contaminated by overpumping. The demand exceeds the known resources."

Dr. Salameh, the hydrologist at Jordan University, agrees.

"We are now living in a water crisis," he said in an interview in Amman, whose summer water supply is rationed to two days of pumping a week and is stored in tanks atop many homes. "It's not yet a catastrophe, but by the year 2010, we'll end up having nothing." History of the Dispute Population Growth, And a New Entity

For centuries, water has set the rhythms of life in the Middle East, from the odysseys between oases of lean desert tribes to the lassitude of the Nile Valley. In this century, water has spawned tension as much as it has sustained life, as tribes and empires drew lines in the sand to mark the frontiers of modern statehood.

Nowhere is the struggle more evident than in the tiny triangle of land below the Sea of Galilee, where the Yarmuk and Jordan Rivers meet.

The natural expansion of populations had already strained those water resources. Then came an influx of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews into Israel beginning in the late 1980's. And in 1990-91, some 300,000 Palestinians arrived in Jordan after they fled or were expelled from Kuwait and other gulf states because of the P.L.O.'s support for Iraq in the Persian Gulf war.

"The population of Jordan increased at once by 12 percent," Dr. Salameh said, "and that's not easy to accommodate."

The demographics of war and peace now threaten to strain resources further. With talk of a new Palestinian authority rising in the occupied West Bank, after Israel's peace with the P.L.O., there will be another claimant to the same waters, seeking an increased share for economic and agricultural growth and for a population likely to be swollen beyond its current one million as refugees return home.

Even now, said Dr. Haddadin, the Jordanian negotiator on water rights, Israel provides its own population of about five million with nearly 400 cubic meters of water per person per year. But in the West Bank, he said, the water supply now amounts to about 115 cubic meters per person per year.

"Why should anyone entertain a disparity of that magnitude?" he asked. "There has been a unilateral usage by Israel of the entire flow of the Jordan River."

A new Palestinian authority would almost certainly demand the right to tap more deeply into the aquifers of the West Bank to promote its agricultural potential than Israel now allows the Palestinians to do. The Palestinians, possibly in tandem with Jordan, would also urge Israel to release more water into the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee, which Israel uses as its main water reservoir.

At the same time, water is running out for the 800,000 Palestinians of the barren Gaza Strip, which has been linked with the West Bank town of Jericho as the embryo of a future Palestinian government. Arab specialists say because the aquifers beneath Gaza, which are sapped by the burgeoning population above, have been contaminated with salt water from the Mediterranean.

Israeli control over water is also a crucial issue for Syria because one of the three main streams of the Jordan River -- the Bajias -- rises in the Golan Heights, annexed by Israel in 1981. The Sources Pressure Exerted From All Sides

Just a glance at the region's water sources suggests the complexity of the struggles to come.

*Israel taps the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee and the Yarmuk River to pump supplies to Tel Aviv through the National Water Carrier, a system of pipelines. It also draws on rain-fed aquifers that run beneath the West Bank toward the Mediterranean. Supplies to the West Bank are limited by regulations covering the depth and use of Arab wells.

*Syria has access to the Euphrates in the north and to the Yarmuk in the south where it has built dams that divert water from Jordan and Israel farther downstream.

*For its agriculture in the Jordan Valley, Jordan depends on water from the Yarmuk, which it pumps into the East Ghor irrigation canal; on rain-fed aquifers further east, and on the small Zerqa river, the only river that rises on its territory. Farmers in southern Jordan have stirred controversy by tapping nonrenewable fossil water lying under the border with Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have drawn criticism for exploiting the same resource. Plans, Past and Present Proposed Quotas; Winners and Losers

A tentative plan for sharing water was first negotiated by the parties in 1953, when Eric Johnston, an envoy of President Eisenhower, visited the Middle East to broker an accord on the division of the Yarmuk and Jordan Rivers. The plan never went into effect because, the Jordanians said, the Arab League rejected it after a technical committee from the region's riparian countries accepted it.

The quotas proposed in the plan, however, serve as a yardstick for what has happened over the last four decades. According to the Jordanian study, both Syria and Israel have vastly increased the amount of water they take from rivers to which they have access.

According to a study published recently by Jordan's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, the Johnston plan allocated Israel 375 million cubic meters of water per year from the Jordan River and 25 million cubic meters from the Yarmuk. Israel now takes 650 million from the Jordan and 100 million from the Yarmuk, the study says.

The Jordanians were allotted 100 million cubic meters from the Jordan River and access to a flow of 377 million cubic meters from the Yarmuk.

Today, the study said, Jordan takes only about 100 to 110 million cubic meters from the Yarmuk and none from the Jordan River. Jordanian specialists attribute that limit primarily to the water's being contaminated by saline spring water pumped downstream from the Sea of Galilee by the Israelis.

Syria was allotted 42 million cubic meters from the upper Jordan River and 90 million from the Yarmuk. Today it takes twice its proposed share from the Yarmuk but none from the upper Jordan because of Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. The Jordan rises in three main springs in the Golan, Lebanon and Israel.

"Jordan is the major loser and Israel is the major winner," the Jordanian report concludes.

There has been much talk in recent years of ambitious projects to pump water into the area from Turkey or Iraq. And Israel, which has access to the Mediterranean and is expanding its use of desalting, has suggested joint investment in desalting projects with Jordan to meet both countries' needs.

Wealthy gulf nations like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia already rely heavily on oil-powered desalting plants, which use a complex distillation process to turn seawater into drinking water .

Many experts say the desalting technology is still too expensive for countries like Jordan. A domestic consumer in Jordan would have to pay $3 to $5 for every cubic meter (about 264 gallons) of drinking water that is desalted, specialists there estimate.

Some experts argue that water supplies in the region could simply be used more efficiently. Jordan, for instance, could use its Yarmuk supply first for drinking water rather than for irrigation, and then recycle urban wastewater to keep the crops growing, as Israel does.

Israeli representatives assert meanwhile that the debate over water has been skewed by the Arabs' emphasis on disparities in consumption.

A person living in a high-rise apartment building in Tel Aviv with a sink, dishwasher, washing machine and toilet is likely to use a lot more water than someone in a Palestinian refugee camp where such amenities are minimal.

"I'm not saying that's good," said Mr. Katz-Oz, the Israeli negotiator. But that disparity, he said, is "a socioeconomic problem -- it's not a water problem."

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