GHAJAR, south Lebanon, 26 September — It’s not much of a river. It’s low enough to walk across, warm from a stone bed that attracts the autumn heat, full of tadpoles and small fish, frothing merrily in a creek below the scruffy village of Ghajar. But take a closer look and you’ll see an Israeli soldier standing above the creek, on the opposite side of a maze of barbed wire, watching this little river through his binoculars. For say the word Wazzani right now, and you’re talking water war. Even Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, has become involved.
There’s no war yet, just a mass of piping that the Lebanese are laying along the Lebanese side of the Israeli frontier wire to carry the warm waters of the river to another bunch of dirt-poor Shiite villages. The trouble is that the Wazzani flows right out of Lebanon and into Israel, where it feeds the fish-farm lakes of four Jewish kibbutzes.
Lebanon’s action is "a violation of every agreement we have signed in the past", says Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Israel’s defense minister. "Israel cannot tolerate the diversion of the waters of the Wazzani." Israel could solve the problem, said Dan Zazlavsky, the former head of Israel’s water commission, with "a few tank shells".
Up in Beirut, Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese president, has responded in kind. The project will continue, he says, and the government has ordered the contractors to speed their work. Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, has phoned his support to Lahoud. The Hezbollah, the group that drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon, claims it will "cut off Israel’s hands" if military force is used to close the pipelines. So no wonder the Israeli soldier watches me through his binoculars as I dip my hands in these tepid waters.
The Americans have turned up to inspect the pipeline system the Lebanese are installing and Powell has discussed the project at the United Nations with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister. Israel says the river carries 10 percent of its water, which, given its meager current, seems a gross exaggeration. What Jim Franckiewicz, the American water expert who turned up on the river here this month made of it, no one knows. In a part of the world where water means politics and possible conflict, the Lebanese have oddly failed to present the UN peacekeeping force on the border with a project assessment. Word has it that under international law, the Lebanese may pump 35 million cubic meters of water a year, and that they intend to pump only 12 million. Other statistics suggest that the Lebanese already pump 7 million cubic meters further north and intend only to raise this figure to 9 million.
The Israelis ask why the Lebanese don’t pump from the Litani River, a much larger watercourse, much of whose contents flows uselessly into the Mediterranean north of the frontier. The answer: the Litani is poisoned by the outflows of factories further inland.
Along the frontier beside the Lebanese village of Addaisey, unarmed Hezbollah fighters guard the pipeline construction workers. If the Israelis should open fire at the workers, they know the Hezbollah will fire Katyusha rockets back across the border in retaliation.
But now Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, has become involved in the whole affair, discussing with army officers the fate of the water project. One Israeli minister scoffed at the use of the army. "Are we going to go to war for four kibbutzes?" he asked. (The Independent)