A nice story I just gotta cite: Another "Resource War" That Fails to Unfold
Story appears in the 16 March issue of the New York Times entitled, “Side by Side, Palestinians and Israelis Repair a Ruined River.”
A pet theory of many security analysts in the post-Cold War era has been that ever more scarce resources (especially fresh water) will become a frequent source of inter-state conflict. The only problem with this theory is the extreme lack of historical evidence, which doesn’t deter many of these advocates, because, as we are constantly told, the world is running out of everything—and it has been for the last several decades. That such predictions consistently prove false doesn’t stop such doom-and-gloomers, who pin a lot of their hopes on “water wars” in the very dry Middle East.
Well, this story provides another nail for the coffin of this theory without a cause. A joint environmental effort by Palestinians and Israelis in northern Israel just won a prestigious Australian award. As one judge commented, “Two communities at each other’s throats in armed conflict somehow found a collective will to repair a damaged and poisoned river.” Why? As history repeatedly shows, when groups in conflict encounter a dangerous decline in a shared natural resource like water, they consistently put aside their differences to cooperate, disappointing many Pentagon security analysts yet again.
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