For more than a century, the Middle East has been synonymous with oil. It has shaped economies, redrawn alliances, funded wars, built cities and drawn the attention of the world’s great powers.

Yet the defining strategic prize of the twenty-first century may no longer lie beneath the ground. It may be found in something far more fundamental to human survival.

Water is quietly becoming the Middle East’s next strategic currency.

Unlike oil, there is no substitute for water. Economies can adapt to new sources of energy. Technology can replace one energy source with another. But no nation can function, no agriculture can endure, and no civilisation can survive without a reliable supply of fresh water.

According to the World Bank, climate-driven water scarcity could reduce economic output across the Middle East by as much as 14 percent by 2050—the greatest projected regional impact anywhere in the world.

Could the next major conflict in the Middle East be fought not over land, not over oil, nor even over nuclear ambition—but over water?

History suggests it would not be without precedent.

Long before desalination transformed Israel’s coastline, control of water was already recognised as a strategic necessity. During the 1960s, attempts to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River became one of the defining confrontations preceding the Six-Day War. Israel regarded the diversion not simply as an engineering project, but as a direct threat to its national survival.

Water was never simply water.

The same pattern is visible across today’s Middle East. Turkey’s vast network of upstream dams on the Euphrates and Tigris increasingly influences the downstream fortunes of Syria and Iraq, while Ethiopia’s........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)