Hydrostrategic Decisionmaking and the Arab ... - Yale University

WOLF 239Arab state to reflect the more advanced agricultural and industrialposition of the former (U.N. Resolution on the Partition of Palestine1947, Chapter 4). The General Assembly approved the PartitionPlan on November 29, 1947.Though the Jewish Agency reluctantly accepted partition, theArab states rejected it outright. When the British pulled out of Palestinein May 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and SaudiArabia went to war against the new state of Israel. Maintaining thethree aforementioned critical zones—the Galilee region with the Jordanheadwaters, the populated coastal zone, and the Negev to absorb anticipatedimmigration—became the foci of the Israeli war effort.Partition cost the Israelis three other strategic points alongwaterways, the repercussions of which would be felt through 1967.As mentioned above, during the Mandate negotiations, theFrench had denied the Zionists the Banias Spring because an accessroad they needed crossed the waterway about 100 meters downstream.To guarantee access to the water, though, a small hill overlookingthe stream, Givat Banias, had been included in Palestine.Second, the town of El-Hama, located on one of the few flat areaswithin the narrow Yarmuk valley, and an adjacent triangular areafrom the Yarmuk to the shores of the Sea of Galilee were includedwithin Palestine territory, specifically to facilitate water resourcesdevelopment. Both of these areas were lost to the Syrians duringfighting in 1948 (Sachar 1979). (Also, the Syrians crossed the JordanRiver in the Huleh Lake/Daughters of Jacob Bridge region, an areatargeted by water planners as the site of the first major Israeli reclamationproject.) Finally, although the Israeli army had occupied a stripof Lebanese territory along the elbow of the Litani, they pulled back tothe Mandate boundaries as part of the armistice agreement, in theunfulfilled hopes of gaining a peace treaty with Lebanon (Hof 1985).The 1948 war added a new type of boundary to the region—theArmistice Line. While the boundary between the British and Frenchmandates had the permanence and force of international law, theArmistice agreement which was signed separately between Israel andeach of its neighbors was explicitly only a temporary military agreement(Hareven 1977). Negotiations continued in an unsuccessfulquest for a permanent peace agreement culminating in Lausannelate in 1949 (Caplan 1993). Water was never mentioned during theRhodes Armistice talks and was referred to only intermittently duringthe Lausanne Conference. 6The differences between permanent legal boundaries and theArmistice Line manifested themselves in how each boundary segmentwas treated by each combatant.6The eighth point of the British Eight-PointPlan submitted in July 1949 was a call for“an Israeli-Arab agreement for sharing thewaters of the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers”(Caplan 1993).YALE F&ES BULLETIN