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The first outcry that drew attention to an impending water war was made in early 1987 when the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), then affiliated with Georgetown University, issued a publication about the subject. The authors forecasted that “water, not oil, will be the cause for the next war in the Middle East.” CSIS hosted a two-part seminar on water disputes in the Middle East. The seminar deliberations focused on the Jordan, Euphrates, Tigris and Nile basins. None of the contributors to the seminar,
however, believed there was an impending water war in the region. Nevertheless, leading newspapers in the United States continued to publish several articles that preached expectations similar to those expressed by the CSIS report.
The rhetoric of water wars persisted and became contagious. The print media in the Middle East followed suit; journalists soon started to echo similar forecasts. Some have gone as far as saying that water caused the 1967 war, in which Israel dealt the Arabs a stunning blow and occupied Arab territories more than twice its own size. Some leading politicians supported such claims, citing the water dispute over the Jordan River as the cause of the war. Facts revealed 30 years later in declassified U.S. government documents, as well as the turbulent events in the Middle East after the 1967 war, proved the error of such claims.
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