Water and the Middle East

In the Middle East, people have been getting uptight and fighting over the amount of water delivered by their rivers for thousands of years, while ignoring till recent generations those funny places where some black, gooey stuff kept oozing out of the ground.  Often shortages were caused by groups upstream denying water to less fortunate people living downstream.  At other times it was caused by the climate being stingy with rains.  But nowadays humans, largely living thousands of miles from the Middle East, have gotten to the point where they have a hand in producing climate woes as well, by launching so much carbon dioxide and other gasses into the skies that the planet has become a spherical hothouse in which, on land, water soon evaporates.

Thus a Google search will cite numerous articles speaking of how water shortages in Syria brought on by human-caused climate change in turn brought on the civil war there, with all its bloodshed and hard to understand twists and turns, and thus also side effects like acts of terrorism.

All in all, because of its water shortcomings, the Middle East has always struck me as being a pretty dicey place for habitation.  I have often wondered why Holocaust survivors were so deliriously happy to relocate there and whether they have yet sensed the error of their thinking.  I assume that the waters of the Dead Sea are even more toxic than those in the Mediterranean.    The well-known real estate dictum that “location is everything” must  have not yet become established at the time.