Hatred of Israel Caused Iran’s Water Crisis

Engineers from the Jewish state built an efficient infrastructure. Then came the 1979 revolution.

Iran is running out of water. “If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Nov. 6. “If it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.” Blame the Islamic Republic’s fanatical hatred of Israel. Decades ago the Jewish state saved Iran from catastrophic ruin from water mismanagement. Then the country’s extremist postrevolution leadership wrecked everything.

A man fills a water tank in Tehran, Nov. 14.

After a devastating earthquake in 1962, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi quietly invited Israeli experts to advise Iran on modernizing its water infrastructure. Like Iran, Israel had an arid climate and a fast-growing population. But it had managed to develop methods and technologies to allow both farmers and city dwellers to have all the water they needed.

The first few water engineers to arrive in Iran were followed by dozens, and ultimately hundreds. So many Israeli water experts worked on Iran’s water restructuring and rethinking of agricultural practices that by the late 1960s Hebrew-language schools for their children were established in several locations in Iran. Shops in some areas had signs in Hebrew.

I interviewed several Israeli water engineers who worked in Iran before the 1979 revolution. They described a warm environment in which Israelis and Iranians worked together. Other than at a soccer match involving a visiting Israeli team, none of the interviewees had any memory of anti-Israel or antisemitic conduct or speech.

By the time the shah fell, Iran’s water systems were flourishing. The country had productive water-focused agricultural planning, major cities’ plumbing upgraded to reduce leaks, and several desalination plants—all designed, built and operated by Israelis in partnership with Iranian experts and engineers. After the revolution, the Israelis left quickly and many of the Iranian engineers who had worked with them were exiled or executed.

The apolitical, technocratic approach to water infrastructure developed by the Israelis was also a casualty of the revolution. Soon after the Israelis left, the regime’s religious leadership largely outsourced water issues to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s ideological enforcers. The IRGC developed engineering and construction companies to handle Iran’s hydrological problems—enriching its leadership with billions of dollars.

Nik Kowsar, an exiled Iranian journalist who often writes on what he calls Iran’s “water mafia,” highlights in a phone interview the billion-dollar “dam and transfer schemes” that were adopted “not because they worked, but because they meant massive commissions, opaque contracts, and zero accountability.”

More than money flowed the wrong way. Khatam-al-Anbiya, an IRGC-owned company, used its unrestricted mandate to divert waterways to favored constituencies, often with devastating human and environmental consequences.

In one example among many, beginning in 2002 the IRGC’s Qomrud project diverted water from tributaries of the Dez River, flowing through southwestern Iran, to the religious power center of Qom in central Iran. While this aided the economic interests of Qom, Mr. Kowsar’s sources tell him it also brought large amounts of water to cool the machinery at the nearby underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility, attacked last June by U.S. bunker-buster bombs.

IRGC water diversions like the Qomrud project left many farms and communities without enough water for crops and herds. Farmers from less favored ethnic groups and regions were driven into poverty, causing them to leave their traditional communities and to move their families to large cities. This contributed to the creation of shantytowns surrounding urban centers in Tehran and other cities. Since the start the Islamic Revolution, 31,000 of Iran’s 69,000 villages have been abandoned, with water scarcity a major contributing factor.

The failure to plan for growing urban populations’ water needs has created new problems. Cities are unable to meet demand. With as many as 17 million people in its greater metropolitan area, Tehran and its suburbs make up nearly 20% of the nation’s total population and face the most immediate water crisis. Other cities are also experiencing water scarcity that could have been avoided with leak reduction, the use of recycled water, groundwater management, desalination plants in coastal areas and other measures. The water depletion from over-pumping aquifers is causing land to sink in the provinces of Tehran and Isfahan. Buildings and water pipes are beginning to crack because of land subsidence.

In a not-too-subtle call for an Iranian popular uprising, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in August offered a return of Israeli water engineers to help Iran out of its coming catastrophe, but with a condition: the end of a hostile Iranian regime and a new one committed to friendly relations. What might Iran have achieved—in water and otherwise—had it used the billions that it has squandered on harmful water infrastructure, regional mayhem and pursuit of nuclear weapons to serve the Iranian people instead?

Mr. Siegel is author of “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World” and “Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink.”