The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) poses what Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, once described as an “existential” threat to his country. [Getty]
A recent cooperation deal between Ethiopia and Israel is renewing concern in Egypt about strengthening ties between the two sides.
The agreement, signed in Addis Ababa on 4 February, will further expand cooperation between the two counties in capacity building, knowledge transfer, and—most importantly—in water and energy development.
It comes as relations between Egypt, on the one hand, and the two countries, on the other, keep deteriorating.
It is also the latest in a series of cooperation agreements between Addis Ababa and Tel Aviv over the years, ones that do not make Egyptian observers exclude their expected negative toll on their country, especially with Egypt and Ethiopia locking horns over the Horn of Africa state’s construction of a gigantic dam on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile River, Egypt’s principal source of fresh water, and historical and current tensions between Egypt and Israel.
“Continued water cooperation between Ethiopia and Israel is reason for concern in Egypt, given the fact that water is a national security issue for Egypt,” international relations specialist, Mohamed al-Dehi, told The New Arab.
“In a way, this cooperation is used to put pressure on Egypt when it comes to some regional and international files,” he added.
‘Existential threat’
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) poses what Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, once described as an “existential” threat to his country which shudders at the prospect of the enormous structure, which has created a reservoir larger than the Greater London area, trimming its annual water share from the Nile in a devastating manner.
A decade of negotiations between the two sides, which also involved Sudan, another Nile River downstream state affected by the dam, produced nothing, amid accusations by Egypt to the Ethiopian side of using the negotiations as a time-wasting tool until the dam became an irreversible fact on the ground.
The dam is complete already, with Ethiopia pinning hopes on it to lift tens of millions of its citizens from poverty and give Addis Ababa a vital commodity, namely electricity, to export to its neighbouring countries which also suffer an energy deficit.
However, there are fears here that the same project will limit the flow of the water of the Nile to water-poor Egypt which stands at the receiving end of the river before it pours its waters into the Mediterranean, thereby causing massive economic devastation to it.
“The dam blocks the flow of a sizeable amount of the Nile’s water, especially while its reservoir is being filled,” Abbas Sharaqi, a professor of geology and water resources at Cairo University, told TNA.
“Egypt spends a huge amount of money every year to prevent this filling from harming it and its people,” he added.
Egypt’s annual share of 55.5 billion cubic metres from the Nile barely covers the needs of its people and its agricultural and industrial sectors, with the populous country suffering a water deficit of around 7 billion cubic metres.
The GERD will but make things worse. This is why the Egyptian administration is investing billions of dollars in the construction of seawater desalination stations and sewage treatment plants, measures that are partly making up for the loss of Nile water because of the Ethiopian dam.
“These measures contribute to mitigating the effects of the dam on Egyptians, despite their costly nature,” Sharaqi said.
“Together with these measures, Egypt is also revolutionising its agriculture and irrigation systems to save water,” he added.
Regional nemesis
Egypt and Israel have moved from a decades-old hostility against the background of Israel’s occupation of Sinai, the Egyptian territory that abuts Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, to frosty peace, which did not exclude intelligence and security cooperation between the two countries, and then to tensions at present.
These tensions have Israeli aggressions against the Palestinians of Gaza at its centre, which are now compounded by a plan by US President Donald Trump to displace the Palestinian territory’s population into Egypt and Jordan.
Like it rejected Israeli attacks against Gaza’s civilian population in the past 15 months, lobbied for the entry of sufficient amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza and warned against making Gaza uninhabitable, Egypt now rejects Trump’s plan, which does not only pit it against Tel Aviv, but also against Washington.
Senior Egyptian officials have even reportedly told the US and other countries that Trump’s plan threatens the peace deal with Israel, a grim prospect the Egyptian president warned against in October 2023, only days after Israel started its onslaught on Gaza.
This is why growing cooperation between Addis Ababa and Tel Aviv is a bit concerting to Cairo, which has been closely following the evolution of relations between the two sides over the years.
The two countries have been cementing cooperation, especially in water, irrigation and agriculture, for several years now, which fills Egyptians with suspicion, especially as tensions between Egypt and the two countries keep widening in scope.
The belief in Egypt is that Ethiopia is being used by Israel and other powers to undermine the Arab world’s most populous state and bring it down to its knees by depriving it of the water of the Nile, an indispensable lifeline.
This also comes against the background of reports that the Ethiopian dam can be used by the American president as a card to force Cairo into submitting to his demand that it take in refugees from the Gaza Strip.
Egypt has not officially commented on the signing of the latest cooperation agreement between Ethiopia and Israel, which was done by Ethiopian Minister of Water and Energy, Habtamu Ittefa, and Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, Eli Cohen.
In this, Egypt maintains an old foreign policy tradition of non-interference in the affairs of other states.
Nevertheless, nationally-minded observers are wary that this cooperation is especially coming at Egypt’s expense and is aimed at making life hard for the North African country.
Giving credence to this worry is what the same observers view as the disproportionate structure of the GERD.
This structure, they said, is not commensurate with Ethiopia‘s declared plan to use the dam for the sheer purpose of generating electricity.
They add that Ethiopia does not need a dam with a storage capacity of 74 billion cubic metres to generate electricity.
“The Ethiopian government has exaggerated the size of the dam, showing that it intends to use this dam to achieve political objectives, not just generate electricity,” Sharaqi said.
“The fact is that Ethiopia needed a dam far smaller than the one present to generate a sufficient amount of electricity,” he added.
