Making another 'desert bloom': Israel’s water tech seeps into the Gulf
Israeli firms are turning Persian Gulf water crises into long-term leverage, using desalination deals to quietly rewire Arab sovereignty from the inside.
Israeli water technology firm IDE Technologies is quietly embedding itself at the heart of Saudi and Kuwaiti infrastructure projects, advancing Tel Aviv’s strategic foothold in the Persian Gulf through what is effectively functional normalization.
While headlines remain focused on overt diplomatic deals, it is through desalination plants and reverse osmosis systems that Israel is carving a decisive role in the Arab world’s most vital sector: water.
In the Arabian Peninsula – where smart city megaprojects like NEOM rise from the sand, and hundreds of billions are earmarked for futuristic visions – one fundamental truth underpins every promise: without water, there is no future.
Water diplomacy
In the world’s driest region, water security is national security. Yet Arab states have systemically failed to establish a homegrown technological base to secure independent access to this resource, leaving them reliant on foreign, increasingly Israeli, expertise.
Israel – the northern neighbor of the Persian Gulf states – was itself born in a water-scarce environment, with half the land it occupied in Palestine consisting of desert. It fought wars to control water sources along its borders with Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and is dreaming of diverting the Nile.
But from early on – under the “Make the desert bloom” strategy laid out, in particular for the arid Negev, by the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion – Israel invested in the water tech sector and succeeded in transforming itself into the “Silicon Valley” of desalination and water reuse technologies.
It is at this intersection – between the Persian Gulf’s perpetual thirst and Israel’s decisive technological edge – that a new West Asia is quietly being redrawn. Here, “soft normalization” seeps through pipes and reverse osmosis systems, bypassing political statements and official speeches.
The matter of overt Arab–Israeli normalization with Gulf countries that have not officially recognized the Israeli state – namely Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – is no longer speculative, nor is it confined to military or intelligence cooperation. It is happening quietly through economic gateways, particularly advanced Israeli technologies, including vital water technologies.
The thirst trap: Gulf dependency takes shape
To grasp the scale of this entrenchment, one must first understand the depth of the Persian Gulf’s water crisis. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors depend almost entirely on fossil groundwater and desalinated seawater.
The former, non-renewable and depleted by decades of reckless agriculture, has been largely exhausted. As for desalination, it is now the only viable path to support expanding populations, urban growth, and mega-projects like Saudi Vision 2030 or Kuwait’s 2035 development plan.
Yet traditional desalination comes with steep costs. It devours oil and gas, dumps hyper-saline brine back into the Gulf – devastating marine life – and escalates both environmental and economic burdens.
Thus, the Gulf’s dilemma is no longer merely about “providing water,” but about doing so “efficiently.” The global race is now over who can desalinate a cubic meter of water using the least energy (kilowatt/hour), at the lowest cost, and with minimal environmental impact.
And this is where Tel Aviv dominates.
The ‘Silicon Valley’ of water
This supremacy is deliberate. From its inception, water for Israel was a matter of survival. Israeli firms like Netafim pioneered drip irrigation. Elite institutions such as the Weizmann Institute and Ben Gurion University devoted decades to refining desalination techniques.
IDE Technologies, born in 1965, is the world’s premier name in large-scale desalination. Its proprietary breakthroughs in reverse osmosis and thermal desalination have set world standards. The company built and operates some of the world’s largest and most efficient plants – including Sorek 1 and Sorek 2 in occupied Palestine – using less energy than any competitor.
For policymakers in Riyadh, Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi, Manama, and Doha, numbers speak louder than politics. When IDE offers technology that can save millions in annual energy costs and ensure stable water supplies for a $500-billion project like NEOM, the engineers’ passport stamps become a secondary issue.
Gulf capitals have realized that clinging to outdated desalination tech is economic and ecological suicide. For water security – and thus national security – they need better solutions. And in this field, the best option simply bears the label: “Made in Israel.”
Soft normalization: The consortium model
Yet political realities persist. Saudi Arabia publicly links normalization to the Arab Peace Initiative – a two-state solution that Israel continues to undermine. Kuwait still enforces a 1964 law banning contracts with Israeli entities. So how does Tel Aviv penetrate?
Enter the consortium model – a corporate workaround for political red lines. Here’s how it works:
The Saudi government, via its Water Partnership Company (SWPC), issues international tenders for strategic water projects. A local champion like ACWA Power leads a bidding consortium. Once awarded, ACWA becomes the project’s face and primary developer.
It then subcontracts global engineering firms to deliver on the scope. Here, IDE Technologies is brought in as a key technology provider or contractor. The paperwork is clean, the project proceeds, and normalization advances – pipeline by pipeline.
International arbitration documents revealed that the Israeli desalination company IDE bypassed the Arab and Muslim boycott through a Swiss-owned intermediary, Swiss Water, which submitted bids while concealing IDE’s Israeli identity and role. Under this arrangement, Swiss Water operated in “prohibited countries” such as Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as well as countries without formal diplomatic ties to Israel before the 2020 Abraham Accords, such as Bahrain, Sudan, Oman, Morocco, and the UAE where IDE maintains today a presence through its regional headquarters in Dubai, known as IDE Meyah Water Solutions.
Swiss Water reportedly signed contracts worth tens of millions of dollars per project, while IDE supplied the technology and built the plants. Major projects include the Red Sea desalination project in Saudi Arabia, the Great Arabian Sea project in Pakistan, and two projects each in Kuwait and Oman.
Jubail 3A: Where normalization meets the pipeline
Take Jubail 3A, one of the world’s largest desalination plants, with a capacity of 600,000 cubic meters per day. The winning consortium was led by Saudi firm ACWA Power (40.2 percent stake), but behind the scenes, engineering and construction were executed by a team that included China’s Power China, Spain’s Abengoa, and Israel’s IDE.
The arrangement is satisfactory to all parties:
Riyadh gets a strategic water facility led by a national firm, powered by world-class technology, funded by China, and engineered by Europe; IDE gains a multimillion-dollar contract in the world’s largest desalination market, deeply embedded in Saudi infrastructure – and all without triggering a political firestorm; and ACWA gains a reputation as a global integrator, capable of assembling the best from east and west to execute megaprojects.
What appears on paper as a technical arrangement is, in effect, a form of functional normalization. IDE’s engineers, software developers, and system managers are now an invisible yet integral part of Saudi Arabia’s water supply – particularly in its oil-rich eastern region.
The quieter Kuwaiti model
Kuwait, often portrayed as the Persian Gulf’s most vocal opponent of normalization, offers another telling case. IDE has operated in the emirate for years, particularly in Doha (east and west) desalination plants. And, as in Saudi Arabia, this took place not through direct Israeli contracts, but via multinational tenders where IDE participated as a subcontractor.
This Kuwaiti example arguably reveals more than the Saudi one. It shows that even the loudest political resistance bows to technical necessity. In practice, Kuwait has accepted Israeli technological primacy despite its official anti-normalization stance. It is a marriage of Arab capital and Israeli know-how, facilitated not by politics, but by pressing water needs.
Saudi normalization strategy
Water is only one front in a broader Saudi strategy for normalization, and it is rooted in gradualism and compartmentalization. Unlike the Emirati and Bahraini rush to the Abraham Accords, Riyadh has opted for a slower, layered approach.
Saudi Arabia, given its religious and political weight, has always avoided a sudden political “leap” toward overt normalization that could trigger backlash. Instead, it has pursued a phased approach – bottom-up normalization.
Stage one was security and intelligence coordination – quiet cooperation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These built trust and institutional familiarity between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.
Stage two is unfolding now – integration via non-controversial sectors like water, agriculture, and cyber. While these are not politically explosive, they are strategically crucial.
When Israeli technology powers the kingdom’s desalination, irrigates its crops, and shields its electrical grid, the relationship becomes a de facto security partnership.
Parallel to this, a third stage is underway – soft social normalization: opening airspace, allowing businesspeople and rabbis to enter with alternate passports, and tempering religious and media discourse to prepare public sentiment.
Once this layered web of relations becomes operationally irreversible, diplomatic normalization, including embassies, flags, and handshakes, becomes less a leap and more a footnote.
Water and oil: The realpolitik of tomorrow
IDE’s penetration into Saudi and Kuwaiti water systems captures the essence of a new regional logic that is pragmatic, technocratic, and devoid of ideological theater. With the collapse of Syria’s resistance front, and with Arab capitals chasing post-oil futures, Israel is in a prime location.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MbS) Vision 2030 rests on importing minds and machines, not politics. If the road to diversification runs through Israeli pipelines, so be it.
Desalination, in this context, is the perfect front. It meets existential needs, strengthens economic ties, and advances normalization without headlines.
Where once West Asian alliances were drawn in the sands of refugee camps and oil fields, today they flow through networks of water, data, and infrastructure.
The water flowing from IDE-linked plants in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait reflects a deeper shift underway across the Persian Gulf without the ceremony and summits, but forged quietly through contracts, infrastructure, and dependence.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.