The Danube is running so low that history is resurfacing.
Along stretches of one of Europe’s great rivers, falling water levels have exposed German warships sunk during the final months of the Second World War. The images are dramatic. But what is emerging from the Danube is more than the wreckage of Europe’s past. It is a warning about its future.
Across the continent, extreme heat is drying soils and vegetation and putting growing pressure on water resources. Spain, already scarred by devastating fires in recent years, is again confronting heat waves and fears of another severe wildfire season. What once appeared primarily a Mediterranean problem is becoming a European one.
In climatic terms, the Mediterranean is moving north. Conditions once associated with Europe’s southern periphery are reaching deeper into the continent.
Water scarcity in Israel
For Israel, none of this is unfamiliar.
Water scarcity has shaped Israeli policy since the country’s creation. Necessity drove Israel to invest in desalination, wastewater recycling, drip irrigation, efficient agricultural use, and the careful management of a resource it could never take for granted.
According to a 2025 OECD country report, Israel’s five desalination plants now supply more than 80% of its domestic urban water, while more than 87% of wastewater effluent is reused, primarily for agriculture.
Israel did not develop these capabilities because environmentalism was fashionable. It developed them because there was no alternative.
That experience is becoming increasingly relevant to Europe – and could provide a new basis for cooperation between Europe and Israel.
Water scarcity is only part of the challenge. Across southern Europe, prolonged heat and drought increasingly interact with soil degradation, stressed vegetation, and wildfire risk. Here, too, decades of Israeli research into agriculture, water, and ecosystems under arid and semi-arid conditions offer a natural basis for collaboration.
The European Union itself recognizes the scale and systemic nature of the challenge. Its Water Resilience Strategy calls for greater efficiency, modernized infrastructure, reduced leakage, increased investment, and stronger international cooperation.
By linking water resilience to competitiveness, disaster preparedness, and security, the strategy signals a broader shift: climate adaptation is moving from the margins of environmental policy to the center of European economic and security planning.
It should also become a new pillar of relations between Europe and Israel.
Europe hardly lacks expertise of its own. Its strengths in river basin management, forest protection, ecosystem restoration, satellite monitoring, and civil protection complement Israel’s experience with water recycling, precision irrigation, drought management, dryland agriculture, and land degradation.
Israel, which has itself relied on European assistance during major wildfires, has as much to gain from such cooperation as Europe does.
The opportunities are practical. Cooperation could range from early wildfire detection, drought forecasting, and ecological recovery to wastewater recycling, precision irrigation, leakage reduction, and technologies that allow societies to do more with increasingly scarce water supplies.
There is no need to start from scratch. Israel already participates in European research and innovation networks. The EU’s Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area, PRIMA, brings together countries from both sides of the Mediterranean to develop solutions in water management, agriculture, and food systems. Horizon Europe provides another powerful framework for scientific collaboration.
The need for strategic ambition
What is missing is not the will to work together. It is strategic ambition.
The EU and Israel should turn these scattered initiatives into an EU-Israel Climate Resilience Partnership, focused initially on three areas: water security, dryland agriculture and land restoration, and wildfire prevention and response.
Such a partnership would go beyond existing research cooperation by connecting universities and research institutes with municipalities, water authorities, civil protection agencies, governments, and private companies.
It could establish joint demonstration projects in European regions particularly exposed to drought and fire, including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Italy.
It could provide a platform for testing Israeli technologies under European conditions and European technologies under Israeli ones, while creating permanent networks among scientists, emergency services, and policymakers.
In time, such cooperation could extend beyond Israel and the EU. Climate change is transforming the Mediterranean into an increasingly shared ecological space. Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the UAE, and other regional partners face many of the same pressures. Water scarcity, drought, and wildfire are challenges that do not respect political borders.
There is also a broader political reason for doing this now.
Relations between Israel and Europe are going through one of their most difficult periods in decades. The war in Gaza and profound disagreements over Israeli-Palestinian issues, humanitarian access, and international law will not disappear because Europeans and Israelis work together on irrigation or wildfire prevention. Climate cooperation cannot resolve those disputes, nor should it be expected to.
But foreign policy does not require agreement on everything before joint action becomes possible on anything.
Indeed, one of the dangers facing relations between Israel and Europe today is the temptation to allow disagreement in one field to paralyze cooperation in others: science, universities, trade, culture, and technology. Climate adaptation demonstrates why that logic is shortsighted.
A wildfire in Spain does not ask how Madrid voted at the United Nations. Falling water levels in the Danube are indifferent to the state of relations between Jerusalem and Brussels.
Climate change has an unusual ability to strip international relations of their rhetoric. It forces governments to confront physical realities.
And one of those realities is geography. Europe, Israel, and their Mediterranean neighbors are increasingly confronting variations of the same problem: how to sustain prosperous societies in a region becoming hotter, drier, and more vulnerable to extreme events.
For decades, Europe possessed knowledge and institutions that Israel sought to emulate. Today, in some fields, Israel has accumulated experience that Europe can use. In others, Israel has much to learn from Europe.
That is precisely what partnership means. The wrecks emerging from the Danube belong to a Europe defined by conflict. Their reappearance should serve as a warning of a different kind. The challenges now rising to the surface will not be solved by countries retreating from one another.
From the Danube River to the Negev Desert, climate change is redrawing the map. Europe and Israel should ensure that their relationship changes with it.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.