In his 2008 eco-thriller Hydromania, Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron imagines a future Israel/Palestine in the aftermath of dramatic climate change. Set in the worryingly close year of 2067, Hydromania presents a drastically altered political scenario in which Palestinians have won the conflict, claimed Jerusalem as their capital and become the regional power. In a reversal of the current territorial situation, Israelis have been left with a narrow coastal strip comprising the two now overcrowded cities of Caesarea and Tiberias. The novel's main theme, however, is water scarcity, with Gavron producing an Israeli version of the emerging genre of climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi‘. The world of Hydromania is effectively governed by corporations from three countries – China, Japan and, more surprisingly, Ukraine–who exercise control over every aspect of Israeli citizens’ lives through their monopoly on the scarce commodity of water, now known by its brand names of ‘Ohiya Water’ or ‘Gobogobo Water’. Rainfall is rare, with each event timed using sophisticated technologies, and citizens are prevented from collecting their own water, leaving them constantly thirsty. This state of affairs is policed through heavy surveillance, including tracking and identification chips in every person's arm. In Gavron's novel the loss of easy access to water alters every aspect of Israeli existence.

Reviewing Hydromania for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Inbal Malka described it as tapping into contemporary Israeli fears. She cautioned that ‘[t]he future that Assaf Gavron depicts in Hydromania is a prospect familiar to every anxious Israeli’. Yet in an age in which talk of ‘climate emergency’ has belatedly entered the mainstream, Gavron's dystopian scenario now speaks to many more than just Israelis. Recent years have seen frenzied reporting in the Anglophone media of ‘Day Zero’ in Cape Town, California's near-constant state of drought and the UK's increasingly regular heatwaves, with attention (if rather less of it) focused at the time of writing on water shortages in Chennai. Gavron's novel, however, does more than merely anticipate this trend: its specific national context is crucial to how we understand the concept of water crisis in the present.