Currently there is no coherent or sustainable water cooperation among the five states—Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories and Syria—that share the Jordan River. Why do people not cooperate on sustainable river basin management, even if it seems the most rational course from the perspective of economic benefits? I hypothesize that the political uses of citizenship, identity and security at the local level hamper cooperation at the basin level and ignore cognitive dimensions of violence and conflict. In this article, I have chosen the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as a case study to illustrate hydropolitics in praxis, because the political future of this particular area in many respects affects the sustainable future of the Jordan River Basin and the entire Levant.