Eilat, Israel — Old-timers in this arid city where the desert meets the Red Sea still recall a time when ice was a luxury and residents watched their gardens bake crisp most of the year.

But ask 22-year-old Einav Arush about her experience with water scarcity and she cocks her head in confusion.

Margaret Coker /Cox Newspapers (ENLARGE)

Eilat, in Israel's Arava Desert, is awash in water thanks to the desalination plant built in 1977.

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"I don't think about water. Our city solved that problem, long ago," she said.

The solution was desalination, the process of turning seawater into fresh water by separating salty compounds and leaving pure water molecules behind.

The technology is gaining new scrutiny among policy-makers in the United States in places such as Georgia, Florida and Texas, where periodic droughts have become severe and growing cities are demanding more water.

In six decades, Eilat has grown from an army outpost to a thriving port city and resort destination. Since 1982, the local desalination plant has met all the city's water needs.

Situated at the southern tip of the Arava Desert, Eilat has no natural fresh water supply and the barest rainfall. Tourists used to bring barrels of water with them on vacation. Residents used to launder clothes from a bucket.

Today Eilat is dotted with trees, decorated with flowerbeds and green grass and awash in swimming pools.

"We still don't have rain, but everything now looks like paradise," said Mimi Sesta, 54, whose family has owned a small beach bar for the past 30 years.

Yossi Shmaya, manager of Eilat's desalination facility, which is owned by the state's national water company, puts it bluntly: "Without the plant, there would be no town."

Desalinated water makes up more than half the fresh water used in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the International Desalination Association, a trade group. About 15 percent of Israel's usable water comes from the sea.

Saudi Arabia, which has 2,000 desalination plants, creates close to a quarter of the worldwide output of desalinated water. Israel, with 31 plants, produces

5 percent.

But in Israel, desalination is as much a national security priority as a lifestyle issue.

Finding a steady supply of water has been a problem since the state's founding 60 years ago. The country's main water sources — the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee and underground aquifers — are all shared by its Arab neighbors.

Among the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Arab peace process has been who will have the rights to these resources.

Desalination is not without its critics. It is not considered a green technology. It takes an enormous amount of energy to conduct the reverse osmosis necessary to create fresh water, and most plants around the world use fossil fuels for their power.

Relying on technological fixes, instead of concentrating on water conservation, isn't environmentally friendly, say critics.

Additionally, scientists don't yet fully know how the concentrated saline waste that is generated by the process will affect soil or sea life where it is deposited.

Eilat's coal-fired plant can produce up to 8 million gallons of water a day, Shmaya says, but also creates the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as a city of 30,000 people.

Shmaya has tried to introduce more energy efficient practices to offset the emissions.

But the water security that Eilat's 60,000 residents now have means that they are among the most wasteful in Israel. The city's per capita average water consumption is 58 gallons per day — almost double the national average.

The plant produces four levels of usable water. The purest gets piped to homes and faucets across the city. The next level goes to dozens of hotels for use in swimming pools. The next is used to irrigate city gardens and yards. And the least pure is piped to the region's greenhouses and fruit farms for agricultural use.

Agriculture accounts for half of Israel's daily water usage, an allocation that provides Israel with a thriving export industry of fruits, vegetables and ornamentals, but leaves Arab neighbors resentful over the disparity that it has created.

Israel consumes an average of 35 gallons of water per capita each day. Palestinians in the West Bank average 21 gallons; Jordanians only 13.

A 2002 Israeli government study on water resources ruled out any radical changes to the agricultural sector — to do so would mean abandoning the Jewish state's founding ideology of making the desert bloom, it said.

Einav Arush, a hospitality manager in the Eilat's Princess Hotel, said that younger residents take the resource for granted.

"My grandmother talks about when water was more precious than oil," she said.

"But I think me and my friends live in a bubble. We are spoiled."