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Making decisions about water allocation in arid environments is inherently contentious. The uncertainty of climate change and projections of a warmer and drier future for arid regions raises the stakes further. When mixed with politically-charged questions about sovereignty, the locations of international borders, agricultural production and population growth, as is the case in the Middle East, these issues can become explosive. In this paper we explore whether methods developed for resolving questions related to how water is distributed in central Arizona, USA, can be applied to situations involving Israel and its neighbors. We describe a suite of approaches that includes a system dynamic program for exploring alternative future scenarios, along with high-resolution, three-dimensional representations of aquifer geometry, and decision-support tools like immersive visualization and secret voting on policy choices. Used collectively, this framework could strengthen the existing dialogue that has taken place over the past 2 decades among Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian water managers and help reduce long-term water conflicts.