As the video makes clear, this is an issue of fundamental discrimination and abuse (forcing a population to live like animals on insufficient or filthy water).

Several regional water-sharing proposals [after Israel's founding] failed in part because Israel linked them to recognizing the Jewish state. It also rejected solutions not in its strategic interest and acted unilaterally instead. Take its National Water Carrier project. Construction began in the late 1950s and early 1960s and became the country’s largest water project – to transfer Sea of Galilee northern water to highly populated areas in the center and south and to facilitate efficient water use. To neighboring Arab states, however, it was a hostile act, and they responded with their own diversion plans. Israel viewed them as a national security threat.

Confrontation followed. The National Water Carrier was targeted. Israel retaliated against Syrian construction sites. Skirmishes broke out, and the 1967 war resulted. Officially it began on June 5, 1967. Others, including Ariel Sharon, said it started two and a half years earlier when Israel acted against diverting the Jordan River. Earlier, Ben-Gurion warned that Jews and Arabs would battle over strategic water resources and determine Palestine’s fate. Its people as well. Aside from other strategic aims for land and regional control, Israel secured water rich lands in southern Lebanon, Jordan, the Golan, and West Bank. It fully exploited them and is a key reason why the Golan was never returned. West Bank water is another issue. It has three principle aquifers supplying about one-quarter of Israel’s needs, including for its settlements and nearly all of what West Bank Palestinians get.

link to globalpolicy.org

Palestinian hopes for genuine self-determination hinge on a number of factors, not the least of which is Israel’s ability to solve its perennial and growing water shortage. According to Dr. Hussein A. Amery, of the Department of Geography, Bishop’s University, Quebec, Israel uses 17% more than the 1.9 billion cubic meters of water that is renewable from natural sources.

But these facts and figures don’t address the question of equity. Arguably 50% or more of the water that Israel uses is unilaterally appropriated from water that should fairly go to its Arab neighbors. Even the New York Times used the word “theft” when quoting an “Arab” in connection with Israel’s appropriation of regional water resources. (“Hurdle to Peace: Parting the Mideast’s Waters” by Alan Cowell NYT, 10.10.93 p. 1)

link to desip.igc.org

Do you not care? Do you seriously not care about the human cost? Really? Are you that callous and heartless and sociopathic?

Even where fresh water is not scarce, it happens mostly between uses. So, for example, fishermen/women fight with utilities over damning for electricity, or flood control, farmers fight with each for water and for effluent “rights”, municipalities fight with others over siting of waste disposal and water purification, industry fights over the “right” to exhaust effluents.

The ONLY way water issues can be resolved is cooperatively and by negotiation and/or legislation. Water issues are regional, larger even than the jurisdiction questions of river to sea.

As such, regional approaches must be included in the process, which means trustable communications and commitments.

Israel trustable, Syria trustable.

As an industrialized area/community, Israel has more responsibility to make sure that water is purified. It is also a public health concern even just for Israelis, if neighbors don’t have access to clean water, as airborne contagious and non-contagious diseases may spread into Israel.

And, if the status of a healthy neighbor relative to a healthy neighbor has any merit, then sufficient fresh water is needed for all.

Water is already an economic good, meaning that it is a commodity that has a market price. That status from free good to market good has already occurred. The water table has already sunk, aquifers are already somewhat polluted (largely from the sinking water tables).

And, it is BOTH Israeli and Palestinian population stresses on the eco-region that have led to that. But, in the “demographic war”, population control is NOTa virtue.

“In his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum – for a Großdeutschland, land, and raw materials – and that it should be taken in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, Germanise or enslave the Polish, and later also Russian and other Slavic populations, and to repopulate the land with reinrassig (racially pure) Germanic peoples. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.”

There are several good studies of the ‘water wars’ between Israel, Syria, Jordan and Egypt leading to the ‘hot’ ‘67 war, some analysts even concluding that was the primary basis for conflict. (Water resources were previously shared under the so-called ‘Johnston Plan’, although that program was never ratified.)

link to answers.com
plan

It should be recognized that issues of the security of water resources and inter-state riparian problems of the Jordan River system, including Israel’s heavy dependence on water supply from the underground aquifer that underlies the West Bank, have been some of the reasons why Israel could not withdraw from the areas occupied since 1967. Thus, without resolution of these inter-state water resources problems, no settlement of the PalestineIsrael and Arab-Israel problems can be achieved.

link to unu.edu
80858E0h.htm

Israeli de facto control of S.Lebanon has similar implications.

“According to witnesses in the South, Israel also continues to steal Lebanon’s water, and is altering the Blue Line and shoveling earth to transport to the Israeli side of the border,” the Daily Star reported on September 25. In addition, Israel is adjusting the Blue Line in its favor. “Lebanon has filed a complaint with the UN and UNIFIL about Israeli alterations of the Blue Line in which hundreds of square meters of Lebanese territory were ‘added’ to the Israeli side. UNIFIL ‘is looking into the matter,’ a Lebanese Army source said.”

Indeed, UNIFIL is “looking into the matter” from 500 meters away, through field glasses, and likely nervous about in-coming.

“The Lebanese Army has also filed a complaint with UNIFIL about the Israeli military’s extending pipelines toward the Wazzani River in South Lebanon, possibly in preparation for drawing water into northern Israeli settlements…. Israel was diverting water from the Wazzani before it withdrew from most of the South in 2000…. According to eye witnesses and Lebanese Army statements, the Israelis are also transporting soil from South Lebanese villages and transporting it to Israel.”

link to uruknet.de
l=t