As Massachusetts officials and businessmen prepare to launch water industry collaborations with Israeli companies, they should be aware of certain facts about “Israel’s innate understanding of water issues” (as Boston Globe reporter Erin Ailworth put it in a November 17 front page article).
Both Palestinians under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel are paying a heavy price for what Ailworth terms “the modern version of the land of milk and honey.” The Israeli government has created one integrated water system for both ‘Israel proper’ and the occupied Palestinian territory that benefits Israeli Jews, while depriving the Palestinian population in both areas of their right to access water.
The Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation that I led to the West Bank and Israel last month saw the impact of Israel’s discriminatory water policies. These have been documented by the UN, World Bank, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department and water researchers from Tufts University, among others.
“Water is a nightmare in Palestine,” we were told by Issa Amro, a Palestinian resident of Hebron, who led us through a once vibrant part of the West Bank city that has been largely emptied of Palestinians by Israeli restrictions and Israeli settler aggression. “There is not enough for basic needs or agriculture. Settlers get the majority of the water. In the summer, water comes through the pipe every three or four weeks, while settlers get as much as they want.”
Wherever we went in the West Bank we encountered this stark inequality in water distribution. For instance, while the fortress-like Israeli settlements surrounding Bethlehem have swimming pools and irrigated landscaping and lawns, Bethlehem can go for 10-15 days without flowing water, as residents are forced to pay for ‘empty pipes.’ The pipes in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp have been empty for more than two months at a time, leaving entirely depleted the rooftop tanks where potable water is stored.
The water shortages that afflict West Bank cities and towns are even more crippling in villages and rural areas. There, Palestinian agriculture has been dealt a deadly blow by Israel’s control since 1967 of the occupied territory’s water sources, including the underground aquifers and the waters of the Jordan River. Since 1967, half of the wells that sustained Palestinian communities have been destroyed, new wells are forbidden and settlers and soldiers routinely vandalize cisterns erected to collect rainwater.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that an estimated 313,000 Palestinians from 113 West Bank communities are not connected to any water network and depend on springs and rainwater-collecting cisterns that are vulnerable to attack, or have to pay the Israeli Water Company exorbitant sums for water that is privately trucked in.
Today, Israelis – more than half a million of them West Bank settlers – use more than 80 percent of the water from the West Bank’s three principal aquifers, leaving only 10 – 20 percent for Palestinians. Four years ago the World Bank found the per capita water consumption by an Israeli is four times that of a Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza. More recent studies estimate that Israeli water consumption is five or six times higher on a per capita basis.
What does this mean for daily life? While the World Health Organization has set 100 liters per day as the ‘absolute minimum’ needed for daily consumption per person, Palestinians are forced to subsist on just 70 liters per capita per day, an amount that dips to 60 liters for one million of the West Bank’s 2.7 million residents, according to OCHA.
Israelis meanwhile enjoy the per capita equivalent of 300 liters per day. This disparity enables West Bank Israeli settlements – that are illegal under international law – to have 13 times more land under irrigation in the agriculture-rich Jordan Valley than indigenous Palestinian communities.
Combined with home demolitions and the fragmentation of Palestinian territory by walls, military checkpoints, closed military zones and ‘settler-only’ roads that are off limits to Palestinians, water has become a weapon in Israel’s decades-long battle to dispossess Palestinians of their land and livelihoods.
Water has also been used as a weapon against the Bedouin citizens of Israel, as we found out when we traveled to the village of Al-Araqeeb, one of the 35 ‘unrecognized villages’ of the Negev that get no services or water from their government. Al-Araqeeb, where Bedouin have lived since early last century, has been repeatedly raided since 2010, its homes demolished, its thousands of olive trees uprooted, its sheep sprayed with herbicides and its water sources seized.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is a central actor in clearing the Negev of between 30,000 and 70,000 Bedouin who, under the controversial ‘Prawer Plan’ that has passed its first reading in the Knesset, are due to be forcibly moved off their land into poorly serviced townships.
In their place, the JNF is planting swiftly growing eucalyptus trees. While Israel chose not to pipe water to Bedouin communities, it is now ignoring sound ecological practices by irrigating notoriously water-greedy trees in the desert.
Massachusetts officials who are planning to collaborate with Israeli water firms in a new ‘Water Innovation Network’ should travel to the West Bank and Negev desert to see for themselves what an apartheid water system looks like.
Thank you Nancy. Hope the government (or people) of Massachusetts can see the light and distance itself — even in proper BDS fashion — from Israeli industries that play any role at all in the deprivation of water to Palestinians in Greater Israel.
Do the transit ads that appears from time to time mention this water business? I’d be glad to make a modest contribution toward ads which do.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is a central actor in clearing the Negev
The JNF’s policies are just another example of corporate war crimes committed since 1948. The prohibitions against apartheid and pillage govern civil war as well as interstate warfare. For a general discussion of the applicable law on corporate pillage of natural resources see:
*James G. Stewart, Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting the Pillage of Natural Resources link to opensocietyfoundations.org
* Corporate War Crimes [Trials] Begin link to opiniojuris.org
It’s way past time to hold Israeli officials and the JNF responsible for the crime of pillage and for payment of compensation.
A 2007 article by Mitchell (Jewish Virtual Library) Bard in the NY Sun about the water situation as it was then. He was advancing in so many other words that Israel could not surrender the occupied Golan and West Bank because these two are where 50% of Israel’s water are sourced and that the master plan for desalination that will take years to build will not suffice to meet Israel’s needs in addition to being very expensive to build and operate. Bard implied that Israel should be ready to go to war over the water because its survival depended on it. Interestingly, Bard admitted to the cause of the attack on the Golan being in good part for its waters that provide 25% of Isreal’s water consumption with another 25% being sourced from the WB mountain aquifer. In short, it’s an admission by Bard that Israel is stealing half the water it’s using:
From the New York Sun
“Water or War
By MITCHELL BARD | August 1, 2007
The supply of water is a matter of life and death, war and peace for the peoples of the Middle East.
Israel is likely to face a shortage of water for drinking and for agriculture because of recurrent droughts, an increase in consumption, and pollution. Moreover, territorial compromise with its neighbors could put as much as half its water supply at risk. This makes securing its existing supplies and developing new ones vital for its future prosperity. Consequently, water is a key element of any peace negotiation, but it is widely neglected in the public debate.
Syria’s foreign minister has said that “Israel has no right even to a single drop of water.” If Syria controlled the Golan Heights, it could divert water flowing into the Sea of Galilee, which supplies about 25% of Israel’s water. The effort to do so between 1965 and 1966 was one of the causes of the Six-Day War.
Syria could severely compromise Israel’s water supply even if its intentions were not malevolent. For example, increasing the population in the area would produce sewage and other contaminants that could pollute the Sea.
Any peace treaty would have to ensure Israel’s water rights, but can Israel afford to put one-quarter of its water supply at the mercy of a foreign power, especially one whose leaders have talked about denying Israel all “Arab water”? Ultimately, Israel may have to choose between water and peace with Syria.
Israel’s water security is further threatened by the fact that the mountain aquifer, which supplies another 25% of Israel’s water, including most of the drinking water for the major cities, is partially located in the West Bank. Even if a future Palestinian state had peaceful intentions, it could significantly reduce the water available to Israel because of the desire to satisfy the needs of its own population.
Today, unauthorized Palestinian drilling of wells in the West Bank affects the quality of the aquifer. Without any other water source, the Palestinians will be tempted to pump more out of the aquifer to meet their needs and thereby inundate it with seawater.
The poor quality of Palestinian Authority water treatment facilities, mismanagement, neglect, and the low priority placed on environmental issues increase the likelihood that the aquifer will be polluted and its quality reduced perhaps to the point of being undrinkable. This has already occurred in the Gaza Strip where the sole aquifer is unusable because of contamination and salinity.
To secure its water future, Israel would need to maintain control over three West Bank regions comprising 20% of the land. In return, Israel has said it is prepared to give up control of the mountain aquifer. This would make Israel dependent on the goodwill of the Palestinians to protect the quality of the water and to ensure that Israel continues to receive sufficient water to meet its needs.
One reason for optimism is that Israelis and Palestinians have made efforts to protect the water supply. In 2001, the two parties issued a joint call to refrain from harming the water infrastructure and water supply to both Israelis and Palestinians. Israel has also resisted the temptation to use water as a weapon and continued to supply water promised to the PA.
If Israel sees its water supply or quality endangered, it will have to decide whether to take military action to stop the drilling of wells, divert the water, or to seize the water source. What level of provocation would the United Nations or America find sufficient to justify Israeli action? What, if anything, would those parties be prepared to do to prevent the interdiction of Israeli water supplies?
The historical answer to that question is not encouraging.
The most popular idea for alleviating Israel’s water shortage is desalination. In 2000, Israel launched the Desalination Master Plan that envisioned the construction of a series of plants along the Mediterranean coast. The first of these was built in Ashkelon in 2005. The plant is expected to provide approximately between 5% and 6% of Israel’s total water needs.
Desalination is not a panacea. It can ameliorate Israel’s water problems, but not solve them. The plants are expensive, take a long time to build, use a lot of energy, and will not supply as much water as Israel will need. They also make tempting targets for terrorists…”
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/water-or-war/59625/
Always informative to know how the 98% US goy taxpayers $ is used to benefit Israel,
Good report Nancy. The Israelis have been abusing their water and also using it as a weapon against the Palestinians since 1948. It is hard for us who live in Western Europe or the US (except for the western desert states) to imagine the problem. It is pretty clear that one of Israel’s tools to convince the Palestinians to leave is their clear policy of selective drought. This is a story the needs to be told.
Two or three generations of Americans have been fed the story of the Israel miracle where they made the desert bloom. Always omitted from this story is that the water was stolen from the Palestinians and that on top of that they used the stolen water in ways that were not sustainable.