Here's something grotesque.
Last week the physician Mustafa Barghouti visited New York and talked about the inequity in water usage in Israel/Palestine on public radio:
"We the Palestinians of the West Bank can only use up to 50 cubic
meters of water per capita per year, while an illegal settler can use
2400, 48 times more than us. That is not sustainable. Because it is inhuman."
Hard to argue with that. But host Brian Lehrer, typically, didn't really respond. (He tends to espouse the Zionist narrative; he'd had on Morton Klein of the ZOA as balance. Oh my.)
Now what do you know, that same day, a charity dedicated to clean water in developing nations was holding a worldwide festival to bring attention to its issue and help bring clean water to Africa. And–I bet you know where this is going– one of its worldwide water festivals was in Israel.
"I'm twittering over water in Jerusalem," wrote Karin Kloosterman.
Despite our own drought
issues, and lack of rain this year, Israelis are tweeting and
retweeting all about the cause to support water in Africa: Jerusalem's Twestival is unique in that beyond money for this charity, it will also be promoting worldwide awareness highlighting Israel's contributions in cleantech, writes Yannai, from the Jewish Climate Initiative…
The grotesquerie here is what it always is. Israel is obsessed with its international image, and manages to promote itself in any semi-hip forum it can get into, often by promoting its high-tech desalination projects– Jewish innovation, making "the desert bloom."
And meanwhile it rubbishes those same values in its treatment of the minority population under its boot. That's why I'm for boycott and divestment, to help end this process of image laundering and general sanctimony from a state that maintains "inhuman" policies, discriminating on an ethnic/religious basis.
(Phil Weiss)
