This story has two chapters. Chapter 1:
“The fundamental premise of the field of Jewish community relations is to foster conditions conducive to Jewish security and creative Jewish living in a free society. Such conditions require a society committed to equal rights, justice, and opportunity. Their denial breeds social tensions, conflicts, and dislocations, and has led to threats to the democratic process in general, and to the Jewish community in particular.”
–From the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council program of 1987, quoted by Leonard Fein, in Where Are We?
Chapter 2: The Guardian’s David Hearst on water theft (thanks to Peter Belmont):
The South Hebron Hills, sweltering in 34C [90F] heat and in its second consecutive year of drought, is a landscape of brutal contrasts. There is enough water here to support lush greenhouses, big cattle sheds, even ornamental plants. It arrives in large, high-pressure lines. And there appears to be no limit to the bounty it can bring.
Cheek by jowl with the water towers and red roofs of the Israeli settlers in this area of the West Bank is a landscape of stone boulders, tents and caves. The Palestinian village of al-Amniyr looks from afar like a rubbish tip until you realise that the rubbish is people’s dwellings, which have been destroyed in attacks targeting their water cisterns.
The villager Mohammed Ahmad Jabor’s water cistern has been destroyed three times this year. The last time was by the settlers. The settler attacks come generally at night and where they cannot destroy water cisterns they poison them by putting chicken carcasses in them.
The second time Jabor’s cistern was destroyed was by Israeli soldiers who destroyed seven tent dwellings and a sheep pen.
