By Charlotte Silver
Water shortages are not new
for Palestinians. Whether in the occupied Gaza Strip or the West Bank including
East Jerusalem, the supply of water flowing into
Palestinian homes is strictly capped or obstructed by Israel.
As temperatures climb during
the summer, taps run dry. Clemens
Messerschmid, a German hydrologist who has worked with Palestinians on
their water supply for two decades, calls the situation “hydro-apartheid.”
This year, Israeli journalist
Amira Hass published data
proving that the Israeli Water Authority had reduced the amount of water
delivered to West Bank villages.
In some places, the supply was
slashed by half. Her records contradict official denials that water supplies to
Palestinian cities and villages are cut during the summer, even though that too
is not new.
Cities and small villages have
gone as long as 40
days without running water this summer, forcing those who can afford it to
haul in water tanks.
When Israel occupied the West
Bank in 1967 it also seized control over the West Bank Mountain Aquifer, the
territory’s principal natural water reserve.
The Oslo accords of the
early 1990s gave Israel 80
percent of the aquifer’s reserves. Palestinians were supposed to get the
remaining 20 percent, but in recent years they have been able to access only 14 percent as a
result of Israeli restrictions on their drilling.
To fulfill the population’s
minimum needs, the Palestinian Authority is forced to buy the rest of the water
from Israel. But even then, it’s not enough.
Israel is only willing to sell
a limited amount of water to Palestinians. As a consequence, Palestinians use
far less water than Israelis, and a full third
less than the World Health Organization’s recommendation of 100 liters per
person per day for domestic use, hospitals, schools and other institutions.
The Electronic Intifada spoke
with Clemens Messerschmid, who has been working in the water sector throughout
the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1997, about the engineered water scarcity
for Palestinians in the West Bank.
Charlotte Silver: Is scarcity
of water in the area driving the water crisis in the West Bank? Or is the
scarcity engineered?
Clemens Messerschmid: Of course
there is no water scarcity in the West Bank. What we suffer from is induced
scarcity – it’s called the occupation. This is the regime imposed on
Palestinians immediately after the war in June 1967.
Israel rules through military
orders, which have the direct and intended result of keeping Palestinians short
on water. It is not an ongoing gradual dispossession as with land and
settlements, but was done in one sweep by Military Order No. 92, in August
1967.
The West Bank possesses ample
groundwater. There is high rainfall in Salfit, in the northern
West Bank, now known for especially hard water cuts.
The West Bank is blessed with
a treasure of groundwater. But this is also its curse, because Israel targeted
this immediately after taking control.
What we need is simple:
groundwater wells to access this treasure. But Israel’s Military Order No. 158
strictly forbids drilling or any other water works, including springs, pipes,
networks, pumping stations, irrigation pools, water reservoirs, simple
rainwater harvesting cisterns, which collect the rain falling on one’s roof.
Everything is forbidden or
rather not “permitted” by the Civil Administration, Israel’s occupation regime.
Even repair and maintenance of wells requires military permits. And we simply
don’t get them.
It is a simple case of
hydro-apartheid – far beyond any regime in history that I am aware of.
CS: Israel has increased the
amount of water it sells Palestinians, but it is still not enough to prevent
villages from running dry. Putting aside the fact that Israel’s control over
the aquifer’s resources is very problematic, why won’t Israel sell the
Palestinians enough water?
CM: Israel first of all has
drastically reduced the amount of water available to Palestinians. It has
prevented all access to the Jordan River, which
is now literally pumped dry at Lake Tiberias.
Then, Israel imposes a quota
on the number of wells and routinely denies permits for much-needed repair of
old wells from the Jordanian days – Jordan administered the West Bank from 1948
until the Israeli occupation – especially agricultural wells. That means the
number of wells is constantly shrinking. We have fewer than in 1967.
Now, the only thing that has
increased is the dependency on buying water from the expropriators, Israel and Mekorot, Israel’s
national water company.
This is reported over and over
in the western press, because it is the point Israel stresses: ‘See how
benevolent we are?’
So, yes, since Oslo, purchases
from Mekorot have grown steadily. Ramallah now receives 100 percent of its
water from Mekorot. Not a drop comes from a single well field we have.
The supply of villages by
Israel was not done as a favor. It was initiated in 1980 by Ariel Sharon, then
agriculture minister, when rapid settlement growth was starting. The water
supply was “integrated,” in order to make the occupation irreversible.
What is important here is the
structural apartheid, cemented and cast in iron in these pipes. A small
settlement is supplied via large transmission pipes from which smaller pipes
split off to go towards Palestinian areas.
Israel is very happy with Oslo,
because now Palestinians are “responsible” for supply. Responsible but without
a shred of sovereignty over resources.
The current so-called water
crisis is not a crisis at all. A crisis is a sudden change, a new turn or a
turning point in development. The undersupply of Palestinians is desired,
planned and carefully executed. The “summer water crisis” is the most reliable
feature of the Palestinian water calendar. And the amount of annual rain, or
drought, has no bearing whatsoever on the occurrence and scale of that
“crisis.”
I should stress that however
routinely this occurs, in each and every single case, it is a conscious
decision by some bureaucrat or office in Israel or the Civil Administration.
Someone has to go to the field and turn down the valve at the split off to the
Palestinian village. This, like every summer, was done in early June. Hence –
water crisis in the West Bank.
CS: What factors may be
contributing to the worsening water cuts this year?
CM: It seems settler demand
rose drastically since last year. The Israeli Water Authority found 20 to 40
percent higher demand, which is quite remarkable.
Alexander Kushnir, the Water
Authority’s director general, attributes this to expansion of settler
irrigation in the mountains of the northern West Bank settlements, around
Salfit and Nablus.
CS: How is it that people in
present-day Israel are reportedly enjoying a surplus
of water since the country has started using desalination, while the people
under occupation in the West Bank are left with so little? Even Israeli
settlers have reportedly experienced water cuts.
CM: It’s true that Israel
declared for the first time a few years ago that it had a surplus water economy
and is keen
to sell more water to its neighbors, from whom it expropriated water in the
first place.
Palestinians are already
buying water Israel stole, but as noted, not reliably or at sufficient rates.
Frankly, I don’t know. Why
this special, elevated and aggravated desire of Israel not even to sell enough
water to the West Bank?
In some areas, water is
actively used as a weapon for ethnic cleansing, like in the Jordan Valley.
Agriculture was always targeted from day one of the occupation.
But this logic does not apply
to the densely populated Palestinian towns and cities in so-called Area A of
the West Bank, that are still struggling. After 20 years, this still leaves me
puzzled.
Another element is important
to understand: Israel needs to constantly teach Palestinians a lesson. Any
water procurement, any drop delivered should be understood as a generous favor,
as an act of mercy, not as a right.
Israel has augmented water
sales to the West Bank from 25 million cubic meters per year in 1995 to around
60 mcm/year now. Why does it not sell much more? It certainly could afford it
waterwise – it has a gigantic surplus.
One of the material issues I
can detect is the issue of price, and therefore meaning of water.
Israel wants to eventually get
the highest price for desalinated water it sells to Palestinians. While we are
only speaking about a few hundred million shekels a year [a few tens of
millions of dollars] – which is not a lot for Israel – Israel wants to end the
debate once and for all over Palestinian water rights.
Israel demands nothing short
of a full surrender: Palestinians should agree that the water under their feet
does not belong to them, but forever to the occupier.
By demanding full prices for
desalinated water, Palestinians would admit and agree to a new formula.
A word on the Gaza Strip –
unlike the West Bank, Gaza has no physical possibility of access to water. The
confined and densely populated Strip can never supply itself. Yet, Gaza does
not get such water deliveries from Israel. Only recently did Israel start
selling to Gaza the five million cubic meters per year agreed in Oslo. A tiny
cosmetic increase has been enacted.
In a way you could interpret
this differential treatment between Gaza and the West Bank as an Israeli
admission of a certain degree of hydrological dependence.
Israel receives the bulk of
its water from the territories conquered in 1967, including Syria’s Golan
Heights, but not a drop from Gaza.
Waterwise, Gaza has no
resource to offer Israel. This is the same as with the main resource: land.
Hence a very different approach to Gaza right from the start in 1967. Israel
does not depend on Gaza in any material form. Ever since Oslo, Israel has
demanded Gaza supply itself by its own means, such as through seawater
desalination.
CS: How have donor countries
acted in all this? Have they defended global minimal water standards or have
they affirmed and bolstered Israel’s control over the water resources in the
occupied West Bank?
CM: Unfortunately the latter.
When Oslo started, we all were under the illusion that a phase of development
would start. Wells that were forbidden to be drilled for 28 years would finally
be put in place.
Soon, we learned that Israel
in fact was never willing to give “permits … for expanding agriculture or
industry, which may compete with the State of Israel,” as then-defense minister
Yitzhak Rabin
said in 1986.
What was needed then and now –
and everybody knew it – was political pressure to extract the minimum
well-drilling permits guaranteed under Palestinian-Israeli accords. This
pressure never came. Never did the EU or my German government issue even a
public statement in which it “deplores” or “regrets” the obstructions in the
water sector. This is a true scandal.
But even worse, what was our
Western answer to this? All donor-funded projects actually abandoned the vital
branch of well drilling. The last German funded well was drilled in 1999.
As for the current so-called
water crisis, we as donors
are now busy generously funding anachronistic water tankering in the cut-off
Palestinian towns and cities – adapting to and stabilizing the status quo of
occupation and water apartheid.
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