Sunday, November 26, 2017 By Zak Witus,
Truthout | News Analysis
Last year, the Standing Rock
Sioux tribe of North Dakota fought loud and proud against the construction of
the Dakota Access pipeline, fearing that the pipeline's inevitable leaks could
contaminate the tribe's main source of drinking water, the Missouri River. As
many of us in the United States thankfully now recognize, this act of
resistance by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies constitutes only the
latest chapter in the centuries-long struggle by the Indigenous peoples of this
continent against the genocidal forces of settler colonialism. In
fact, the fight by Indigenous folks for their water rights permeates the
globe at this very hour. It extends to South America, Australia and to
Israel/Palestine, where the settler colonial state of Israel, with the strong
backing of the US, continues to systematically block Palestinians' attempts to
access clean water.
The lack of potable water for
Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories, and even within the state of Israel itself, is a full-blown health
crisis. A person needs at minimum 120 liters of water per day, according to the World Health Organization, but an average
Palestinian in the West Bank receives only 73 liters of water per day. As a
2009 World Bank report on water restrictions in the
Occupied Territories put it, many Palestinian communities in the West Bank,
particularly in the area under strictest Israeli control, "face water
access comparable to that of refugee camps in Congo or Sudan." In
the Jordan Valley, Israelis use roughly 81 times more water per capita than Palestinians in
the West Bank, filling their swimming pools to the brim. In Gaza, the
situation is even worse: the United Nations estimates that 96 percent of the
water is unfit for consumption. By year's end, Gaza's only source of
water, the Coastal Aquifer, will be depleted, and irreversibly so by 2020, when the UN
projects that Gaza will be literally uninhabitable.
Like many humanitarian crises
across the globe, the Palestinian water crisis didn't evolve naturally. As a
matter of official policy and using great precision, Israel and the US
have blocked every attempt by the Palestinians to develop and maintain
sustainable access to water. In the West Bank, the Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem, documents how Israeli authorities routinely confiscate
and demolish Palestinian water infrastructure. Most recently, B'Tselem has
reported on the Israeli Army and Civil Administration destroying rainwater cisterns, slashing
pipes and seizing
construction equipment, like welding machines. An extensive
report by Amnesty International in 2009 shows that these cruel
practices of the Israeli military and Civil Administration in the West Bank go
back decades.
The Separation Wall,
constructed and expanded by Israel in violation of orders by the International
Criminal Court, stands as the biggest physical barrier to Palestinian
realization of their water rights. Winding through Palestinian territory, the
wall cuts off Palestinians in the West Bank from their wells and cisterns, as
well as some of the choicest farmland in the area. Along the wall, the Israeli
military arbitrarily declares wide swaths of land in the West Bank to be
"closed military areas," further seizing the already meager patches
of territory left to the Indigenous population.
In Gaza, now in its 10th year
under the brutal Israeli blockade, residents cannot import any materials that
they need to repair or improve their water network, which Israel has decimated
during repeated assaults. The official UN fact-finding mission on the 2008-2009
Gaza conflict (codename Operation Cast Lead) found that Israel deliberately bombed water
treatment and sewage facilities in Gaza for no other purpose than to inflict
collective punishment on the residents of Gaza -- a major war crime.
Subsequent reports by the UN and human rights groups found that Israel committed these same kinds of
unjustifiable intentional attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in
the 2014 conflict (codename Operation Protective Edge), severely damaging what
little was left of Gaza's water and sanitation network.
Furthermore, these crimes were
not the aberrant acts of a few rogue soldiers, but were the outcome of official
Israeli policy. And we know so beyond a reasonable doubt based on two principal
pieces of evidence. First, Israeli officials' explicitly stated before, during and after the conflicts that they would (and did) inflict collective
punishment on the residents of Gaza. Israel's so-called Dahiya doctrine
enshrines this strategy of total war (that is, war against civilians and
civilian infrastructure, not just military targets) into official policy.
Second, we can note, as the UN fact-finding missions did, how Israeli authorities refused to
modify their strategy of indiscriminately shelling densely-packed residential
areas over the course of the conflict, even after the high civilian death tolls
and allegations of war crimes were mounting.
Besides massively and
systematically destroying the Palestinian water system through direct violence,
Israel also prevents Palestinians from maintaining or developing their network
by bureaucratic means. After conquering the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel
issued a series of military
orders that gave the Israeli Army complete control over all
water-related issues in the Occupied Territories and required Palestinians to
obtain permits from the Israeli army in order to pursue any and all water
projects. All unpermitted water installations would be (and were) confiscated
or demolished. While in theory, Palestinians could still manage their water
needs after a long and complicated bureaucratic process, in practice,
Palestinians were hardly ever granted permits. According to B'Tselem, from
1967 to 1996, Israel granted Palestinians just 13 permits, and all these
permits only covered domestic projects; in other words, they wouldn't even
cover the work needed to repair existing wells and pipes, let alone expand the
water network in order to serve the growing population.
In the 1990s, as a part of the
Oslo Accords, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization made a provisional agreement to "share" access to
the Mountain Aquifer, a vast underground source of water beneath the West Bank
and the easternmost parts of the State of Israel. This agreement, like most
agreements made across steep power gradients, reflected the inequality between
the negotiating parties, with Israel taking 80 percent of the water potential from
the Mountain Aquifer and the Palestinian Authority taking the remaining 20
percent. Keep in mind that the Mountain Aquifer is the only source of water for
the Palestinians living in the West Bank, because since 1967, Israel has prevented Palestinians from accessing the shores of the Jordan
River. Israel, on the other hand, has many other sources of drinking water,
including from the Sea of Galilee, the Coastal Aquifer, its water recycling
system (the most advanced in the world by far) and its desalination facilities
(also among the most advanced in the world). Nonetheless, Israel, being the
unquestionably dominant player here, took the lion's share of the water
resources between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Even worse, it was revealed eight years ago that Israel had in fact been
over-extracting from the Mountain Aquifer at almost double the agreed-upon
rate, drying up Palestinian wells while causing potentially irreversible harm to
the aquifer.
Meanwhile, the old oppressive
permitting regime continued, albeit through a new institution called the Joint
Water Committee (JWC) that was meant to review permits for water-related
projects. But, as the World Bank pointed out in its 2009 report, the name of this committee is a misnomer since
the JWC "does not function as a 'joint' water resource governance
institution" due to "fundamental asymmetries" between the
Israelis and Palestinians. Amnesty International described the situation more
plainly in its report, writing that, "The Joint Water Committee
merely institutionalized the intrinsically discriminatory system of Israeli
control over Palestinian resources that had already been in existence since
Israel's occupation of [the West Bank and Gaza] three decades earlier."
The World Bank and Amnesty International pointed out that between 2001 and
2009, about one-half of all Palestinian projects presented to the JWC were
approved, compared to the near 100 percent approval rate for Israeli projects.
Of the Palestinian projects approved by the JWC, those that touch on Area C of
the West Bank (which most do, for geographical reasons) must obtain a second
approval from the Israeli Civilian Administration, and this second approval
process is done without public participation or representation by Palestinians.
So, as much as one-third of water in the Palestinian water system is lost in
leakages due to old and inefficient networks that can't be replaced or
modernized because it's so difficult to obtain a permit.
In addition to the official
state-sanctioned strangulation of Palestinians' water supply, settlers in the
West Bank do their part through sabotaging Palestinian water infrastructure and
resources. Amnesty International has reported on
how settlers have destroyed Palestinian water pipes, poisoned rainwater
cisterns and dumped untreated sewage into Palestinian springs. Recent reports
show this pattern of settler
violence against Palestinians and their allies continuing up to the
present.
Significantly, human rights
organizations have noted that, though these despicable attacks by settlers
aren't officially state-sanctioned, the Israeli authorities rarely investigate
them, so the perpetrators generally enjoy impunity, feeling free to continue
terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. It takes no
stretch of the imagination to consider how Israel would treat
Palestinians even suspected of such crimes, because we know that Palestinians
even suspected of terrorism sink into the bowels of the Israeli prisons, never
to be heard from again, while Israel demolishes the family homes of suspected
violent resisters, letting Palestinians and the world know that Israel won't
tolerate any resistance to its tyranny.
Lastly, we must remember that
Israel can only deprive the Palestinians of water because the US allows it. In
the past, when Israel committed massacres against Palestinians, or acted in
other ways that US presidents didn't like, presidential administrations have
occasionally threatened to cut off the flow of military aid, and in these
cases, Israel eventually fell into line. But the flow of US military aid to
Israel, roughly $3.1 billion per year (soon to increase to $3.8 billion annually), has continued unabated as Israel
has condemned the Palestinians to die of thirst, in violation of not just
international law, but US domestic law, which prohibits the sending of
non-humanitarian aid to known violators of human rights, which Israel plainly
is.
Water is one of the key
components of life as we know it. If we allow our country to continue to green
light Israel's dehydration of the Palestinians, we will be aiding and abetting
all further deaths and illnesses that befall the Palestinians living in the
Occupied Territories as a result. Worse, if present trends continue, we will be
responsible for yet another genocide against an Indigenous people.
Unlike past generations, many
of us now recognize and regret how our nation nearly exterminated the Native
people of North America. But what good is this retrospective shame if we don't
act to prevent our country from exterminating another Native people, the
Palestinians? The reality is, if we do nothing, the US, through our ally
Israel, will surely repeat these darkest chapters of US history. We can't let
that happen.
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