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Israel flooded dozens of homes and hundreds of dunums of agricultural lands in Gaza. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
Water Fact: January 9, 2023
Polluting water supplies is a many-decades-old weapon of ethnic cleansing
The new Israeli government has been described in the mainstream press as ‘far right’ and ‘extremist,’ leading readers to assume that Israel is leaving its Zionist roots behind and heading in a new and dangerous direction.
But to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé who has delved deeply into the historical archives for his pathbreaking 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the new government represents the “maturation of the Zionist project: a ruthless settler colonial project, built on apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, colonization and genocidal policies.”
Just how ruthless that project has been is laid bare in a myth-shattering new book by Thomas Suárez, Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea (Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2023). Using largely original source material, Suárez details the astonishing number of lethal terrorist attacks implemented by Zionist gangs to create and consolidate the State of Israel, and describes how assassination, intimidation and propaganda operated to silence critics and win international support for the ‘Jewish State’.
Bombs and bullets were the weapons of choice, but according to Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who had served in the Zionist Underground, and Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, bacteriological warfare also had its place. In a 1998 article in the Americans for Middle East Understanding publication The Link, Giladi used information from Mileshtin to back his assertion that “the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into water wells” to make sure ethnically cleansed Palestinians could not “return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages.” He described the Haganah putting bacteria into the spring that fed the city of Acre (Akko) and a Haganah division dressed as Arabs going to Gaza where “Egyptians caught them putting two cans of bacteria, typhus and dysentery into the water supply in wanton disregard of the civilian population.”
The deliberate contamination of water sources to drive Palestinians off their land did not end with the consolidation of the Israeli state. For 21st century examples see here and here and here.
Israel has been accused of waging a water war on Palestinians since its creation atop the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948.