Water Fact~March 6, 2023
Water Fact: March 6, 2023
Settlers, soldiers and Mekorot have tormented Huwara for many decades
On February 26th about 400 settlers raged through the West Bank town of Huwara near Nablus, torching houses and stores, destroying more than 100 cars, slaughtering livestock, killing a Palestinian resident and wounding hundreds. An Israeli military officer, some journalists, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem among others termed the spasm of violence a ‘pogrom’.
The attack on Huwara received considerable attention in the western media, as did the March 1st statementby Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – a settler who now has responsibility for the Civil Administration of the West Bank – that the town should be “wiped out” by the Israeli government.
From the ‘wiping out’ of more than 500 Palestinian villages during the Nakba to the lengthy catalogue of settler rampages, the historical context has generally been absent from reports of Huwara’s current nightmare. Largely unacknowledged is the fact that this is no aberration attributable to the extreme far right nature of the current Netanyahu government. On the contrary, Huwara’s residents and those of nearby villages have endured hundreds of settler attacks since the hilltop settlement of Yitzhar was built in 1983 on land taken from Huwara and five neighboring villages.
Yitzhar’s settlers - known as the ‘hilltop youth’ - have routinely burned or cut down the olive trees of this ancient village of 7,000 people. In a January 2021 report Al Haq states that attacks by Yitzhar’s settlers “include beatings, throwing stones, shooting at villagers with live ammunition, torching agricultural lands, trees and cars, uprooting trees, confiscating and pillaging natural resources, including land and water, attacking and suppressing peaceful assemblies, denying access to property and to sources of livelihood, and spray-painting hate speech on cars, walls and other Palestinian properties. Most of these attacks happen under the watchful eye of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF), if not actively encouraged by them.”
The Israeli National Water Carrier Mekorot has contributed to Huwara’s ordeal. In June 2016, in a move affecting the lives of some 150,000 Palestinians, it reduced the quantity of pumped water to Huwara and 13 other villages in the north of the West Bank by 50-70 percent. Residents were forced to buy expensive trucked water for both domestic and agricultural use while additional water was made available to expanding settlements.
What is new now are the odds that Palestinians are facing in their struggle to remain on the land. A dozen years ago the ideologically-driven settlers who routinely attacked Huwara appeared “on the fringe of Israeli society.” Now their leaders – Kahanist disciple Ben Gvir and the ethnic cleansing-endorsing Smotrich – have their hands on the levers of power. Given the reluctance of the Biden Administration to combine verbal denunciations with actual consequences, It is not surprising that settler shock troops feel newly empowered.
Banner design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press
A Boycott Announced~
Boycott Sadaf
“We’re a group of Palestinian and Arab grassroots activists who believe our money shouldn’t fund our own dispossession. We feel responsible towards our community against the theft of our ingredients and manipulation of our community to purchase goods from zionists who are bankrolling the occupation over our peoples’ lives—all without our knowledge and consent.”
Feb 20th Water Fact
The Palestinian human rights group Al Haq has recently issued a comprehensive report that describes how Israel uses water as a weapon against the Palestinian people in a manner that earns its corporations big profits, reduces Palestinians to a ‘captive market’ forced to buy back at every increasing prices water that has been pillaged from them, and promotes Palestinian dispossession from their land and resources. For the last decade Al Haq has been using the term ‘water apartheid’ to apply to Israel’s water policies, and an in depth case for describing them as such is made here.
Corporate Liability: the Right to Water and the War Crime of Pillage details how “Israel utilizes Palestinian water to maintain control over the Palestinian population, deepen its fragmentation, and hold the Palestinian economy captive, amounting to economic annexation.” It traces the evolution of this process from the founding of Mekorot in 1937 by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund to its emergence as an Israeli government-owned company with sole control over the water supply of the occupied Palestinian territories.
The report describes the role played by other corporations in settlement expansion and the theft and destruction of Palestinian water resources and infrastructure, among them the TAHAL Group International, the Hagihon Company, IDE Technologies, Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC Banford Excavations Ltd, and Volvo. Various case studies outline just how water dispossession has been engineered. In one example, between 60,000 and 80,000 Palestinians were cut off from their water supply when Hagihon, a private Israeli water and sewage corporation for the Jerusalem Municipality, stopped serving Palestinian areas of Jerusalem after they were isolated behind Israel’s Apartheid Wall. The section on how Israel and corporate entities reap big profits by forcing Palestinians to buy expensive desalinated water rather than use water from their own Mountain aquifer makes for especially painful reading.
The report gives an historical overview of Palestinian water laws and the military orders that had reduced the per capita water consumption of Palestinians to a quarter of that of Israelis before the Oslo Accords. While the Oslo II agreements (1995) seemed on paper to give Palestinians a say in how their water was used, in practice an Israeli veto over any Palestinian water project has deprived them of that. In the years since then the Palestinian population has doubled, while the amount of water accorded to them has remained frozen at the figure allocated by Oslo II.
The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians residing in Area C – some 62 percent of the West Bank as delineated by the Oslo Accords – are at particular risk. “Since Israeli planning authorities do not recognize 88% of Palestinian villages in Area C, the Civil Administration automatically rejects proposals for any sort of infrastructure to serve these villages” while rapidly approving settlement proposals.
It is deeply regrettable that the portion of the report on water as a human right under international law and the recommendations it makes to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, implicated corporations, and the international community are likely to be entirely ignored.
photo credit: Prensa Latina