Water Fact: September 25, 2023
Who are the real terrorists?
Israeli settlers are on the rampage, driving their sheep onto Palestinian fields to destroy harvests, seizing Palestinian water sources and on occasion poisoning wells with animal carcasses, attacking and sometimes murdering Palestinian shepherds in their fields, killing their animals and conducting night-time raids on their homes.
The dramatic increase in settler violence averaging now three attacks each day has been recently described in UN reports here and here. A report by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem called The pogroms are working – the transfer is already happening describes how terror and water deprivation are used to force Palestinian shepherding communities to leave their land, enabling settlers to take it over:
“Such attacks have grown significantly worse under the current government, turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal dignity. The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their ability to continue earning a living. It has terrorized them to the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize the understanding that there is no one to protect them. This reality has left these communities with no other choice, and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and home for safer places.”
In the West Bank today those ‘safer places’ are hard to find. As Tor Wennesland, the UN Middle East Envoy, told the UN Security Council on August 21, the West Bank toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers is the highest this year since the UN began keeping records in 2005.
The settlers have been given the blessing of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has moved to shift control of the West Bank from military governance – subject to international law on temporary military occupations – to permanent Israeli civilian rule. As street protests continue against Netanyahu’s planned judicial overhaul, his coalition is in the process of quietly annexing Area C – some 60 percent of the West Bank.
This does not seem to concern the Biden Administration, as it presses ahead to achieve ‘normalization’ between Israel and Saudi Arabia and is reportedly on the verge of welcoming Israel into the US Visa Waiver program.
For details concerning the role that water is playing in driving Palestinians off their land listen to “Water Apartheid in Israel-Palestine,” a September 2023 radio broadcast from KKFI Kansas City featuring Eyal Hareuveni, author of the B’Tselem study, ‘Parched: Israel’s Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank’ and Nancy Murray of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine.
Radio interview with Nancy Murray of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Eyal Hareuveni of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem discusses how and why Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank face a chronic shortage of water. He is the author of a new study by B’Tselem called “Parched: Israel’s Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank,” which examines Israel’s discriminatory use of water to control the Palestinian population under military ccupation. Though Israel is a water super-power, producing twice as much water as it receives from natural sources, it limits Palestinians’ consumption of water and prevents them drilling new wells or supplying water to needy communities. Only about one-third of Palestinians in the West Bank have daily access to running water. Nancy Murray of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine speaks to the toll the shortage of water takes on Palestinians’ lives, health and economy and addresses the effects of this not only in the West Bank but also in the Gaza Strip,where 98 percent of the ground water is now contaminated.
Listen to the interview here.
Water Fact: August 28, 2023
The word spreads about Israel’s denial of water to Palestinians
This summer Israel’s Apartheid water policies reached a broad audience.
On August 17, 2023 the Associated Press featured a substantial piece of photojournalism, “As Israeli Settlements thrive, Palestinian taps run dry. The water crisis reflects a broader battle.” It appeared on ABC News on the same day.
It was then picked up by the Los Angeles Times on August 18, and Haaretz on August 19, accompanied by an audio reading. The Middle East Monitor republished the story on August 21 and it then appeared in a variety of online publications, including the Telegraph Herald of Dubuque, Iowa.
This is hardly the first time a mainstream news source has featured Israel’s practice of depriving Palestinians of water. For instance, on July 9, 2008 Reuters ran a piece with this headline:
“West Bank taps run dry due to drought and Israeli controls.” It reported that “parts of major West Bank cities such as Jenin, Hebron and Bethlehem have had no running water for about a month and even faucets in parts of Ramallah, the occupied West Bank’s political hub which rarely experiences cuts, have been dry for days at a time in recent weeks.”
Why? Israel had cut off their water supply and prevented Palestinians from drilling deeper wells, as their shallow ones dried up because of the drought.
On July 26, 2023 Israel utilized a relatively novel weapon in its water deprivation toolbox. The video of Israeli forces pouring cement into three Palestinian water wells near Hebron appeared on Tik Tok, X(formerly Twitter) and was picked up by several publications. The video of the incident published by Middle East Eye features an interview with one of the impacted farmers as the cement is being poured.
This was not the first time Israel has permanently sealed a Palestinian water source. The previous year Israeli forces used cement to plug two water wells providing drinking water near Tulkarem.
But this time Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy made no effort to contain his outrage:
“The evil of apartheid has many faces; this clogging of wells, in which no blood was shed and no people were arrested, is one of the ugliest. No security lie or pretext can hide the concrete-covered wells, nor can the excuse of law and order, only pure evil. Even if it is not the most horrific of the crimes committed every day in the territories, it is one of the ugliest: sealing up water wells.”
Where is the international outrage that will force an end to what Gideon Levy calls these “diabolical” practices?
Banner design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press
In Pictures: Aljazeera on Palestinian struggle for Water
“It is easy to pick out the Israeli settlements – illegal under international law – that are encroaching on more and more of the occupied West Bank.
They stand in stark contrast to the arid villages of the occupied West Bank, where an excruciating lack of water means farmers are forced to leave their precious date palms to die and desert their greenhouses.”