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Sarah
Irving is a freelance writer with a long history of involvement in
the environmental justice, anti-globalisation and Palestine
solidarity movements. She was involved in the International
Solidarity Movement in Palestine in 2001-2 and is a director of
Olive Co-operative, which runs tours to Palestine and sells fairly
traded Palestinian products.
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Israeli Uses Of Palestinian Water
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Symbolism And Ideology
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Ideology and the Sitting of Settlements
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Ideology and Israel's international water relations
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Water in Israeli-Palestinian peace and war
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The situation for people in the West Bank
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The situation for people in Gaza
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The situation for Palestinians in Israel and
East Jerusalem
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Gendered impacts
In
the summer of 2004, a day-tour designed to show foreigners the
situation of Palestinians living in the Jerusalem area took me
through the illegal settlement of Maale Adumim. Amongst its pristine
new homes and glossy shopping centres were swathes of bright green
lawns and bright flowerbeds, being watered by drip irrigation and
sprinklers which glistened in the sun. A public swimming pool
advertised activities, and in the gardens of private houses, bushes
and trees were growing.
I had been staying in the comparatively comfortable, affluent
Palestinian town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem in the West Bank.
Although water was freely available, it tasted unpleasant and we
were urged to have quick showers. Visiting refugee camps I had
encountered houses where running water was available for only part
of some days and sometimes standpipes had to be used. I also knew
that the camps were often under curfew or military attack, and that
going outside to collect water was not feasible. I had also read the
accounts of Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist who had lived in Gaza,
who described the brown, rusty, foul liquid which came out
(occasionally) of the taps in Gaza City.
There is a substantial body of academic and institutional literature
on the issues of water distribution in the West Bank and Gaza, and
the subject was one of the five main areas of discussion in the
doomed Final Status Negotiations of the Oslo Accords [1].
Amongst the Palestine solidarity community, however, water has been
less widely picked up as an issue. Settlements and the Separation
Wall can be seen; human rights abuses listened to and agonised over.
But the details of aquifers and rainfall can seem scholastic and
dull, and the key significance of water for Palestinian survival and
in Israeli strategic considerations is easily passed over. Even more
commonly discounted is the role of ideology in the way that water is
regarded, and the differential impact that water appropriation has
on different groups; especially women, within Palestinian society. I
particularly want to focus on these two aspects of the water issue
in Palestine and Israel, as I believe that highlighting them adds
considerably to understanding of the way that access to water has
been used as a weapon against the Palestinian people, and has
affected relations within Palestinian society.
Israeli Uses Of Palestinian Water
Access to Palestinian water was recognised by the architects of the
State of Israel as vital to their plans. The Zionist leaders, coming
from a rapidly industrialising Europe, aspired to standards of
living which were much more resource-intensive than those pursued by
the inhabitants of Palestine under the Ottoman Empire and British
Mandate. This included plans for hydroelectric power generation and
for intensive forms of agriculture that were already, even in the
1920s, causing dangerous levels of salinisation of soil around
Jewish farms under the British Mandate
[2].
In 1946 the American Zionist Association employed Tennessee Valley
Water Authority engineers, who had been responsible for some of the
biggest water management projects in the modern world, to present
plans for the diversion of the Jordan River to the Negev
[3]. The Haganah Museum in Tel Aviv attaches great
significance to water in the founding of the country and in the
military aims of the Founding Fathers, and features maps linking the
lines of water control between the Mandate era Jewish settlements of
the 1930s. Just five years after the establishment of Israel, the UN
intervened to prevent conflict with Syria over Israel attempts to
divert water from part of the Jordan River in the demilitarised zone
down to the Negev. With this plan foiled, the National Water Carrier
was built between 1959 and 1964, using a network of pipes and
tunnels to draw water from the Sea of Galilee to the desert South
[4].
This level of water appropriation was still, however, insufficient
for Israeli usage. The occupation of the West Bank in 1967 increased
Israels accessible water by 50% due to its occupation of the three
West Bank aquifers[5]. Israel used Military Orders
to enforced control over Palestinian water. In addition, the Golan
Heights, also occupied by Israel in 1967, increased Israels water
supply by giving it control of two Jordan tributaries; the Banyas
and the Yarkon, and provided a water tower[6] for
the country.
Despite this widespread appropriation of other countries water
resources, and the availability of efficient water-saving
technologies, Israel still massively over-uses water, and has done
so since the 1970s[7], aspiring to the lifestyles
of water-rich industrialised nations. Israel takes 40% of its
groundwater and 25% of renewable water supplies from Palestinian
sources; draws heavily on its own stocks; and still needs to
undertake negotiations with Turkey to buy water capacity from this
and other countries. With a projected population in Israel of 8
million by 2025, this desperation for water can only increase. In
addition, Israel is the only country of the Jordan basin not to have
signed up to the UN Watercourse Convention, which aims to promote
dialogue between countries sharing water resources[8].
Solutions to water shortages are the subject of great interest in
Israel from desalination plants to the use of wastewater for
agricultural irrigation[9] but it is unlikely that
any of these will be able to meet the kind of increases in demand
that are projected.
While the over-use of water by Israel is the result of individual
habits and a reaction to the availability of water, I would contend
that it is also influenced by the way that Israeli society wishes
ideologically to see itself and to promote itself worldwide. This is
as a modern, Western-style nation with unlimited resources and
access to pastimes such as swimming pools, lush gardens and keeping
expensive cars sparkling clean. An Israeli elite that has often
grown up in European countries or the USA, or has family links with
these countries, has profited considerably from its identification
as being like these countries, in an international climate where
non-whites are categorised as inferior. It is their success in
maintaining this racist differentiation that has been so useful to
the Israeli state in presenting itself to the West as rational,
victimised and white, so that its enemies Palestinians and the wider
Arab world are constructed in opposition to this; as the violent
attackers. Western anti-Jewishness has been overcome by another
layer of prejudice, which Israeli politicians have successfully
manipulated in the international arena to create a racist stereotype
of their opponents. Water is fundamental to this lifestyle, both for
Israelis themselves and for the experience that Western visitors to
Israel have of a country that is civilised.
Symbolism And Ideology
My contention about the normative role of water leads into a
discussion of the symbolism and ideology which surrounds water in
Palestine and Israel. The conflict is ridden through with emotional,
ethnic and religious significances which further complicate any
notion of rational decisions that international relations scholars
might attempt to apply. As Miriam Lowi, one of the first scholars to
consider the subject of Israeli and Palestinian water in an
international context, pointed out: What is more important to
understand, though, is that interests emerge within the context of a
particular belief system and historical experience. Both the
neo-realists and neo-liberals fail, in general, to take sufficient
account of this. Indeed, national interests and foreign policy
behaviour are responses to environmental constraints that are
normative and ideational in nature, as well as being structural and
material[10].
For right-wing religious Jews, such as Rabbi Ariel of the violent
exclusivist movement Gush Emunim, the real Zionism, the holy one
with profound roots, exists only where the really religious Jews are
living; in the mountains of Judea and the valleys of Samaria[11].
Both land and water have profound religious significant, and the
racism which is implicit (and often explicit) in such religious
fervour rejects the validity of any other ownership of God-given
natural resources, and therefore lays religious claim to water as
well as land: [Gush Emunim] argue that what appears to be the
confiscation of Arab-owned land for subsequent settlement by Jews is
in reality not an act of stealing but one of sanctification[12].
Thus taking possession of Palestinian-owned land is seen as not only
a matter of resource control but also a religious duty.
For Israeli Jews who are not of religiously fundamentalist leanings,
there are still significant normative values associated with water.
The place of agriculture in the Israeli psyche is particularly
prominent, associated with Zionist slogans about greening the desert
and symbolic of the fertile promised land. Its significance in this
respect is out of all proportion to the contribution it makes to the
countrys economy. In 1999, for example, economists proposed a
solution to the summer drought which entailed giving water to
Palestinian farmers, in order to maintain the Palestinian economy
and Palestinian consumption of Israeli goods. In monetary terms,
this would benefit the Israeli economy more than giving the same
water to Israeli farmers. The public outcry and political opposition
that crushed this idea is a clear illustration of the overwhelming
of economics by ideological passions[13].
The symbolic value of water has also made it an effective weapon,
not only in disrupting peoples lives but also by humiliating and
depriving them. All societies have notions of cleanliness and
pollution which go beyond the immediate biological or chemical
properties of substances, which means that actions such as urinating
in water tanks (recorded in both the first and second Intifadas);
serve to enforce the helplessness of people under occupation and the
contempt of their occupiers, as well as to affect their health and
physical cleanliness.
It is factors such as these which go some way to explaining the
inadequacy of Israeli macroeconomic analyses of the water situation.
One such analysis suggests the settlements are not a significant
tool of water policy because to use conflict to control water is
more expensive for Israel than to buy it from other countries[14].
To rely solely on the pragmatic issues around water is to fail to
understand the normative significance it has for the Israeli
policy-makers and public.
Land, agriculture and water also inhabit significant normative
spaces for Palestinians, though without the kind of ethnic
exclusivism expressed by Israeli Jewish fundamentalists. Women
interviewed by Tamar Mayer during the first Intifada regularly used
words such as holy to express their perception of the land and its
resources. For these women, farming (often under difficult
conditions) and their relationship to the land had become part of
their resistance to the Israeli occupation and had taken on
emotional and nationalistic connotations[15].
Unlike the Israeli religious right, for Palestinians keeping control
of their land and its resources is not only a matter of physical
survival, but also of identity and of spiritual resistance. As two
female Palestinian citizens of Israel wrote in 2002: land is
fundamental to Palestinian culture, economy and identity. The
current destruction of olive groves by Israeli military and settlers
is not simply the destruction of thousands of trees, but of the
Palestinian soul.[16]
The normative role of water and land also underlies a significant
problem of dealing with water issues for the Palestinians. As water
has become a symbol of the oppression, and a significant factor in
day-to-day difficulties for them, a discourse has developed which
only allows water problems to be attributed to the Occupation. This
means that other problems which became rife in the West Bank and
Gaza due to water shortages cannot be properly dealt with, because
their root causes cannot be acknowledged. These problems include
corruption, water theft and mismanagement, the chaos caused by
different agencies and aid organisations failing to co-operate with
one another in the Oslo period, and the failure of some villages to
acknowledge the consequences of their own choices to be attached to
the Israeli state water network[17]. Trottier uses
the concept of sanctioned discourses to explain the circumscribed
way in which certain ideas and concepts are allowed or not allowed
to exist within the way that water is talked about by Palestinians.
The sanctioned discourse of a simple Israeli appropriation of all
West Bank water is undoubtedly a useful rallying cry for the
Palestinian Authorities, but it also obscures inquiries into
bureaucratic incompetence and corruption[18].
Ideology and the Sitting of Settlements
Despite official denials, the use of the West Bank settlements to
control water resources is well known and widely admitted. The
pattern of settlement building since the 1970s has followed the
ridges and edges of aquifers in the hills of the area, allowing
settlers to dominate aquifers and more easily access their contents[19].
It is widely acknowledged that settlers use between three and four
times as much water per head as their Palestinian neighbours[20].
Their access to more sophisticated drilling equipment allows them to
drill deeper wells to access clean water, which many Palestinians
believe saps the supplies of their own older, shallower wells. The
Taba agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, signed
in 1995, ceded Israel the rights to 82% of West Bank water, setting
in stone Israeli control over Palestinian resources. This agreement
was facilitated by the facts on the ground created by the
settlements. This also reinforced the kind of situation, typical in
the West Bank, commented on by Hanna Nasir, mayor of Bethlehem, in
2002: Here we are surrounded by settlements. They are grabbing the
land around the clock and taking eighty-one percent of our water.
Oppression to this extent doesnt help the cause of peace[21].
Those who attribute the sitting of settlements to Israeli desires to
control water resources are still largely dismissed as conspiracy
theorists despite evidence to the contrary coming from many
quarters. Even Malcolm Rifkind, former Conservative defence minister
in the UK, acknowledged that this was the case and that it was
illegal[22]. A study cited by Trottier denied
strenuously that water grabbing motivated settlement construction
but admitted that the IDFs planning department included an officer
whose responsibilities included the evaluation of the strategic
influence of water resources[23]. And maps
produced by Palestinian organisations such as HDIP and Israeli human
rights groups such as Btselem confirm the congruence of settlement
construction and the position of water. The most recent of these
maps also confirm the role of the Separation Wall in reinforcing
this control, throwing long spurs into the West Bank to strengthen
ownership of strategically important settlements such as Ariel and
Barkan. Thus, the pragmatic concerns of Israeli planners to control
water resources further coincides with the ideological motives of
racially and religiously discriminatory Israelis whose primary
objective is the expansion of the state of Israel.
Ideology and Israels international water
relations
The appropriation of Palestinian water has not been Israels only
controversial acquisition. Water conflicts have been key to
interethnic conflicts in the region since Biblical times, and in
their plans for a state the early Zionists were well aware of the
issue. They were the only group to bring the subject into the peace
conferences at the end of World War One, whereas the Hashemites
complacently assumed they would control the entire region and did
not need to consider specific areas. Even Zionist founder Theodor
Herzl commented that the real founder of the new-old country were
the hydraulic engineers (Trottier 1999 p40).
In 1953 the UN had to prevent the newly formed state of Israel from
diverting water from the demilitarised zone between Israel and
Syria, in order to draw it south to the Negev desert (Bregman 1998
p257). Having been thwarted in this, Israel built the National Water
Carrier, a network of pipes which took water from the Sea of Galilee
to the southern desert. Israels 1967 occupation of the Golan Heights
was also partly inspired by the desire to take control of this was
source (Bregman 1998 p230). It was this water access, and its
channelling southwards, which allowed Israel to carry out the
Zionist dream of greening the desert.
Prior to 1948 Zionist organisations entered into a deal with King
Abdullah of Jordan which offered him the West Bank aquifers and
parts of the Jordan River in return for co-operation (Trottier 1999
p50). The two countries co-operated from 1963 onwards, and more so
after 1967, although the relationship was kept quiet because of
hostility from other Arab states (Trotter 1999 p7-8). A 1994 treaty
formalised exchanges of water between the two countries in times of
crisis, setting in law the de facto control by Israel of the Wadi
Arabah, captured in 1967. However, the deal was not well thought out
on the Jordanian side, as the absence of a clause specifying water
quality has meant that Israel has handed over dirty, high-salinity
water after receiving cleaner supplies. (Trottier 1999 p10, 60, 68).
Israels lack of respect for its Arab neighbours make sending them
dirty water an act of symbolic aggression, as well as of short-term
economic pragmatism.
Water in Israeli-Palestinian peace and war
As Birgit Schlutter noted at the end of 2005, With the beginning of
new peace negotiations under Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, the
topic of water and its allocation to Palestinians and Israelis is
back on the negotiation table. Water has of necessity featured in
the provisions of all Israel-Palestine negotiations since the Madrid
talks and Oslo accords of the early 1990s. However, Israel has held
a hard line on the subject. At Madrid it refused to discuss the
political aspects of water, insisting on covering only technical
areas and programmes of capacity-building in Arab states and areas,
including resurrecting the idea of a canal between the Nile and Gaza
(Trottier 1999 p63). The Oslo agreement included an annex specifying
co-operation on water issues (Bregman 1998 p230), but the 1994 Cairo
agreement placed the Palestinian Authority in an untenable position
of being responsible for water and sewage in the West Bank and Gaza,
but keeping supply in the hands of the Israeli Mekorot Water Company
(Trottier 1999 p65).
As is often the case, many people the press, the international
community, and the governments of the countries concerned spend a
lot of time talking about the big questions of geology, of
international politics, agreement and treaties. What so often
disappears in these talks and statements is the impacts on millions
of ordinary people.
Israels manipulation of its control of water has been used as a
weapon during both Intifadas. During the first Intifada even the
Mayor of Jerusalem cited the illegality of collective punishment in
his objections to army cutting of water supplies in East Jerusalem
as punishment for communities in resistance (Cheshin et al 1999
p171). Similar tactics were still being employed in the second
Intifada, for example in Bethlehem in 2002, when despite keeping the
city centre under 24-hour curfew for weeks, Israeli soldiers cut
domestic water pipes (Irving 2004 p10). Such actions draw their
power not only from their effects on peoples lives and wellbeing,
but also from their symbolic strength in withdrawing not just a
basic utility but the very stuff of life.
The situation for people in the West
Bank
In January 2006 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz printed a story that
will be familiar, in gist if not in detail, to anyone who pays
attention to Israeli incursions onto West Bank land. According to
the piece: Wadi Fuqin is known far and wide for its traditional
farming practices, considered by many to be the finest, most
impressive agricultural system in any Palestinian village. However,
extensive [settlement] expansion plans are now threatening the
preservation of this farming tradition by endangering, among other
things, the village's water supply. If the plans materialize, the
village will be surrounded on nearly all sides by new Betar Illit
neighbourhoods and the separation fence. A planned road will also
cut through village fields.
This tale illustrates the breadth of the impact that Israels
attitude to Palestinian water has. It not only affects peoples
livelihoods, by curtailing agriculture, but destroys heritage and
ways of life that have lasted for hundreds of years. In urban
settings, where supplies can be not just disrupted but cut
altogether, it impacts on health, causing unsanitary conditions and
inadequate clean drinking water. Everyday tasks such as washing
clothes and bathing are restricted, and stereotypes about dirty
Arabs reinforced, despite Israeli imposition of any lack of
cleanliness. Increasingly, environmental problems occur as a result
of Israels over-exploitation of its own and others water; chemicals,
fertilisers and sewage pollution are starting to concentrate in the
aquifers, damaging future water resources (Mayer 1994 p13), while
even the Jordan River is drying up as the sources feeding it are
used to excess. According to environmental groups, fifty years ago
some 1.3 billion cubic metres of clean water flowed through the
Lower Jordan each year. Today, the total is less than 100 million
cubic metres, much of it either sewage or diverted saline water.
Massive water diversion programs, closed borders and sewage
discharge have almost completely destroyed the natural and cultural
heritage of this river (Friends of the Earth 2005 p15). This not
only damages current agriculture and domestic access, but also has
considerable implications for a putative Palestinian state built on
industries such as agriculture and tourism. It also contributes to
the high levels of unemployment in the West Bank, where an estimated
60% of the population lives below the poverty line (Gavrilis 2006),
as jobs lost to inadequate resources join those cut off by movement
restrictions such as the Wall and checkpoints.
Israeli control of Palestinian water has also had longer-term
impacts, preventing development and planning. The (in)famous
Military Order 158 of 1967 subjected all drilling of agricultural or
industrial wells in the West Bank to Israeli licenses, and only 23
were granted between 1967 and 1990 (Trottier 1999 p60). Domestic
wells were largely allowed, indicating that the intention was to
stifle economic activity and ensure that Palestinians, until the
first Intifada, remained a source of cheap labour for Israeli
agriculture and industry. Economic uses of water were further
prevented by high prices well above the subsidised rates for
Israelis served by the same supplier which were set by a board
dominated by Israeli farmers (Trottier 1999 p62) in whose interests
it was to price their Palestinian colleagues out of existence.
Despite some allocation of governance to the Palestinian Authority,
under the Taba agreement, the Israeli state retained a veto (Trottier
1999 p67, 184), allowing it to forever inhibit Palestinian
development and curtail the Palestinian authorities ability to plan
or to deal adequately with fraud and theft (should it be inclined
to). The ideological element of this process is illustrated by the
fact that under slightly more dovish Labour governments the
committee determining water licenses met frequently, allowing
decisions to be made quickly. Under the hawk Netanyahu, the timing
was cut to just four times per year, slowing the process even
further (Trottier 1999 p184). As well as the economic impacts of
such constraints, they continued to function as impediments to the
Palestinian peoples sense of being in control of its own affairs and
contributed to a situation of disempowerment in which the impetus
and energy was drained from Palestinians who were continually denied
the chance to make decisions or have a say in their own futures.
The situation for people in Gaza
The water situation in Gaza is in some respects worse than that in
the West Bank, where, although the Israelis draw large quantities of
water out, rainfall is more abundant and the Israeli state has
largely stayed out of domestic water issues. In Gaza, however, the
underlying aquifer has been seriously depleted and what water
remains is polluted and saline. The population of Gaza was massively
increased by refugees of 1948 and 1967, increasing demand on already
diminished supplies, and proper wastewater treatment only started in
the 1990s (Trottier 1999 p71, 120). Although the occupying
authorities had been more inclined to allow wells to be dug than in
the West Bank, where they wanted to keep the water for Israeli use (Trottier
1999 p171), this now leads to a complex situation for the
post-withdrawal Palestinian Authority, which must decide whether to
allow more wells to be dug further depleting the already scanty
aquifer or to try and take a longer-term approach which may be
unpopular with a public which has had to put up with desperately
scarce running water. In addition, the occupying Israeli authorities
have refused to invest in infrastructure, resulting in a situation
of poverty and hardship, as described by Amira Hass:
The Israeli military government set up in 1967, and the civil
administration after it, were distinguished by their budgetary
niggardliness, by a lack of provision for development, by heavier
taxation than in Israel, by an education system that could not or
did not try to keep up with the increasing number of schoolchildren,
and by monumental neglect of Gazas infrastructure: its roads, its
water, sewage, telephone and electricity systems. Families
compensated for the neglect with their own improvisations, and the
cost was shouldered by sons and daughters and siblings and in-laws.
Such improvisations often included makeshift sewage systems, private
water tanks, illegal wells, or even just a battery of jerry cans
filled with unpolluted water taken from pipes near the Jewish
settlements or the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood all to avoid the
foul-tasting water in most homes and to cope with the frequent
interruptions in its flow (Hass 1999 p59).
The situation for
Palestinians in Israel and East Jerusalem
The Israeli States ideological desire to control water resources,
and to reserve them for its Jewish population, not only impacts on
Palestinians resident in the West Bank and Gaza. Hadas Lahav, a
left-wing Israeli activist with labour rights and womens
organisations, talks visitors to the Galilee through the countryside
alongside either side of the main roads. She points out that on one
farm a crop will be tall and robust, while the same species growing
in a neighbouring field will be stunted and sparse, yielding far
lower harvests. Jewish Israeli farmers, who are granted licenses to
irrigate their fields and use considerable amounts of water, own the
lush, healthy farms. The poor, sparse plants are those of
Palestinian Israeli farmers, who are frequently denied irrigation
permits and have to struggle to grow crops that are reduced in
quantity and quality, confining their sale to local markets and
denying the farmers access to lucrative export sales. Restrictions
on access to water also affect Palestinian-Israeli towns; water
supplies are often inadequate for the population size, and Israeli
state polices which deliberately under-fund Palestinian towns mean
that amenities such as public swimming pools, common in Jewish
towns, are rare in Arab neighbourhoods.
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem live under much more direct
day-to-day control from the Israeli state than West Bank and Gazan
Palestinians. Like Israeli citizens of Palestine, East Jerusalemites
also exist as second-class citizens when it comes to access to water
and sanitation, with many neighbourhoods still lacking proper
running water (Cheshin et al 1999 p21). Many existing water lines
were installed in the early 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of
Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, and are inadequate for current
population levels. The lack of will of the Israeli authorities,
combined with tensions between the communities which at times has
made it difficult for Israeli water engineers to carry out repairs
in Palestinian areas, has also meant that many pipes are broken and
leaking (Cheshin et al 1999 p84, 130, 174). Again, normative
considerations racism and concepts of exclusive rights to resources
govern decision-making about access to water. This attitude is
illustrated by the comments of a former Mayor of Jerusalem, whose
policies ensured sub-standard conditions for Palestinians:
Only when the lack of infrastructure threatens to produce wider
problems for Jewish populations has the Israeli state invested
systematically in modernising occupied Palestinian communities. On
retiring, Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem between 1967 and 1993,
made a startling admission: For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in
the past 25 years, he reflected. For East Jerusalem? Nothing!
Sidewalks? Nothing! Cultural institutions? Not one! Yes, we
installed a sewerage system for them and improved the water supply.
Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their
welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the
Jews were afraid that they would catch it! (Graham 2002).
Gendered impacts
Different groups within Palestinian society are affected in
different ways by the problems of water shortages and appropriation.
I want to look specifically at the way that women, particularly
women living in the refugee camps of the West Bank and Gaza, and
women in other working-class areas, both urban and rural, are
impacted on. It is a truism of development studies that women are
most affected by poverty, as in many societies they are more likely
to be confined to the domestic sphere and to be responsible for
allocating scarce food resources within the family, resulting in
less resources being allotted to themselves. So, as well as the
issues discussed below, it must be understood that Palestinian women
are likely to be on the receiving end of the declines in income
caused by unemployment, economic closures of large areas of
Palestine, and the decline of agriculture (Assaf 1994 p173).
Around a third of the Palestinian population lacked piped water to
their homes in the early 1990s. Although aid donors and the PA have
improved this situation, many rural households still have no running
water (Assaf 1994 p170). In areas such as refugee camps this pattern
is repeated because they are most likely to be subject to attack by
Israeli troops, including severing of water supplies, and the
inhabitants of the camps are least likely to be able to afford
illicit extensions from the established water network. In addition,
many urban areas with pipes fitted only actually receive water
through them for a few days a week (Assaf 1994 p169, Hass 1999 p60).
The result for women is that they are often expected to carry water
for long distances, either from wells and springs, or from
standpipes (Assaf 1994 p170). During the first intifada, women were
shot at by soldiers and settlers while collecting water, and were
extremely vulnerable during the 2-6 hours it can take to gather
water for an average-sized family of 6 people. The collection of
water was also often a job allocated to older girls in a family,
meaning that they were even less likely to be able to choose whether
to stay in education (Young 1994 p187).
Many of the houses with poor water supplies also have substandard
sewage and sanitary provision, due to decades of underinvestment, as
observed by Karen Assaf: sewage disposal and treatment has been
systematically neglected since the days of the British Mandate which
ended in 1948. All types of development in the OTs have been more
directly hindered by the Israeli occupation (Assaf 1994 p171). The
pressure on this infrastructure is increased by the growth in
population density, especially in Gaza and the camps. This results
in widespread problems typical of the kind found in the presence of
poor sanitation, such as endemic dysentery and other digestive tract
problems, especially amongst children. When such diseases become
chronic they also have longer-term effects, such as malnutrition
(Young 1994 p188). The dangers for women in childbirth also increase
when water is scarce, as sterilisation becomes impossible (Young
1994 p187). The health effects of water shortage are
disproportionately heavy on women and female children, as they tend
to spend more time within contaminated areas, while men are more
likely to work or socialise away from home, and boys are more likely
to be permitted to go to school or play further from home (Assaf
1994 p165). Some commentators have even seen this as a means of
covert population control by the Israeli authorities of a despised
population (Young 1994 p178).
The contamination of water sources with substances such as
unregulated pesticides, which the Israeli authorities have allowed
to enter the West Bank and Gaza while banning inside Israel, also
disproportionately affects women and children, as they are again
more likely to be routinely drinking water from a single source.
Water supplies in the West Bank have never been regularly tested for
pesticide residues (Assaf 1994 p174). It must, of course, be noted
that such health problems are likely to be increasing amongst men in
the West Bank, as they too have been more confined to small areas
and to the home since the beginning of the second Intifada brought
checkpoints and mass job losses.
Water, the little-discussed and unglamorous but utterly vital
resource, is key to so many aspects of the situation of the
Palestinian people and their Israeli occupiers, from the smallest
everyday acts to the grandest dreams of men forging international
agreements and launching international wars. Its significance in the
Israeli-Palestinian relationship is not as simple as a blanket
scarcity affecting all Palestinians, or a pragmatic concern of the
Israeli state. It is crosscut by myriad factors of class, ethnicity,
geography and, as I have highlighted in this essay, gender and
ideology. It is these complexities which make resolution of the
water issue even should the Israeli state desire such a resolution
so difficult. Because water has such symbolic significance, creating
fair agreements on it is not simply a matter of technical issues but
of emotion and ideology, and for the Israeli state to relinquish
even a small percentage of the water it currently controls would not
only impact on its peoples lifestyles but also their self-image and
the international standing of their country, so vital to its
continued defence by the powers that currently determine the worlds
balance of power. And because the voices of women, especially
working-class ones, are largely absent from political and
international negotiations, in Palestine as in so many other parts
of the world, their specific needs and the particular challenges
they face in their roles as women wives, mothers, pupils, small
girls continue to remain unaddressed in the way that resources such
as water are discussed in the negotiations and talks which will
ultimately determine the conditions of their lives and futures.
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Footnote: the geography of Palestinian and Israeli water
Palestine lies at the Western end of the Fertile Crescent, the site
of humankinds first domestication of plant and animals. Although
there is sufficient water for agriculture, many areas are very dry,
and water was key to the siting of some of the earliest towns in the
region, such as Beersheba (Qumsiyeh 2004 p9). Early inhabitants of
what is now Israel and Palestine, such as the Nabateans, were
amongst the first desert farmers, and the techniques they developed
are still used today amongst the Bedouin. Ironically, the Romans
wrote of these people making the desert bloom, a phrase which echoes
the propaganda of Zionist projects to bring agriculture to the Negev
desert (ibid). Nevertheless, water has always been in short supply
in the region, and fertile land goes uncultivated for lack of it (Trottier
1999 p3).
There are five main aquifers underground rock formations where water
is stored in the land making up Israel and Palestine (the West Bank
and Gaza). The Israeli coastal aquifer stretches from Mount Carmel
south to Gaza, while the Yarkon-Taninim runs from Mount Carmel
inland to Beersheba, and is partly fed by rainwater which falls in
the West Bank and percolates downwards through the rocks (Trottier
1999 p51-52)
In addition to these, the West Bank area of Palestine contains three
further aquifers. One is situated in the West of the area, another
in the East, where its water flows down to the Jordan River, and one
to the North, where its water ends in the Galilee in Israel (Trottier
1999 p60). The position of these aquifers, and the direction of
their water flow, is key to understanding much of Israels behaviour
towards the Palestinian people and the territory they live on.
[1]
Trottier, Julie (1999) Hydropolitics in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of
International Affairs), at 1.
[2]
Ibid, at 42, 45.
[3]
Ibid at 13.
[4]
Bregman, Ahron and Jihan el-Tahri (1998), The Fifty Years War:
Israel and the Arabs, Penguin, at 257-259.
[5]
Supra note 1, at 60.
[6]
Ibid at 59.
[7]
Hunt, Constance E (2004)., Thirsty Planet: Strategies For
Sustainable Water Management, Zed Books, at 51.
[8]
Ibid at 56, 269.
[9]
Ibid at 125.
[10]
Quoted by Trottier, supra note 1, at 9.
[11]
Quoted by Shahak, Israel and Norton Mezvinsky (2004), Jewish
Fundamentalism in Israel (2nd ed.), Pluto Press, at
88.
[12]
Ibid at 67.
[13]
Supra note 1, at 192-193.
[14]
Ibid at 15.
[15]
Mayer, Tamar Heightened Palestinian nationalism: military
occupation, repression, difference and gender, in Tamar Mayer (ed)
(1994) Women and the Israeli Occupation: the Politics of Change,
Routledge, pp 62-87, at 81.
[16]
Shaheen, Wafaa and Trees Zbidat-Klosterman (2002) We have to change
our lives, in Trouble & Strife: Feminist Perspectives After
September 11th, pp37-45, at 37.
[17]
Supra note 1 at 23, 77 and 163.
[18]
Ibid at 164.
[19]
Philo, Greg and Berry, Mike (2004), Bad News from Israel,
Pluto Press, at 94.
[20]
Ibid. See also, Hunt, supra note 7, at 51.
[21]
Schubert, Katharine von (2005), Checkpoints And Chance: Eyewitness
Accounts From An Observer In Israel-Palestine, Quaker Books, at 25.
[22]
Supra note 19, at 92.
[23]
Supra note 1, at 11.
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