This year’s World Water Day (March 22) has come and gone, leaving the achievement of water as a human right – which the UN General Assembly declared it to be in 2010 – more remote than ever.
Now we see water being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine where residents have been melting snow to quench their thirst. As Covid-era water shut off moratoriums expire in the US, those who cannot afford spiraling water bills are again being threatened with displacement, making way for so-called ‘development’. Large corporations continue to reap profits by turning water into a commodity that is more valuable than ever as drought conditions deepen in the western US and much of the world. On Indigenous lands, water resources are still being plundered and polluted, with devastating consequences for traditional ways of living and the environment.
In some previous Alliance for Water Justice forums, we have shown how the seizure and diversion of water to drive people from their land has served as a tool of colonial domination from the Americas to Palestine and beyond. We have also highlighted how water is increasingly becoming a potent focus of resistance, and the way Indigenous water protectors have emerged as leaders in the battle against climate change.
The struggle of Palestinians to stay on the land despite Israel’s water apartheid policies was the theme of our March 19th webinar organized jointly with 1for3.org, ‘Parched in Palestine: Resisting Water Apartheid.’ A prelude to our annual World Water Day Stand Out held this year in Cambridge’s Central Square, and to the BDS Movement’s Israeli Apartheid Week, the webinar featured brief film clips and speakers from Palestine who are building cooperative efforts to defend Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley and the UNESCO Heritage Site of Battir, and to develop food sustainability projects in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp and the Gaza Strip.
The webinar also incorporated segments describing Israel’s water apartheid policies, which are spelled out in considerable detail by Amnesty International in its recent 270-page report, ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’. The report was released in February along with a video, a curriculum on Israeli Apartheid and a toolkit. It was largely ignored by the mainstream media, and immediately dismissed as ‘absurd’ by the US State Department and ‘appalling’ and ‘antisemitic’ by Israel.
This major Amnesty International production was many years in the making. It follows similar, but less detailed reports on Israeli apartheid policies by the Israeli group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, and earlier reports by eight Palestinian human rights groups including Al Haq, which Israel has (without evidence) designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ in the attempt to silence it along with five other prominent Palestinian civil society organizations. Another of those ‘terrorist’-designated organizations is Addameer which earlier this year partnered with the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School in a joint submission to the UN on ‘Apartheid in the Occupied West Bank’.
In the words of the Amnesty report, “Israel’s control of water resources and water-related infrastructure in the OPT results in striking inequalities between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. The Israeli authorities restrict Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank through military orders, which prevent them from building any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. They are unable to drill new wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, and are denied access to the Jordan River and freshwater springs. Israel even controls the collection of rainwater in most of the West Bank, and the Israeli army often destroys rainwater-harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities…. While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements. Israel has transferred 82% of Palestinian groundwater into Israel and for the use of Jewish settlements, while Palestinians must purchase over 50% of their water from Israel.”
Lengthy sections of the Report describe the “devastating impact” of Israel’s discriminatory water policies in the Jordan Valley and the water calamity taking place in the Gaza Strip which, in 2021, “reached a crisis point, exacerbated by the stringent restrictions imposed for over 14 years by Israel on the entry into Gaza of material and equipment necessary for its development and repair.”
It is not just in Ukraine that water is being used as a weapon of war. As the report points out, “during Israel’s 50-day military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2014, Israeli forces destroyed the main water and sanitation infrastructure. Israel also targeted infrastructure during the 10-21 May 2021 military operation in the Gaza Strip. According to OCHA, water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure was severely affected, with wastewater networks, pipelines, wells, a wastewater pumping station and service vehicles damaged in 93 Israeli strikes. Compounded by the lack of power supply, three main desalination plants providing drinking water for more than 400,000 people suspended operations as did sewage treatment facilities, resulting in more than 100,000 cubic metres of untreated or partially treated wastewater being discharged into the sea every day. Further, the limited entry of fuel and the damage to the electricity network reduced access to electricity to a daily average of four to six hours throughout Gaza, further limiting the provision of water and treatment of sewage. An estimated 800,000 people lacked regular access to piped water.”
As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote earlier this year, seven months after the May 2021 Israeli invasion much of the equipment and material needed to repair the damage to the Gaza water infrastructure was still being barred by the 15-year-long Israeli blockade.
At the ‘Parched in Palestine’ webinar, we asked the audience to undertake three actions that can be accessed through the homepage of this website by clicking onto ‘Take Action’.
The first is directed at Congress and demands accountability and conditioning aid to Israel based on its human rights record. Congress just voted an additional $1 billion in military aid to Israel, bringing its yearly total to nearly $5 billion. Incidentally, over $170 million of that amount comes from Massachusetts taxpayers.
The second action item urges the State Department to denounce the silencing of six of the most prominent Palestinian human rights and civil society groups that have been monitoring Israel’s apartheid policies. The third is a call for Massachusetts residents to contact the Massachusetts legislature and ask it to support the state’s Indigenous Legislative agenda.
We hope you will work with us as we demand movement towards water justice for Palestinians and people everywhere. Let’s unite in the fight to make water a human right!
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Israel’s water apartheid, funded by US aid, was featured at this year’s World Water Day Stand Out in Central Square, Cambridge.