Water Fact: January 23, 2023
Eco apartheid and ongoing colonization are paving the way to climate disaster
While Israel continues to destroy Palestinian homes, water sources and olive trees and its new government prepares to accelerate the takeover of most of the West Bank, Time warns that “Israel and the Palestinian territories are among the most climate vulnerable places on the planet.”
Drawing on an Haaretz investigation, Time reports that a predicted rise in sea level of up to a meter by 2050 will wipe out many of Israel’s beaches, and damage its cliffs, sewage and drainage systems, desalination plants and power stations.
The tiny Gaza Strip, within which 2.1 million people are currently caged, will substantially shrink in size and the intrusion of yet more saltwater will irreversibly damage its sole aquifer. As temperatures and the sea both rise, Palestinians are likely to suffer ever more greatly from the impact of ‘eco-apartheid.’
A handful of Israeli environmentalists who joined with a few Palestinians to form the group One Climate(short for ‘One Climate From the Jordan River to the Sea’) recognize that “the only way to fight climate breakdown is to tie it with the struggle against the occupation.”
One of its founders, Mor Gilboa, has pointed out that the current ecological crisis facing Israel and Palestine is rooted in the early days of Zionism’s project to colonize the land, with resulting “racist and discriminatory policies of occupation” leaving “millions of cubic feet of sewage in our streams and seas. They create severe water shortages for drinking and agriculture for millions of Palestinians. They promote land grabs and theft of natural resources, as well as air and water pollution.”
The group EcoPeace, which was favored in 2022 with a $3.3 million USAID grant, attempts to forge a working coalition of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists as a step towards ‘peace.’ But its plan to create ‘A Green Blue Deal for the Middle East’ has gained little traction that Palestinians can benefit from, and is unlikely to move forward under a Netanyahu government bent on colonizing the rest of Palestine.
A more modest effort to address the dire water shortage faced by Palestinian farmers in the 62 percent of the West Bank known as ‘Area C’ is the current ‘Smart Water Practices’ program initiated by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The idea is to provide self-watering ‘wicking beds’ to 30 families so they can grow healthy food. It is unclear whether the new Netanyahu government will tolerate even a few dozen raised beds that help farmers survive in what its supporters of the Far Right insist is “Israeli sovereign territory.”
With land theft at the top of the Israel’s agenda, climate catastrophe appears inevitable.
The Map of Palestine from the National Geographic Magazine, 1947. via Asia-Pacific Community for Palestine