Water Fact – October 9, 2023
While we were compiling this Water Fact, the world turned upside down in Israel/Palestine. Almost entirely missing from the “we stand with Israel” declarations from western elected officials and drumbeat of condemnations of the Hamas attacks in much of the media has been any recognition of the context behind the horrific bloodletting now underway. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has called Palestinians ‘animals’ and ordered the Gaza Strip to be deprived of electricity, fuel and water as bombs and missiles rain down on its 2.3 million population, half of them children.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding provides that missing context here and the Israeli publication +972 Magazine spells it out here. Here is the urgent call Palestinian Organizations are making to the international community.
A future Water Fact will take stock of what Israel’s latest military pulverization of the Gaza Strip means for its beleaguered water infrastructure. But now, we turn to Israel’s use of water as a weapon in the West Bank.
Worse than apartheid: Israel’s water wars
On October 2, 2023 the South African Anglican Church echoed a growing number of religious and human rights organizations and declared Israel an apartheid state.
But for years, many South Africans have claimed that the situation in Palestine is in fact much worse than what they experienced under the apartheid regime. In the words of Thembisa Fakude, “apartheid isn’t actually a strong enough term to describe Israel. We should stop comparing the rogue state to Apartheid South Africa because it is much, much worse. We need to find another label, and quickly.”
NYU Professor Andrew Ross, the author of the recent book Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, agrees. In his penetrating piece in The Boston Review, “Warfare dressed as water policy,” he writes that “while apartheid talk has generated much-needed attention to Israel’s injustices, it is also, in many ways, insufficient. In the public mind, ‘apartheid’ suggests the maintenance of repressive rule through a racial hierarchy upheld by Israeli law. Yet the occupation’s daily business of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and land grabbing proceeds at a pace and on a scale that far exceeds this. Emboldened by the new far-right government, settlers are now on a tear. Aided and abetted by the Netanyahu administration’s soldiers and administrators, they are snatching up territory all across the West Bank without regard for the already flimsy laws meant to prevent them from doing so. In many locations, the map has been changing almost from week to week. Weaponization of the water supply has become a frontline tactic of the reinvigorated settler movement.”
Ross uses the “lens of water weaponization” to describe Israel’s actions: “With its hand on the faucet, Israel is actively dehydrating strategic portions of the Palestinian population.” He reminds us that “cutting off water supply to the enemy is an ancient military tactic. Is its application to civilian populations, then, anything less than a form of war? “
Readers of our ‘water facts’ who are familiar with the role of Mekorot and settler violence in driving Palestinians from the land may still be stunned by Ross’ description of the speed with which the land is being emptied and how the seizure of certain wells north of Ramallah “could be a tipping point for the effective loss of the entire region to Zionist habitation.”
It is not just Palestinians in rural areas (labeled ‘Area C’ in the Oslo Accords) upon which water warfare has been unleashed. In order to exert Israeli control over supposedly autonomous cities in ‘Area A’, Mekorot can simply turn off the spigot, as it did this summer in parts of Hebron and Bethlehem, which received running water only one or two days a month.
And, as ever, Israel conducts its water wars with complete impunity.
