The Palestinian human rights group Al Haq has recently issued a comprehensive report that describes how Israel uses water as a weapon against the Palestinian people in a manner that earns its corporations big profits, reduces Palestinians to a ‘captive market’ forced to buy back at every increasing prices water that has been pillaged from them, and promotes Palestinian dispossession from their land and resources. For the last decade Al Haq has been using the term ‘water apartheid’ to apply to Israel’s water policies, and an in depth case for describing them as such is made here.
Corporate Liability: the Right to Water and the War Crime of Pillage details how “Israel utilizes Palestinian water to maintain control over the Palestinian population, deepen its fragmentation, and hold the Palestinian economy captive, amounting to economic annexation.” It traces the evolution of this process from the founding of Mekorot in 1937 by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund to its emergence as an Israeli government-owned company with sole control over the water supply of the occupied Palestinian territories.
The report describes the role played by other corporations in settlement expansion and the theft and destruction of Palestinian water resources and infrastructure, among them the TAHAL Group International, the Hagihon Company, IDE Technologies, Hyundai, Caterpillar Inc., JC Banford Excavations Ltd, and Volvo. Various case studies outline just how water dispossession has been engineered. In one example, between 60,000 and 80,000 Palestinians were cut off from their water supply when Hagihon, a private Israeli water and sewage corporation for the Jerusalem Municipality, stopped serving Palestinian areas of Jerusalem after they were isolated behind Israel’s Apartheid Wall. The section on how Israel and corporate entities reap big profits by forcing Palestinians to buy expensive desalinated water rather than use water from their own Mountain aquifer makes for especially painful reading.
The report gives an historical overview of Palestinian water laws and the military orders that had reduced the per capita water consumption of Palestinians to a quarter of that of Israelis before the Oslo Accords. While the Oslo II agreements (1995) seemed on paper to give Palestinians a say in how their water was used, in practice an Israeli veto over any Palestinian water project has deprived them of that. In the years since then the Palestinian population has doubled, while the amount of water accorded to them has remained frozen at the figure allocated by Oslo II.
The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians residing in Area C – some 62 percent of the West Bank as delineated by the Oslo Accords – are at particular risk. “Since Israeli planning authorities do not recognize 88% of Palestinian villages in Area C, the Civil Administration automatically rejects proposals for any sort of infrastructure to serve these villages” while rapidly approving settlement proposals.
It is deeply regrettable that the portion of the report on water as a human right under international law and the recommendations it makes to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, implicated corporations, and the international community are likely to be entirely ignored.
photo credit: Prensa Latina