Water Fact: March 6, 2023
Settlers, soldiers and Mekorot have tormented Huwara for many decades
On February 26th about 400 settlers raged through the West Bank town of Huwara near Nablus, torching houses and stores, destroying more than 100 cars, slaughtering livestock, killing a Palestinian resident and wounding hundreds. An Israeli military officer, some journalists, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem among others termed the spasm of violence a ‘pogrom’.
The attack on Huwara received considerable attention in the western media, as did the March 1st statementby Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – a settler who now has responsibility for the Civil Administration of the West Bank – that the town should be “wiped out” by the Israeli government.
From the ‘wiping out’ of more than 500 Palestinian villages during the Nakba to the lengthy catalogue of settler rampages, the historical context has generally been absent from reports of Huwara’s current nightmare. Largely unacknowledged is the fact that this is no aberration attributable to the extreme far right nature of the current Netanyahu government. On the contrary, Huwara’s residents and those of nearby villages have endured hundreds of settler attacks since the hilltop settlement of Yitzhar was built in 1983 on land taken from Huwara and five neighboring villages.
Yitzhar’s settlers - known as the ‘hilltop youth’ - have routinely burned or cut down the olive trees of this ancient village of 7,000 people. In a January 2021 report Al Haq states that attacks by Yitzhar’s settlers “include beatings, throwing stones, shooting at villagers with live ammunition, torching agricultural lands, trees and cars, uprooting trees, confiscating and pillaging natural resources, including land and water, attacking and suppressing peaceful assemblies, denying access to property and to sources of livelihood, and spray-painting hate speech on cars, walls and other Palestinian properties. Most of these attacks happen under the watchful eye of the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF), if not actively encouraged by them.”
The Israeli National Water Carrier Mekorot has contributed to Huwara’s ordeal. In June 2016, in a move affecting the lives of some 150,000 Palestinians, it reduced the quantity of pumped water to Huwara and 13 other villages in the north of the West Bank by 50-70 percent. Residents were forced to buy expensive trucked water for both domestic and agricultural use while additional water was made available to expanding settlements.
What is new now are the odds that Palestinians are facing in their struggle to remain on the land. A dozen years ago the ideologically-driven settlers who routinely attacked Huwara appeared “on the fringe of Israeli society.” Now their leaders – Kahanist disciple Ben Gvir and the ethnic cleansing-endorsing Smotrich – have their hands on the levers of power. Given the reluctance of the Biden Administration to combine verbal denunciations with actual consequences, It is not surprising that settler shock troops feel newly empowered.
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