Water Fact: April 17, 2023
Israeli Supreme Court and deprivation of water advance ethnic cleansing
Following Netanyahu’s March 27th ‘pause’ in plans to restrict the powers of the Supreme Court, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have continued to take to the streets to denounce his proposed ‘judicial coup.’
While demonstrators see the Supreme Court as critical to ‘Israeli democracy,’ Palestinians regard it as a component in the machinery of ethnic cleansing.
A current example in the 75-year-long ‘ongoing Nakba’ is the steady expulsions of residents taking place in a dozen villages in the area of Masafer Yatta south of Hebron. Back in the late 1960s, Ariel Sharon first proposed that the area should be declared a closed military zone in order to clear it for Jewish settlements. In 1980 the military designated 7,500 acres of privately owned Palestinian land to be ‘Firing Zone 918’ from which Masafer Yatta’s residents – then living in 18 communities – should be excluded. While Palestinians spent decades in court insisting that they were ‘permanent residents’ who could not be permanently expelled, a ring of Jewish settlements was built around their villages and supplied with water, electricity, paved roads, schools and health centers.
As their case made its slow way to the Supreme Court, villagers were repeatedly harassed by settlers and the army. They were arrested and had their houses, buildings and livestock destroyed. Israel’s use of water as ‘a tool for forcible transfer’ in the area took an especially heavy toll. Rainwater met 30 percent of their water needs. The rest had to come from the purchase of expensive trucked water. Since 2011, the military has issued demolition orders on more than 60 shallow wells semi-nomadic farmers in the area had used to store rainwater.
In desperation, in 2019 Masafer Yatta’s residents used shovels at night to dig a channel 25 kilometers long in which they installed underground water pipes paid for by the UN and EU. It took two months of stealth labor to complete the installation which, for 40 days, supplied a thousand people in 16 communities with water. Then, on December 2, 2019, the army brought in bulldozes to destroy it. Water pipes were confiscated and many residents were arrested.
On May 4, 2022, the Supreme Court finally issued its decision. In defiance of international law, it ruled against the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta, declaring that 1,200 Palestinians were not ‘permanent residents’ and could be forcibly expelled.
Since then life in Masafer Yatta has been an ongoing nightmare. Their homes are being destroyed and animals killed. Many residents have moved into caves in the effort to resist expulsion. But it is unclear how long they will be able to hold out since, as reported on April 6 by Doctors Without Borders, “water pipes are regularly cut off, water tanks are destroyed and trucks delivering water tanks are stopped and confiscated. The challenges of getting hold of sufficient water are further compounded by a lack of rain.”
For more on the steadfastness of Masafer Yatta’s cave dwellers see here.
