Water Fact: September 25, 2023

Water Fact:  September 25, 2023
 
Who are the real terrorists?
 
Israeli settlers are on the rampage, driving their sheep onto Palestinian fields to destroy harvests, seizing Palestinian water sources and on occasion poisoning wells with animal carcasses,  attacking and sometimes murdering Palestinian shepherds in their fields, killing their animals and conducting night-time raids on their homes.  
 
The dramatic increase in settler violence averaging now three attacks each day has been recently described in UN reports here and here.   A report by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem called The pogroms are working – the transfer is already happening  describes how terror and water deprivation are used to force Palestinian shepherding communities to leave their land, enabling settlers to take it over:
 
“Such attacks have grown significantly worse under the current government, turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal dignity.  The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their ability to continue earning a living.  It has terrorized them to the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize the understanding that there is no one to protect them.  This reality has left these communities with no other choice, and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and home for safer places.”
 
In the West Bank today those ‘safer places’ are hard to find.  As Tor Wennesland, the UN Middle East Envoy, told the UN Security Council on August 21, the West Bank toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers is the highest this year since the UN began keeping records in 2005. 
 
The settlers have been given the blessing of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich,  who has moved to shift control of the West Bank from military governance – subject to international law on temporary military occupations – to permanent Israeli civilian rule.   As street protests continue against Netanyahu’s planned judicial overhaul, his coalition is in the process of quietly annexing Area C – some 60 percent of the West Bank.  
 
This does not seem to concern the Biden Administration, as it presses ahead to achieve ‘normalization’ between Israel and Saudi Arabia and is reportedly on the verge of welcoming Israel into the US Visa Waiver program.  
 
For details concerning the role that water is playing in driving Palestinians off their land listen to “Water Apartheid in Israel-Palestine,” a September 2023 radio broadcast from KKFI Kansas City featuring Eyal Hareuveni, author of the B’Tselem study, ‘Parched: Israel’s Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank’ and Nancy Murray of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine.