Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2024, pp. 60-61
Waging Peace
“People know about land grabs, they know about demolitions,” said Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, “but they know less about the water issue, including what’s called ‘the water grab.’”
Halper was speaking at a March 17 online film salon, “Israeli Apartheid in Action: Water Control,” organized by Voices From the Holy Land. The panelists explored how Israel uses water as a weapon of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and “slow genocide” in Gaza.
As described in a 2023 report by panelist Eyal Hareuveni, researcher at the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel maintains near-complete control over the region’s freshwater aquifers, severely restricting Palestinians’ ability to drill wells, install pumps, build water tanks, access piped water and even collect rainwater.
and later in the article, our own Nancy Murray, one of the panelists is quoted:
What can activists do to combat water apartheid? As models for local action, Nancy Murray, co-founder of the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, pointed to the work of the Alliance, which successfully interrupted a water partnership between Israel and Boston, and Milwaukee 4 Palestine, which is campaigning against a partnership between Israel and Milwaukee. Such partnerships give Israeli companies with technological expertise in areas such as wastewater treatment and storm water management access to U.S. markets. According to Murray, these local campaigns require a range of efforts, including demonstrations, lobbying members of the state legislature and the governor, and educating the public.
Murray noted that the water crisis in Palestine intersects with water justice issues in U.S. cities such as Jackson, MS, and Flint, MI, and in Mexico, where the Israeli company IDE Technologies plans to build a desalinization plant and pipe the water 200 miles north, through Native American lands, to Arizona. The North American contexts present opportunities to foster public discussion of water as a human right, as acknowledged by the United Nations in a 2010 resolution.
Read the article here.