Amira Hass : Israel Incapable of Telling Truth About Water It Steals From Palestinians
Water
is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend
its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of
security and God.
haaretz.com
Israeli spokespeople have three answers ready to pull out when they respond to questions on the water shortage in West Bank Palestinian towns – which stands out starkly compared to the hydrological smugness of the settlements: 1) The Palestinian water system is old, so it suffers from water loss; 2) the Palestinians steal water from each other, and from the Israelis; and 3) in general, Israel has in its great generosity doubled the amount of water it supplies to the Palestinians, compared to what was called for in the Oslo Accords.
“Supplies,”
the spokespeople will write in their responses. They will never say
Israel sells the Palestinians 64 million cubic meters of water a year
instead of the 31 million cubic meters agreed to in the Oslo Accords.
Accords that were signed in 1994, and that were supposed to come to an
end in 1999. They will not say that Israel sells the Palestinians water
that it first stole from them.
Bravo
for the demagogy. Bravo for the one-eighth portion of truth in the
answer. Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it
difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive
policy with pretexts of security and God. That is why it must blur and
distort this basic fact: Israel controls the water sources. And being in
control, it imposes a quota on the amount of water the Palestinians are
allowed to produce and consume. On average, the Palestinians consume 73
liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum. Israelis
consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even
more. And here, unlike there, you will not find thousands who consume 20
liters a day. In the summer.
True,
some Palestinians steal water. Desperate farmers, regular chiselers. If
it was not for the water shortage, it would not happen. A large part of
the thefts are in Area C, under full Israeli control. So please, let
the IDF and police find all the criminals. But to justify the crisis
with theft – that is deceit.
With
the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and
brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for
Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the
Palestinians (from wells drilled before 1967, which the Palestinians
continued to operate; from the Mekorot water company; from future wells
to be drilled in the eastern basin of the mountain aquifer; from
agricultural wells and springs. Many of the springs, by the way, dried
out because of Israeli deep wells, or because the settlers took them
over. The ways of theft know no bounds.)
Twenty
percent is actually good, because now only about 14 percent of the
water from the mountain aquifer is accessible to Palestinians in the
West Bank. Technical reasons, irregularities and human error,
insufferable Israeli bureaucratic foot-dragging, whose entire goal is to
delay the development of the Palestinian water infrastructure and the
upgrading of what now exists; unexpected difficulties in producing water
from wells in the allowed places, old wells that have dried out or
whose production has fallen, and which Israel does not allow to be
replaced by newly-drilled wells – all these explain how we have reached
14 percent instead of what was signed in Oslo, and why Israel sells the
Palestinians more water that it committed to back then. After all, it
has been left with more water to produce from this natural resource,
which, according to international law, an occupying country is forbidden
to use for the purposes of its civilian population.
During
the summer, the problem becomes worse, of course. The heat rises and
the Palestinians’ demand for water rises, not just the settlers’. So in
the Salfit district and east of Nablus, Mekorot reduces the amount of
water it sells to Palestinians. The spokespeople will not state it that
way. They will say “regulating,” they will say, too. that in the
settlements “there are also complaints about a water shortage” (it seems
I missed the report on Arutz 7 about it).
But
in Farkha, Salfit and Deir al-Hatab people describe, on the verge of
tears, how humiliating it is to live for weeks without running water.
And we have not even spoken about the dozens of Palestinian communities
on both sides of the Green Line that Israel, a light unto the nations,
refuses to allow to connect to the water infrastructure.
Haaretz Correspondent
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