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<h1 id="reader-title">Israel's hydro-apartheid keeps West Bank
thirsty</h1>
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<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charlotte Silver</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog">-</span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2016-08-01T11:57:07+00:00">1 August 2016</span></span>
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<p>Water shortages are not new for Palestinians. Whether
in the occupied Gaza Strip or the West Bank including
East Jerusalem, the supply of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/water">water</a>
flowing into Palestinian homes is strictly capped or
obstructed by Israel.</p>
<p>As temperatures climb during the summer, taps run dry.
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/clemens-messerschmid">Clemens
Messerschmid</a>, a German hydrologist who has worked
with Palestinians on their water supply for two decades,
calls the situation “hydro-apartheid.”</p>
<p>This year, Israeli journalist Amira Hass <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.726132">published
data</a> proving that the Israeli Water Authority had
reduced the amount of water delivered to West Bank
villages.</p>
<p>In some places, the supply was slashed by half. Her
records contradict official denials that water supplies
to Palestinian cities and villages are cut during the
summer, even though that too is not new.</p>
<p>Cities and small villages have gone as long as <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/israel-cuts-water-supplies-west-bank-ramadan-160614205022059.html">40
days</a> without running water this summer, forcing
those who can afford it to haul in water tanks.</p>
<p>When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 it also
seized control over the West Bank Mountain Aquifer, the
territory’s principal natural water reserve.</p>
<p>The <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo-accords">Oslo
accords</a> of the early 1990s gave Israel <a
href="http://www.btselem.org/water/oslo_accords">80
percent of the aquifer’s reserves</a>. Palestinians
were supposed to get the remaining 20 percent, but in
recent years they have been able to access <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.726132">only
14 percent</a> as a result of Israeli restrictions on
their drilling.</p>
<p>To fulfill the population’s minimum needs, the
Palestinian Authority is forced to buy the rest of the
water from Israel. But even then, it’s not enough.</p>
<p>Israel is only willing to sell a limited amount of
water to Palestinians. As a consequence, Palestinians
use far less water than Israelis, and <a
href="http://www.btselem.org/water/discrimination_in_water_supply">a
full third less</a> than the World Health
Organization’s recommendation of 100 liters per person
per day for domestic use, hospitals, schools and other
institutions.</p>
<p>The Electronic Intifada spoke with Clemens
Messerschmid, who has been working in the water sector
throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1997,
about the engineered water scarcity for Palestinians in
the West Bank.</p>
<p><strong>Charlotte Silver:</strong> Is scarcity of water
in the area driving the water crisis in the West Bank?
Or is the scarcity engineered?</p>
<p><strong>Clemens Messerschmid:</strong> Of course there
is no water scarcity in the West Bank. What we suffer
from is induced scarcity – it’s called the occupation.
This is the regime imposed on Palestinians immediately
after the war in June 1967.</p>
<p>Israel rules through military orders, which have the
direct and intended result of keeping Palestinians short
on water. It is not an ongoing gradual dispossession as
with land and settlements, but was done in one sweep by
Military Order No. 92, in August 1967.</p>
<p>The West Bank possesses ample groundwater. There is
high rainfall in <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/salfit">Salfit</a>,
in the northern West Bank, now known for especially hard
water cuts.</p>
<p>The West Bank is blessed with a treasure of
groundwater. But this is also its curse, because Israel
targeted this immediately after taking control.</p>
<p>What we need is simple: groundwater wells to access
this treasure. But Israel’s Military Order No. 158
strictly forbids drilling or any other water works,
including springs, pipes, networks, pumping stations,
irrigation pools, water reservoirs, simple rainwater
harvesting cisterns, which collect the rain falling on
one’s roof.</p>
<p>Everything is forbidden or rather not “permitted” by
the Civil Administration, Israel’s occupation regime.
Even repair and maintenance of wells requires military
permits. And we simply don’t get them.</p>
<p>It is a simple case of hydro-apartheid – far beyond any
regime in history that I am aware of.</p>
<p><strong>CS:</strong> Israel has increased the amount of
water it sells Palestinians, but it is still not enough
to prevent villages from running dry. Putting aside the
fact that Israel’s control over the aquifer’s resources
is very problematic, why won’t Israel sell the
Palestinians enough water?</p>
<p><strong>CM:</strong> Israel first of all has
drastically <em>reduced</em> the amount of water
available to Palestinians. It has prevented all access
to the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jordan-river">Jordan
River</a>, which is now literally pumped dry at Lake
Tiberias.</p>
<p>Then, Israel imposes a quota on the number of wells and
routinely denies permits for much-needed repair of old
wells from the Jordanian days – Jordan administered the
West Bank from 1948 until the Israeli occupation –
especially agricultural wells. That means the number of
wells is constantly shrinking. We have fewer than in
1967.</p>
<p>Now, the only thing that has increased is the
dependency on buying water from the expropriators,
Israel and <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/mekorot">Mekorot</a>,
Israel’s national water company.</p>
<p>This is reported over and over in the western press,
because it is the point Israel stresses: ‘See how
benevolent we are?’</p>
<p>So, yes, since Oslo, purchases from Mekorot have grown
steadily. Ramallah now receives 100 percent of its water
from Mekorot. Not a drop comes from a single well field
we have.</p>
<p>The supply of villages by Israel was not done as a
favor. It was initiated in 1980 by Ariel Sharon, then
agriculture minister, when rapid settlement growth was
starting. The water supply was “integrated,” in order to
make the occupation irreversible.</p>
<p>What is important here is the structural apartheid,
cemented and cast in iron in these pipes. A small
settlement is supplied via large transmission pipes from
which smaller pipes split off to go towards Palestinian
areas.</p>
<p>Israel is very happy with Oslo, because now
Palestinians are “responsible” for supply. Responsible
but without a shred of sovereignty over resources.</p>
<p>The current so-called water crisis is not a crisis at
all. A crisis is a sudden change, a new turn or a
turning point in development. The undersupply of
Palestinians is desired, planned and carefully executed.
The “summer water crisis” is the most reliable feature
of the Palestinian water calendar. And the amount of
annual rain, or drought, has no bearing whatsoever on
the occurrence and scale of that “crisis.”</p>
<p>I should stress that however routinely this occurs, in
each and every single case, it is a conscious decision
by some bureaucrat or office in Israel or the Civil
Administration. Someone has to go to the field and turn
down the valve at the split off to the Palestinian
village. This, like every summer, was done in early
June. Hence – water crisis in the West Bank.</p>
<p><strong>CS:</strong> What factors may be contributing
to the worsening water cuts this year?</p>
<p><strong>CM:</strong> It seems settler demand rose
drastically since last year. The Israeli Water Authority
found 20 to 40 percent higher demand, which is quite
remarkable.</p>
<p>Alexander Kushnir, the Water Authority’s director
general, attributes this to expansion of settler
irrigation in the mountains of the northern West Bank
settlements, around Salfit and Nablus.</p>
<p><strong>CS:</strong> How is it that people in
present-day Israel are reportedly enjoying a <a
href="http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-desalination-plants-ensure-water-supply-until-2025-1001140724">surplus
of water</a> since the country has started using
desalination, while the people under occupation in the
West Bank are left with so little? Even Israeli settlers
have reportedly experienced water cuts.</p>
<p><strong>CM:</strong> It’s true that Israel declared for
the first time a few years ago that it had a surplus
water economy and is <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-historic-israel-jordan-water-deal-leaves-palestinians-high-and-dry/13139">keen
to sell more water to its neighbors</a>, from whom it
expropriated water in the first place.</p>
<p>Palestinians are already buying water Israel stole, but
as noted, not reliably or at sufficient rates.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t know. Why this special, elevated and
aggravated desire of Israel not even to <em>sell</em>
enough water to the West Bank?</p>
<p>In some areas, water is actively used as a weapon for
ethnic cleansing, like in the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jordan-valley">Jordan
Valley</a>. Agriculture was always targeted from day
one of the occupation.</p>
<p>But this logic does not apply to the densely populated
Palestinian towns and cities in so-called Area A of the
West Bank, that are still struggling. After 20 years,
this still leaves me puzzled.</p>
<p>Another element is important to understand: Israel
needs to constantly teach Palestinians a lesson. Any
water procurement, any drop delivered should be
understood as a generous favor, as an act of mercy, not
as a right.</p>
<p>Israel has augmented water sales to the West Bank from
25 million cubic meters per year in 1995 to around 60
mcm/year now. Why does it not sell much more? It
certainly could afford it waterwise – it has a gigantic
surplus.</p>
<p>One of the material issues I can detect is the issue of
price, and therefore meaning of water.</p>
<p>Israel wants to eventually get the highest price for
desalinated water it sells to Palestinians. While we are
only speaking about a few hundred million shekels a year
[a few tens of millions of dollars] – which is not a lot
for Israel – Israel wants to end the debate once and for
all over Palestinian water rights.</p>
<p>Israel demands nothing short of a full surrender:
Palestinians should agree that the water under their
feet does not belong to them, but forever to the
occupier.</p>
<p>By demanding full prices for desalinated water,
Palestinians would admit and agree to a new formula.</p>
<p>A word on the Gaza Strip – unlike the West Bank, Gaza
has no physical possibility of access to water. The
confined and densely populated Strip can never supply
itself. Yet, Gaza does not get such water deliveries
from Israel. Only recently did Israel start selling to
Gaza the five million cubic meters per year agreed in
Oslo. A tiny cosmetic increase has been enacted.</p>
<p>In a way you could interpret this differential
treatment between Gaza and the West Bank as an Israeli
admission of a certain degree of hydrological
dependence.</p>
<p>Israel receives the bulk of its water from the
territories conquered in 1967, including Syria’s Golan
Heights, but not a drop from Gaza.</p>
<p>Waterwise, Gaza has no resource to offer Israel. This
is the same as with the main resource: land. Hence a
very different approach to Gaza right from the start in
1967. Israel does not depend on Gaza in any material
form. Ever since Oslo, Israel has demanded Gaza supply
itself by its own means, such as through seawater
desalination.</p>
<p><strong>CS:</strong> How have donor countries acted in
all this? Have they defended global minimal water
standards or have they affirmed and bolstered Israel’s
control over the water resources in the occupied West
Bank?</p>
<p><strong>CM:</strong> Unfortunately the latter. When
Oslo started, we all were under the illusion that a
phase of development would start. Wells that were
forbidden to be drilled for 28 years would finally be
put in place.</p>
<p>Soon, we learned that Israel in fact was never willing
to give “permits … for expanding agriculture or
industry, which may compete with the State of Israel,”
as then-defense minister <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yitzhak-rabin">Yitzhak
Rabin</a> said in 1986.</p>
<p>What was needed then and now – and everybody knew it –
was political pressure to extract the minimum
well-drilling permits guaranteed under
Palestinian-Israeli accords. This pressure never came.
Never did the EU or my German government issue even a
public statement in which it “deplores” or “regrets” the
obstructions in the water sector. This is a true
scandal.</p>
<p>But even worse, what was our Western answer to this?
All donor-funded projects actually abandoned the vital
branch of well drilling. The last German funded well was
drilled in 1999.</p>
<p>As for the current so-called water crisis, we as <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/donor-aid">donors</a>
are now busy generously funding anachronistic water
tankering in the cut-off Palestinian towns and cities –
adapting to and stabilizing the status quo of occupation
and water apartheid.</p>
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