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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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href="https://english.palinfo.com/news/2019/4/17/Why-is-Palestine-an-exception">https://english.palinfo.com/news/2019/4/17/Why-is-Palestine-an-exception</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">Why is Palestine an exception?</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Ramzy Baroud - April 17,
2019<br>
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Free access to clean water is a basic human right. This is
not just a common-sense assertion, but also a binding
legal commitment enshrined in international law. In
November 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights adopted “General Comment No. 15” regarding
the right to water: “The human right to water is
indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a
prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”
(Article I.1)
<p>
The discussion on water as a human right culminated
years later in UN General Assembly resolution, 64/292 of
28 July, 2010. It explicitly “recognizes the right to
safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human
right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life
and all human rights.”</p>
<p>
It all makes perfect sense. There can be no life without
water. However, like every other human right, it seems,
the Palestinians are denied this one too.</p>
<p>
There is a water crisis affecting the whole world, and
it is most pronounced in the Middle East. Climate
change-linked droughts, unpredictable rainfall, lack of
centralized planning, military conflicts and more have
resulted in unprecedented water insecurity.</p>
<p>
The situation is even more complicated in Palestine,
though, where the water crisis is related directly to
the more general political context of Israel’s
occupation: apartheid, illegal Jewish settlements, siege
and war. While much attention has rightly been given to
the military aspect of the Israeli occupation, the
state’s colonial policies involving water receive far
less attention, but they are a pressing and critical
problem.</p>
<p>
Ashraf Amra Indeed, total water control was one of the
first policies enacted by Israel after the establishment
of the military regime following the occupation of East
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967.
Israel’s discriminatory policies – its uses and abuses
of Palestinian water resources – can be described as
“water apartheid”.</p>
<p>
Excessive Israeli water consumption; the erratic use of
dams; and the denial of Palestinians of the right to
their own water or the digging of new wells, have all
left vast and possibly irreversible environmental
consequences. They have fundamentally altered the
aquatic ecosystem altogether.</p>
<p>
In the West Bank, Israel uses water to cement existing
Palestinian dependency on the occupation. It uses a
cruel form of economic dependency to keep Palestinians
reliant and subordinate. This model is sustained through
the control of borders, military checkpoints, collection
of taxes, closures, military curfews and the denial of
building permits. Water dependency is a centerpiece of
this strategy.</p>
<p>
The “Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip”, known as the Oslo II Agreement, signed in Taba,
Egypt in September 1995, crystallized the unfairness of
Oslo I, which was signed in September 1993. Over 71 per
cent of Palestinian aquifer water was made available for
Israeli use, with just 17 per cent allocated for
Palestinian use.</p>
<p>
Even more appallingly, the new agreement invited a
mechanism that forced Palestinians to buy their own
water from Israel, further cementing the client-owner
relationship between the Palestinian Authority and the
occupying state.</p>
<p>
Israel’s Mekorot water company, a wholly-owned
government entity, misuses its privileges to reward and
punish Palestinians as it sees fit. In the summer of
2016, for example, entire Palestinian communities in the
occupied West Bank went without water because the PA
failed to pay Israel massive sums of money to buy back
water taken from Palestinian natural resources.</p>
<p>
Bewildering, isn’t it? And yet many are still wondering
why Oslo failed to deliver the much-coveted “peace”.</p>
<p>
Look at the numbers in order to appreciate this water
apartheid: Palestinians in the West Bank use about 72
litres of water per person per day, compared to 240-300
litres for Israelis. The political responsibilities of
such unequal distribution of available water resources
can be attributed to both the cruel Israeli occupation
and the short-sighted vision of the Palestinian
leadership.</p>
<p>
The situation in Gaza is even worse. The territory will
be officially “unlivable” by 2020, according to a UN
report. That’s next year. The main reason for this grim
prediction is Gaza’s water crisis.</p>
<p>
According to a study conducted by international charity
Oxfam, “Less than four per cent of fresh water [in Gaza]
is drinkable and the surrounding sea is polluted by
sewage.” Oxfam researchers concluded that water
pollution is dangerously linked to a dramatic increase
in kidney problems in the Gaza Strip. Gaza’s water and
sanitation crises are worsening as frequent shutdowns of
the enclave’s only functioning power plant are killing
any hope for a remedy.</p>
<p>
The US-based RAND Corporation found that one-fourth of
all diseases in the besieged Gaza Strip are waterborne.
RAND estimations are no less dramatic. It reports that,
based on World Health Organisation (WHO) standards, 97
per cent of Gaza’s water is not fit for human
consumption. In terms of human suffering, this reality
can only be described as horrific.</p>
<p>
The hospitals in the Gaza Strip are trying to fight the
massive epidemic of illness and disease caused by dirty
water while under-equipped, suffering electricity cuts
and lacking any clean water themselves. “Water is
frequently unavailable at Al-Shifa, the largest hospital
in Gaza” the RAND report continues. “Even when it is
available, doctors and nurses are unable to sterilize
their hands to carry out surgery because of the water
quality.”</p>
<p>
According to the environmental media platform Circle of
Blue, out of Gaza’s 2 million residents, only 10 per
cent have access to clean drinking water.</p>
<p>
“My children get sick because of the water,” Madlain
Al-Najjar, a mother of six living in the Gaza Strip,
told Circle of Blue. “They suffer from vomiting and
diarrhea. Often, I can tell that the water is not clean,
but we have no other option.”</p>
<p>
Britain’s Independent reported on the story of Noha
Sais, a 27-year-old mother of five, living in Gaza. “In
the summer of 2017, every one of Noha’s children
suddenly fell ill, uncontrollably vomiting and were soon
hospitalized. Gaza’s filthy Mediterranean waters had
poisoned them.</p>
<p>
“The youngest, Mohamed, normally a healthy and
boisterous five-year-old, contracted an unknown virus
from the sea, which took over his body and brain. Three
days after the trip, he slipped into a coma. A week
after that he died.”</p>
<p>
Noha told the newspaper that, “The doctors said the
source of the infection was a germ that came from the
polluted seawater, but they couldn’t work out exactly
what it was. They just said to me even if my son
recovered, he would never be the same – he would be a
vegetable.”</p>
<p>
Many similar cases are reported across Gaza, and there
is no end in sight. Israel’s water policies are facets
of a much larger war against the Palestinian people
intended to reinforce its colonial control.</p>
<p>
Judging by the evidence, Zionists didn’t “make the
desert bloom,” as Israeli propaganda claims. Since its
establishment on the ruins of more than five hundred
Palestinian towns and villages destroyed between 1947
and 48, Israel has done the exact opposite.</p>
<p>
“Palestine contains vast colonization potential which
the Arabs neither need nor are qualified to exploit,”
wrote one of Israel’s founding fathers and first Prime
Minister, David Ben Gurion, to his son Amos in 1937.
Zionist Israel, though, has done more than just
“exploit” that “colonization potential”; it has also
subjected historic Palestine to a relentless and cruel
campaign of destruction that is yet to cease. This is
likely to continue as long as Zionism prevails in Israel
and occupied Palestine; it is a racist, hegemonic and
exploitative ideology. If access to clean water is
indeed a human right, why is the world allowing Israel
to make Palestine and its people an exception?</p>
<p>
<em>- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of
Palestine Chronicle. He has authored a number of books
on the Palestinian struggle including ‘The Last Earth:
A Palestinian Story’. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine
Studies from the University of Exeter and is a
Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and
International Studies, University of California Santa
Barbara. <br>
</em></p>
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