AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S report on water in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza is a compelling and frightening account of how a basic necessity has become bound up in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Water is one of the final settlement issues between the two sides, whenever negotiations reach that stage, but in the meantime an existential war is being fought out over the control and use of this diminishing resource. The report cannot be dismissed merely as yet another hostile criticism of Israel, despite some of the shortcomings pointed out yesterday by Israeli spokesmen.
It documents the systematic inequality of access to water sources between the 450,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the 2.3 million Palestinian residents there. Reinforced by a highly restrictive system of Israeli military permits, the security fence/wall and frequent army destruction of “illegal” Palestinian wells, cisterns, tanks and crops this results in what Amnesty claims to be an average 70 litres a day usage by Palestinians compared to 300 litres by Israeli settlers.
Several detailed descriptions bring home the stark contrast between flourishing Israeli settlements with swimming pools, green lawns and well-irrigated fruit and vegetable farms alongside parched Palestinian villages and farms forced to buy water from travelling tankers. As one Palestinian woman said: “They make our life very difficult to make us leave”. The situation in Gaza is even worse – “dire” according to the report – with 90 per cent of water there contaminated and huge destruction of sewage, piping and other infrastructure during Israel’s attack on the territory last year.
This is the nitty gritty of Israeli occupation policy, which receives too little international attention. It helps explain the growing pessimism about the prospects for Barack Obama’s recent peace initiative, following Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to halt Israeli settlement expansion; but it reinforces how necessary that is if more violence is to be avoided. Amnesty’s calls on Israel to lift these harsh restrictions, equalise access to water resources and allow it to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza are valid demands on the occupying power. Its criticisms of ineffective policies by the Palestinian Authority are also telling. Amnesty should respond in detail to Israeli complaints that it seriously underestimate existing water supplies to Palestinian communities. But even if that is true, the main thrust of this report is not undermined.