Palestinians, water and the Zionist state

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times, July 15, 2000

In West Bank, Water Is as Touchy as Land

By WILLIAM A. ORME Jr.

KARMEL, West Bank, July 12 -- Rafat, a skinny 9-year-old too shy to supply
a surname, heads every summer morning to the only swimming hole in this
hardscrabble stretch of the Hebron hills. It is a stark stone cistern,
about a 100 feet long and 50 feet across, built long ago to store the rains
that fall only in winter.

Descending a rickety ladder, Rafat and his pals plunge happily into
stagnant water barely three feet deep, its surreal surface an unbroken
carpet of brilliant green algae.

"These are our children," said Khalil Yunis, mayor of the nearby town of
Yatta, shaking his head at the sight of the small boys diving under the
undulating scum. "And this is their water."

Rafat's algae-choked swimming pool is the centerpiece of the village water
system. The other daily water source for Karmel's 3,500 residents is a tiny
spring-fed brook wending its way through a herd of goats into a newly
covered concrete cistern.

The villagers carry pails past a hand-lettered sign in English and Arabic
extolling this modest public works project, "implemented by Yatta
municipality" and financed by the United States Agency for International
Development.

"God bless America," Mr. Yunis said with a wry smile.

Mr. Yunis tried to help Karmel further by linking the village to Yatta's
municipal water system, but the summer supply in Yatta is so low that water
now flows through the three-inch pipe here just two or three days a month,
the mayor said.

Like most of the West Bank, Yatta gets its water from Israel's state water
company. Dispute over water resources has been a fact of life here since
the land was occupied by Israel 33 years ago.

But with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators now trying to resolve the
issue of water rights along with all their other hypercharged disputes --
refugees, borders, Jerusalem -- the concern in this parched part of the
West Bank is that Israel may end up retaining its hold on the reserves
beneath the bedrock here.

About a mile down the dirt road, Mr. Yunis pointed out what is to him a
symbol of the conflict that he hopes the Camp David talks can resolve: a
pristine pumping terminal, protected by a chain-link and barbed-wire cage,
for a large water main supplying a Jewish settlement town, Maon.

A smaller pipe once channeled some of this water to Karmel, but the link
was severed by settlers, Mr. Yunis said.

"The water is right here, and we can't touch it," he said.

Within plain view of the fenced-in pumping station, outside another small
village, Azam Abugadiah lowered two yellow pails into a 30-foot well dug a
year ago in another local government effort to expand water resources.

Four times a day, he expertly tips the buckets into the few remaining
inches of standing water, his family's only supply of drinking water. Next
to the nearly dry well, a new storage tank stands empty, an electric pump
is idle and the year-old water meter shows a long row of zeroes.

In the West Bank, water allocation is a zero-sum game, and Palestinians
consider local scarcity a direct and unjust consequence of the resources
given to Jewish communities.

With their watered lawns and community pools, the 160,000 Jewish settlers
in the West Bank enjoy essentially the same suburban life as Israelis
elsewhere.

In the settlements, daily water consumption for households and general
urban use is about 74 gallons a person. That is not a lot by American
standards, but it is four times the Palestinian usage. And during summer
droughts, despite public service calls to conserve water, there is little
real reduction in Israeli household use. But among Palestinians, water
supplies slow to a trickle.

"The Israelis make all this fuss about a shortage of water to wash their
cars, and we do not have enough to wash our bodies," said Muhammad Amro, an
official with the Palestinian local government ministry in the Hebron region.

The World Health Organization says 26.5 gallons of potable water per person
is needed daily for minimal health and sanitation standards.

In the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians control local government but
Israel still controls most of the water resources, the average consumption
is 18.5 gallons daily. In the summer in towns like Yatta, with water
systems connected to Israel's national network, the supply dwindles to half
that or less.

The estimated 215,000 Palestinians who live in villages with no running
water rely on trucked-in water bought in most cases from Jewish settlements.

Noam Lubell, a spokesman for B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that
brought European diplomats here for meetings with officials of
drought-stricken Palestinian towns, said the settlements were just part of
the problem. The drainage of aquifers for Israeli industry and agriculture
and the lack of serious water conservation efforts in Israel's affluent
suburbs are the real sources of the disparity, he said.

"The water issue is not one of the settlers versus the Palestinians, but of
Israel versus the Palestinians," said Mr. Lubell, whose organization issued
a study this month urging radical cutbacks in Israel's use of underground
fresh water reserves.

In the inch-by-inch negotiating battle for territory here, the lands that
are bitterly disputed are precious and finite. But at least they are not
contracting. Subterranean water reserves, by contrast, are steadily
shrinking as the demands of two fast-growing societies outpace natural
replenishment by rivers and rainfall.

As fresh water supplies diminish, brackish water from pools deeper
underground is drawn up into the depleted aquifers, rendering the reserves
undrinkable.

Even Israeli officials who favor increased allotments to the Palestinians
have argued for continued Israeli control of shared aquifers beneath the
hills here. Israel's acknowledged expertise in water management can benefit
both sides, they contend, and hydraulics and topography make it easier to
tap the main reservoir from within Israel's borders.

But the Palestinians point to Israel's recent warnings that it may
unilaterally cut water supplies promised to Jordan under the terms of its
peace treaty with Israel.

The one point of concurrence between Israeli and Palestinian water experts
is that the aquifers do not hold enough water to supply both populations at
present consumption rates for many more years.

While Palestinian villagers import Israeli water in tanker trucks, Israel
is seriously considering the emergency importation of Turkish water in
tanker ships, converted for the purpose from the oil trade.

Some Israeli experts deride that proposal as costly and unsanitary, and say
the farms that use most of the country's fresh water should instead be
irrigated with brackish and recycled waste water.

The only long-term solution, experts agree, is to create more fresh water.

Israel is seeking bids for gas-powered desalting plants along the
Mediterranean. The water-deprived Gaza Strip could be the biggest
beneficiary.

But in Karmel and other hamlets in the brown hills here, these projects
seem like a distant abstraction.

"They are discussing the problem of water for the next generation," Mr.
Amro said. "But if we can't drink the water now, there will be no next
generation."

Louis Proyect
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