The water problems in Palestine are not, unsurprisingly, related to climate change, but rather the political climate, according to AL Monitor’s Ahmed Melman:
Israel started controlling water resources in 1948, and began impeding the development of wells and water springs, in addition to exploiting the existing resources for the benefit of settlements and agricultural purposes at the expense of the Palestinians. In the mid-1960s, Israel began exploiting the water of the Jordan River basin that feeds the Dead Sea and diverting the water to private settlements in Negev settlements south of Palestine through the National Water Carrier; it also drained Lake Hula in northern Palestine. After Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israeli control over water resources increased. This happened through preventing drilling, bridging springs and refraining from issuing licenses as the governing authority until it controlled 90% of Palestinian water resources using military orders and laws. The water issue was moved to final-status negotiations within the framework of the Oslo Accord due to its importance and complexity. Phase I (Declaration of Principles) of the accord, which was set at five years, included the transitional arrangements for the establishment of a self-governing interim Palestinian Authority (PA); this was to lead to a permanent settlement in order to deal with the six key issues the parties agreed to move to final-status negotiations five years from the signing of the accords.
The future of water in Palestine does not look promising and might be headed toward a catastrophe in the coming years, especially in the Gaza Strip.
PWA Minister Mazen Ghoneim told Al-Monitor, on the sidelines of the World Water Day celebration in Ramallah on March 26, “The water situation in Palestine is very complex in light of Israel’s control over 90% of water resources, in addition to its refusal to increase the amount of drinking water sold to Palestine since 1995, which totals up to 52 million cubic meters, for $55 million.”
“The biggest water catastrophe on earth is in the Gaza Strip, as 97% of the coastal aquifer water is unfit for human use because of seawater intrusion and leakage of sewage water into it,” Ghoneim said.
AlJazeera publishes Charlotte Silver’s piece:
Israel credits its use of desalination plants and drip-irrigation with enabling the desert to bloom – the iconic image reinforcing the still-lingering notion that the land of historic Palestine was a dry one, while further impressing Israel’s world audience with the young country’s wizardry with water.
Less attention is given to the Knesset report commissioned in 2002, nearly four decades after Israel’s national water carrier began diverting the Jordan river to Israeli citrus orchards in the Negev region. The report concluded that the region’s ongoing water crisis – a desiccated Jordan river and shrinking Dead Sea – was “primarily man-made“. …
In fact, Palestinians have not historically wanted for water. But the characterisation of Palestine as a desperately arid land has, as Clemens Messerschmid wrote in 2011, “naturalised” the water crisis that Palestinians experience every day. Gaza, which is currently subsisting off of a water source that is 95 percent non-potable, long served as an oasis for travellers crossing from Cairo to Damascus. This history – and more – is important to consider amid the recent enthusiastic clamour over Israel’s miraculous water surplus that promises to provide a glimmer of hope for peace and cooperation, but is, in truth, a helpful cover-up for its ongoing theft and exploitation.
I cannot say if the facts cited are true, or out of context.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz contributor Amira Hass writes:
So here are the facts:
* Israel doesn’t give water to the Palestinians. Rather, it sells it to them at full price.
* The Palestinians would not have been forced to buy water from Israel if it were not an occupying power which controls their natural resource, and if it were not for the Oslo II Accords, which limit the volume of water they can produce, as well as the development and maintenance of their water infrastructure.
* This 1995 interim agreement was supposed to lead to a permanent arrangement after five years. The Palestinian negotiators deluded themselves that they would gain sovereignty and thus control over their water resources.
The Palestinians were the weak, desperate, easily tempted side and sloppy when it came to details. Therefore, in that agreement Israel imposed a scandalously uneven, humiliating and infuriating division of the water resources of the West Bank.
* The division is based on the volume of water Palestinians produced and consumed on the eve of the deal. The Palestinians were allotted 118 million cubic meters (mcm) per year from three aquifers via drilling, agricultural wells, springs and precipitation. Pay attention, Rino Tzror: the same deal allotted Israel 483 mcm annually from the same resources (and it has also exceeded this limit in some years).
In other words, some 20 percent goes to the Palestinians living in the West Bank, and about 80 percent goes to Israelis – on both sides of the Green Line – who also enjoy resources from the rest of the country.
Hass finishes with:
Instead of spending time calculating whether the average Israeli household’s per-capita consumption of water is four times or “only” three times that of Palestinian consumption, open your eyes: The settlements bathed in green, and across the road Palestinian urban neighborhoods and villages are subject to a policy of water rotation. The thick pipes of Mekorot (Israel’s national water provider) are heading to the Jordan Valley settlements, and a Palestinian tractor next to them transports a rusty tank of water from afar. In the summer, the faucets run dry in Hebron and never stop flowing in Kiryat Arba and Beit Hadassah.
So it seems better management is required; but my impression is that tribalism is too strong, and tensions will continue, although there is a joint project underway to solve the water problem:
In a rare display of regional cooperation, representatives of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement on Monday to build a Red Sea-Dead Sea water project that is meant to benefit all three parties.
The project addresses two problems: the acute shortage of clean fresh water in the region, especially in Jordan, and the rapid contraction of the Dead Sea. A new desalination plant is to be built in Aqaba, Jordan, to convert salt water from the Red Sea into fresh water for use in southern Israel and southern Jordan — each would get eight billion to 13 billion gallons a year. The process produces about the same amount of brine as a waste product; the brine would be piped more than 100 miles to help replenish the already very saline Dead Sea.
