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Water in the desert - beyond Biblical prophecy in Israel Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by Kevin Newman, United States Jun 4, 2003
Peace & Conflict   Opinions

  

I was struck by an article in the Los Angeles Times in 1990 about a Palestinian agronomist imprisoned for two years for his statements about water use in the West Bank. His area of research was growing tomatoes. I thought: "why imprison someone who has no power, advocates no violent acts, looks to be a man in his fifties, and is standing in front of tomato plants?" He was talking at a West Bank university about control of water resources by the Iraeli government from the aquifer below. It seemed out of balance. After all these years, maybe it wasn't. Maybe this is the big issue that shadows others: If there is no water there can be no life.
If you find a map of the Oslo II agreements- if you can- you see a graphic image of an open hand laid across the West Bank. The fingers are the Israeli settlements, both current and in masterplans. Some settlements are master planned with up to 250,000 population. The fingers do two things, break up a continuous Palestinian state and control the water of the aquifer below. These issues are tightly related because these "fingers" are the hills, and between them are the plains. The aquifer below has water but the water as it comes close to the surface is clean only in what are called bubbles,and brackish elsewhere as it comes through the limestone, "brown" water with enough grit to make it unusable for drinking and problematic for agriculture and industry. The bubbles are under the Israeli settlements. The only legally recognized drilling points are on the hills, in the settlements. Palestinian attempts to drill for this water have been violently stopped, both by the Israeli government and the settlers themselves. Farmers have seen their crops wither and die without access to this water, towns have dried up without access to it. The "brown" water is all but unusable.
There has been a policy of denying Palestinians new access to potable water supplies at least since the 70's. Without water, life is impossible. So obvious it is overlooked. When I read the actual text of the Oslo Agreements, I found that Palestinians were not going to be given 94 % of the West Bank and Gaza, but 94 % of the population centers, the almost all of this territory being the refugee camps and the immediate surrounding land in the waterless plains. The camps were created there to stifle growth, to encourage flight. With this final status solution, on less than 44 % of the West Bank, the available water can not sustain even the current population. If a well was officially permitted, the water would be undrinkable. Per capita water use by the Palestinians is one sixth that of the settlers. Making up less than 8% of the population, settlers use over 74 % of the water in the West Bank. If Arafat had signed these agreements, he would have doomed his entire country to elimination, as surely as the dry fields of the farmers. The agronomists on both sides orf the struggle understand this. Notice when there is an "incursion", as often as not, Civil engineering records both paper and computer based are systematically destroyed, water supply lines are dug up, sewer pipes are cut in two. Search the archive files of major newspapers in this country and the Israeli press. The sotries are the same over a decade long period.

I advise all readers to educate themselves on what was in these past agreements regarding water rithgts and Israeli and Palestinian settlement locations and Palestinian agriculture. Through the wonder of this very internet, I have found an emerging pattern. Writers from all political positions, from the U.S., Europe, Israel and Palestine speak to these same issues, but the aggregate facts are not disputed: Israel has in place a goal of driving out the Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza by eliminating access to the water supply needed to sustain them. This is a long standing and publicly stated policy from both Labor and Likud parties. Look at the pattern of government subsidized settlement growth during the nineties. Settlement population leaped 40% at a time when there was an accepted freeze according to the negotiations. These settlements are all over the water bubbles.
I ask you to make up your own mind as to how close this writer is to the "big Shadow" behind the rhetoric of Biblical destiny.





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