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Wednesday, July 14, 1999
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The ping-pong game misses the point
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By Amira Hass
When journalists finally began showing some interest in the Palestinians' annual summer water shortages, one of the claims immediately raised by Israel was that Palestinian planning mistakes were to blame for an involuntary cut in the Mekorot Water Company's supplies to certain areas, and for unnecessary delays in moving over to a new infrastructure system. A news item on the Voice of Israel (broadcast without a Palestinian reaction) cited the main water reservoir of Bethlehem as an example: The Palestinians, the Civil Administration argued, refused to listen to us and dismantled it before building a new reservoir. The amount of water supplied of necessity dropped.But the Palestinians do have an answer to this claim: The old reservoir was no longer usable. The new one, much larger, was built in the same place and additional connections were made in advance to enable water to be pumped to other reservoirs as well. On the other hand, it was hard to understand from the Palestinian spokesmen why they did not hasten to install a connecting waterline to the pipe which Mekorot extended up to the Green Line some two months ago, so as to require Israel to honor the commitment it made in the Taba Accord (September 1995) to sell 5 million cubic meters of water to the Gaza Strip every year.
There is no end to this ping-pong of arguments and counter-arguments. Each side presents its own figures as to the quantities of water pumped by Mekorot to the major Palestinian reservoirs. But senior Palestinian officials have receipts for the monthly payments made to Mekorot and the accurate data is to be found there. One fact stands out clearly: No significant addition is made to the water supplies in the hot summer months.
The Israeli authorities (the Water Commission and the Civil Administration) stress that despite the fact that 1999 was a drought year and water quotas to Israeli farmers were cut, the quantities supplied to Palestinians remained untouched. How incredibly generous of us! Just imagine, our poultry industry and crops are being hurt, but we are magnanimously not cutting back on the drinking and bathing water supplied to the Palestinians! This boasting expresses better than anything else the anti-egalitarian and discriminatory approach that has guided the Israeli institutions which have run the Palestinians' lives for decades now. Depicting the decision not to cut Palestinian water supplies as the kind gesture of a philanthropist who controls the resources exposes the extent to which they do not recognize that all human beings are equal. Let any Israeli, on either side of the Green Line, examine his bathing habits this summer and he will immediately conclude, without consulting water experts, that the overall quantity of water he uses is on the rise - and he is not required to take the drought into consideration. No Israeli official is demanding that we only take one shower a day, or even that we refrain from watering our lawns (or from filling public and private swimming pools).
Various international organizations, such as the World Bank, note the following facts with undisguised bewilderment: The per capita water consumption in Israel is high - higher than that in Germany, for example. But for years, under Israeli rule, the Palestinians' per capita home water consumption has been lower than the minimum essential set by the United Nations (70 liters a day), and is the lowest in the area. This discrepancy is not the result of an alleged mentality difference. It is the result of deliberate anti-egalitarian water distribution between the two populations, which since 1967 has determined the type and pace of development and maintainance of water infrastructure.
In Gaza's affluent neighborhoods, the number of households installing home water purification systems is on the rise. The water pumped through the pipes has reached a dangerous level of pollution and salinity, no longer just a bad-tasting one. Residents of the Gaza Strip are subject to an autarkic water regime: only water produced from the underground reservoirs within the strip's artificial borders is at their disposal. Would anyone in Israel dream of demanding that Be'er Sheva or the Sha'ar Hanegev local council make do exclusively with the water produced in their own municipal borders? But what is not demanded of Jews is demanded of Palestinians.
The implementation of Palestinian plans to set up a "national water carrier" from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, so as to minimize the growing deficit in Gaza's underground aquifers, is dependent on a change in the anti-egalitarian water distribution policy in the West Bank. Of the water produced from West Bank aquifers, 80 percent is used by Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line) and only 20 percent is allocated to the Palestinians.
But the case-by-case sparring about the water shortage has pushed to the side one central fact: The delayed permanent settlement negotiations were by now supposed to have put an end to Israel's sole control of the water resources and laid new, egalitarian, principles for distributing water between the two populations
© copyright 1999 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved
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