Israel's ongoing theft of Palestinian lands in the West Bank isn't just intended to provide room for the ever-increasing settlements there, it is driven at least as strongly by Israel's insatiable desire for the region's water. Water is a great weapon-- sure, Israel has objectively legitimate needs for it, and also wants it to maintain a nice suburban lifestyle for its so-called "settlers."
Denying it to the Palestinians also weakens whatever residual enclaves the Palestinians will retain on the West Bank and helps prevent them from becoming self-sufficient, perpetuating their enforced dependence on their Israeli occupiers, and ensuring the availability to Israelis of a compliant workforce without any power to improve their own lot (until, mebbe, the day an independent Palestinian entity is created, which will be never as things now stand).
Israel will defend it's one-sided allocation of water by claiming that the Palestinians waste water-- but in their present condition of enforced poverty with virtually no infrastructure building allowed by Israel, they can't afford the technology that Israel uses to recycle-- just another Catch-22 imposed on a captive population by the State of Israel. Israel also accuses the Palestinians of stealing water, which they undoubtedly do to some extent, but given whose land the water comes from in the first place, that really amounts to a put-down of a small-time thief by a by a more successful one.
Acquiring the regions water (not just the West Bank's water) has been Israeli policy from Day One, and we can talk some other time about the role of water in precipitating the Six-Day War and in retaining the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms, and about recent threats by Israel to abrogate the agreement with Jordan regarding the water in the Jordan River, and about numerous other aspects of the water fight, but what follows pertains only to the West Bank.
Under Olmert's plan, Israel aims to keep the two main Palestinian West Bank aquifers: the lower Jordan River basin in the east, and the eastern mountain aquifer, trapped behind Israel's wall in the west. This will force Palestinians to depend on Israel for water, preserving the status quo, a dramatically unjust division of water resources.
One example of this vastly unequal division of water resources is my West Bank village of Qira. Every summer the Israeli company that supplies water to our village and that provides about 53 percent of the total Palestinian domestic water supply deliberately cuts off our water, thus generating a crisis. Last year Qira, a village of 1,000 residents, had no water for more than three continuous weeks, despite the summer heat.
Water reductions and total cuts force villagers to find alternative water sources. We collect rainwater in cisterns during the winter, but by the start of the summer, the cisterns, unfortunately, run dry. Palestinian communities are thus obliged to purchase additional water from expensive and unsanitary tankers. A high proportion of children in Qira suffer from kidney problems thought to be related to drinking stagnant water. My 4-year-old daughter was forced to have a kidney transplant.
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http://www.thenation.com/...
Like most of the West Bank, [the Palestinian village of] Yatta gets its water from [Mekorot] 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.
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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.
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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. [emphasis added]
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.
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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.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
An Israeli water engineer who recognizes the injustice of the situation in the West Bank gives us some ground-level details on how the water supply to the Palestinians is limited::
The first way is that Israel, at the Joint Water Committee, prevents the development of Palestinian water resources wherever such development may be detrimental to the amount of water available to us.
The second way is that there are still 220 Palestinian localities with 215,000 residents (about 10% of the population) which are not connected to any running water systems (B'Tselem, 2000). Their water supply is from collection in cisterns and provided by tankers.
The third way the water supply is limited is that the supply to the localities connected to Mekorot [the Israeli national water company] is limited, disrupted and irregular. This is done by several methods: for instance, in two places there are reports of storage tanks that jointly supply water to Jewish or Israeli settlements and to Palestinians. The pipe going to the Palestinians is attached higher than the pipe going to the Israeli customers. Thus, when the flow is limited or consumption is high, supply to the Israelis may continue while to the Palestinians it is disrupted. [citations omitted] In other places the line to the Palestinian settlement goes through a small diameter pipe segment and the flow is limited (in one place I saw a 1 inch pipe; it was replaced after a visit by Yesh Din and a request from our Water Authority); another way to reduce the flow is to insert in the line to the Palestinian village a reduction valve [citation omitted]; in some villages pressure regulators were installed, preventing the water from reaching high places. Stopping the water supply for hours or days is another simple solution; there are places where it is reported that water flows for only a few hours a week and even less. In such cases the Palestinians themselves assign the limited supply inside the village to homes or neighborhoods so that at least once in each period water will reach every household. The residents collect water in tanks or cisterns; and supplementary supply comes in water tankers, when it comes, and at prices that are much higher than the price of water in the pipe.
http://departments.agri.huji.ac.il/...