Thirsting for Justice

Palestinians are thirsting for justice in terms of their fair share of water from Israel. I knew that they were shortchanged, and today I found out just how much. Alex Abu Atta of a coalition of 30 NGOs called Emergency Water and Sanitation/Hygiene  (EWASH) told us that the average Israeli uses four times as much water as the average Palestinian, and some poor Palestinian villages get only one-fifth of the WHO-recommended daily minimum. In the Jordan valley, Israeli settlers actually use 81 times more water per capita than the Palestinians in the area.

Alex Abu Atta of EWASH

Alex says the problem throughout the West Bank is that Israel controls all water sources and extracts almost 90% of the water from the aquifer under the West Bank. Palestinians have no access to the Jordan river, and it is polluted anyway.

The 1995 Oslo accords set an unequal distribution of 80% of the water to Israel and 20% to Palestine, but that target has not been met, and Palestinians get less water today than they did before Oslo.

Alex says Palestinians have only half as many wells as they did in 1967, due to confiscation, demolition, and the long and difficult process of getting permits for new ones. It is also hard to get a permit to build or clean out cisterns, even though they collect only rain water and do not tap the aquifer. Alex says another problem is settler harassment. Settlers have taken over Palestinian springs and on occasion have contaminated them by throwing in dirty diapers or dead chickens.

The Israeli army threatens to demolish this Bedouin's cisterns.
Photo courtesy of Thirsting for Justice

Alex says the Israeli government has turned a deaf ear on appeals to give Palestinians a fairer share of the water. EWASH is conducting a campaign called "Thirsting for Justice" to encourage European countries to pressure Israel to change its water policies to comply with international law and respect Palestinian human rights. If anyone would like to organize a "teach-in" on the problem for World Water Day (March 22), excellent resources are available at www.thirstingforjustice.org. It's time to give the Palestinians their fair share of water.