Dear friend,
Water is not a luxury. Without it, there is no life. That fact does not stop Israel from using this essential resource to strengthen its control over the West Bank and advance the apartheid regime’s principles: reinforcing and entrenching Jewish supremacy in the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Israelis and Palestinians live in a dry, arid area where the effects of climate change are already felt. Still, there is no water shortage between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Smart, long-term planning by the Israeli authorities, including the use of desalination plants and reclaimed water for agriculture, guarantees that Israelis have access to an abundant supply of water. The result is that for Israelis – on both sides of the Green Line – it would be inconceivable to live without access to as much running water as they please every day of the year.
Palestinians living in the West Bank, however, do not benefit from this abundance and instead suffer from a chronic water shortage. In most Palestinian cities, water is supplied to residents only a few days at a time, once a week or once a month. Only just over a third of the West Bank’s Palestinian residents have access to running water on a daily basis, while many shepherding communities have no connection to the water grid and rely on water purchased at a high cost from vendors.
This inequality in access leads to staggering disaprities in water consumption between Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line) and Palestinians in the West Bank. Israelis use three times as much water as Palestinians, averaging 247 liters per person per day, compared to Palestinians’ average consumption of 82.4 liters per person per day, which is less than the WHO-recommended minimum of 100 liters per day. In Palestinian communities that are not connected to the water grid, average water consumption is even lower: 26 liters per person per day, a figure that is similar to consumption averages in disaster zones. In 2020, total water consumption by Israelis was ten times that of West Bank Palestinians, though Israel’s population is only three times larger.
Israel, for its part, feigns innocence, justifying its water policies by claiming that it is upholding the agreement it signed with the PLO nearly 30 years ago. But this agreement, which in any case was only supposed to remain in place for five years, was inherently discriminatory against Palestinians, as it enshrined the principle that Israelis have access to water on demand while Palestinians receive water according to predetermined allocations. The water allocations were woefully inadequate even when the agreements were signed, and, although the Palestinian population has grown by about 75% since then, the amounts of water Israel allows Palestinians to pump remain the same.
More importantly, the agreement did not foresee Israel’s transformation into a water superpower, no longer dependent on the natural water resources it shares with Palestinians. Given this development, Israel could allow Palestinians to pump much larger quantities of water without at all impacting its own citizens’ copious water consumption.
A new B’Tselem report, Parched, shows that the Palestinian water plight is not the result of fate or an unsolvable natural disaster but the outcome of Israel’s discriminatory policy that deliberately creates a chronic, artificial water crisis for millions of people. Contrary to basic principles of fairness and morality, Israel uses water to pursue political goals, consciously choosing to implement a policy of deprivation that includes not just draconian restrictions on water pumping but also the destruction of water cisterns and the confiscation of tankers that transport water to remote communities, which are some of the poorest in the West Bank.
Yours,
Eyal Hareuveni
B'Tselem Researcher
