West Bank Water Woes

The article, "West Bank water wars: Palestinian taps dry as Israeli water flows" relates:

    Across the dusty villages of the occupied West Bank, where Israeli water pipes don’t reach, date palms have been left to die. Greenhouses are empty and deserted. Palestinians say they can barely get enough water to bathe their children and wash their clothes — let alone sustain livestock and grow fruit trees.

    In sharp contrast, neighboring Jewish settlements look like an oasis. Wildflowers burst through the soil. Farmed fish swim in neat rows of ponds. Children splash in community pools.

    The struggle for water access in this strip of fertile land reflects a wider contest for control of the West Bank — and in particular the Jordan Valley, which Palestinians consider the breadbasket of their hoped-for future state and Israelis view as key to protecting their eastern border.

    “People are thirsty, the crops are thirsty,” said Hazeh Daraghmeh, a 63-year-old Palestinian date farmer in the Jiftlik area of the valley, where some of his palms have withered in the bone-dry dirt. “They’re trying to squeeze us step by step,” Daraghmeh said.

    Across the West Bank, water troubles have stalked Palestinian towns and cities since interim peace accords of the 1990s gave Israel control over 80% of the West Bank's water reserves — and most other aspects of Palestinian life.

    The accords also created a limited self-rule Palestinian government that would provide water to its swelling cities by tapping the rapidly depleting reservoirs it shares with Israel and buying water from Israel's state-run company. The arrangement left the Palestinians who live in the remaining 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli civil control stranded — disconnected from both Israeli and Palestinian water grids. This includes much of the Jordan Valley.

    Intended to last five years, the interim accords remain in place today.

    “The amount of water that Israel is supplying has not adapted to the needs of Palestinians and in many cases has not changed since the 1970s,” said Eyal Hareuveni, author of a recent report on the water crisis from Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “The infrastructure is designed to benefit settlements.”

    The 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank are connected to the Israeli water grid through a sophisticated network that provides water continuously, but Palestinian cities are not. So in the scorching summer, Palestinians get municipal water only sporadically.

For some reason, after Israel attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty in 1967, instead of bombing Tel Aviv back to the stone age, the U.S. instead took Israel under its protective wing. It has been a mistake. If Israel had to suffer the full consequences of its treatment of the goyim living under its rule and along its borders, it probably would have been forced to come some solution years ago instead of continually kicking the can down the road. At one time I had a lot of sympathy toward Israel, but now they remind me of the aliens in Independence Day, particularly the scene where the U.S. president asks the alien what it wants, and it tells him that they (the aliens) want the humans to die. I feel that too many Israelis have the same attitude toward the Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike.