Water
And Resistance
By Timothy Seidel
writing from the West Bank
09 June 2007
Live
From Palestine
The
view from the Palestinian village of Nahhalin, in the west Bethlehem
area, is sobering. This small village -- along with the villages of
Husan, Battir, Wadi Fuqin, and Al Walaja -- are becoming more and more
isolated from Bethlehem. As Israeli colonization in the Etzion bloc
grows and as the Wall continues to cut deeply into the West Bank and
strangle these communities, these Palestinian villagers have little
access to the rest of the Israeli occupied West Bank. Even now, Israel
is burrowing out a tunnel under the major settler bypass road running
through the Etzion bloc, that will provide "transportational contiguity"
for this one of many isolated islands of land on 40 to 50 percent of
the West Bank that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice want to sell to the world as "the state
of Palestine." [1]
Stuck between the "Green
Line" -- the 1949 Armistice Line that separates Israel from the
West Bank -- and the Wall, Palestinians from Nahhalin find themselves
among some 60,000 Palestinians living in the "seam zone" or
the western segregation zone between the Wall and the Green Line which
includes roughly 11 percent of the West Bank and which will ultimately
be annexed to the "state of Israel" in Israel's unilateral
plan to define its own borders.
When I last visited Nahhalin,
I was joined by my friends at the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem
(ARIJ). [2] ARIJ had begun a waste water treatment project in Nahhalin
that will now be duplicated to provide rural Palestinian areas in the
West Bank with new sources of water for irrigation. ARIJ's water and
environment research unit will install on-site waste water treatment
systems for 180 homes, providing direct benefits to about 1,800 people.
The project gets underway this year and will be completed in 2010.
Nader Sh. Hrimat from ARIJ
pointed out to me that scarcity of fresh water supplies and restricted
access to traditional water supplies creates ongoing shortages of water
for agricultural purposes. These new systems will not only improve access
to water, they improve management of waste water, said Nader, explaining
that the re-use of treated wastewater for irrigation is now considered
to be one of the most feasible and economical ways to utilize household
waste water in a sanitary manner.
The anticipated success of
expanding this project to 180 homes is expected to encourage more Palestinian
villages to install on-site treatment systems. In addition to addressing
water shortages and water pollution concerns, these systems are also
expected to increase agricultural productivity and food security, a
function all the more important considering that over a third of Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories are, with another 12 percent at risk of
becoming, "food insecure." [3] Treatment units will be manufactured
locally and create much-needed employment opportunities here where rampant
unemployment has contributed to a poverty rate of over 33 percent (with
a quarter living in "deep poverty"). [4]
On the surface, this might
simply appear to be another development project, one that is similar
to many others around the world. However, in this context of ongoing
Israeli colonization and occupation of Palestinian life and land, such
simple acts of waste water treatment and sustainable development are
not only peacebuilding initiatives in their own right but they also
become powerful acts of nonviolent resistance.
Another example would be
the next phase of a hydrology project in the northern part of the West
Bank with the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG). [5] I recently joined
Abdul-Latif from PHG in a field visit to the Palestinian villages of
Jayyus and Kafr Jammal near Qalqilya where farmers are cut off from
their agricultural lands by the Israeli separation barrier. This hydrology
project in its various phases has sought to assist farmers in keeping
a presence on their lands on the other side of the Wall, the "seam
zone," by maintaining well pumps and irrigation systems.
Projects such as these give
Palestinian people greater control over their natural resources, explained
Nader. Water resources, he noted, are particularly vulnerable because
Israel controls over 80 percent of the Palestinian groundwater resources
in the West Bank, restricting access to water for agricultural irrigation
and other purposes. [6]
Abdul-Latif also pointed
this out to me. With Israeli control over water resources, and Palestinians
captive to Israeli water companies, Abdul-Latif asks, "Where is
the infrastructure for this 'Palestinian state'?" Abdul-Latif then
pointed out to me the citrus lying on the ground having rotted off the
trees as another sign of the economic strangulation on these communities.
These fruits go unpicked because Palestinian farmers have very limited
access to a market of any sort to sell their goods due to the Israeli
closure system in the West Bank. And when they can sell their goods
somewhere, Israel has flooded the market with cheap fruits from Israel
(and Jordan) that these farmers simply cannot compete with.
These indicators point to
what many see as the imminent demise of a "two-state" solution
to this terrible conflict and the solidification -- through this structure
of occupation, colonization, and apartheid -- of Israeli domination
over the Occupied Territories. And with the absence of any viable economic
infrastructure, those calling for investment in Palestinian society
as a "positive" response to the "critical" call
for boycott, divestment, and sanctions need to understand the context
of this structure that holds Palestinians captive in "Bantustans"
as cheap laborers and consumers -- a structure that will not benefit
Palestinians or Israelis in the long run.
A hydrology initiative such
as this is the form that a relevant nonviolent resistance has taken
in the Occupied Territories. And it goes unnoticed by many in North
America because it is not as recognizable as demonstrations or sit-ins.
But in a context where so many pressures are exerted on Palestinian
communities to leave their homes due to economic, social, or political
forces (or other softer forms of what is essentially ethnic cleansing),
assistance by the international community to help these communities
simply be, simply exist, is the most salient form of nonviolent resistance
that Palestinians live out on a daily basis.
This is why when I hear people
ask, "Where is the Palestinian Gandhi, or the Palestinian King,
or the Palestinian Mandela?" (once again blaming the victim for
their victimhood and absolving the oppressor by placing the responsibility
and the initiative on the shoulders of the oppressed, which makes one
want to respond with a "Where is the Israeli Mandela or de Klerk?")
I think of the Nader's and Abdul-Latif's of Palestine who exercise courage,
persistence, and steadfastness in the face of all of these pressures
of dispossession, colonization, occupation, and most recently international
boycott, and through the seemingly mundane acts of farming, reclaiming
land, and water and food security initiatives truly resist injustice
and truly pursue a sustainable peace born of justice in this broken
land.
Timothy Seidel
is a peace development worker with Mennonite Central Committee in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories where he has lived for the past three
years.
Endnotes:
[1] See Jeff Halper's recent comments on this in "The
Livni-Rice Plan: Towards a Just Peace or Apartheid?" ICAHD.org,
2 May 2007.
[2] See http://www.arij.org/.
[3] See "One-third
of Palestinians 'food insecure'," IRIN 22 March 2007,
and "Growing
poverty, unemployment threaten Palestinians' ability to feed their families,"
UN News, 22 February 2007, or
"Poor Palestinians unable to purchase enough food,"
WFP Press Release, 2 February 2007.
[44 See "Financial
boycott sends Palestinian poverty numbers soaring, finds UN report,"
UN News, 24 November 2006, and Rory McCarthy, "UN
plea for millions in Palestinian aid amid fears of economic collapse,"
The Guardian, 8 December 2006.
[5] See http://www.phg.org/.
[6] See the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department summary on water athttp://www.nad-plo.org/listing.php?view=nego_permanent_water.
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