Mendacious attacks on Israeli water policy has been going on
forevermore. I caught a whiff of it even
as a high school student. Ongoing
investment in water by Israel has succeeded in providing not just real water
security but now exportable water. All the
while with a rapidly expanding
population base and a demanding industrial expansion.
In the meanwhile, their opponents have preferred to pay little
attention to water needs from all appearances while continuing to remain in
technical ignorance by and large. This
is generally unacceptable.
Israel was a wasteland due to Arab and Turkish controlled hyper
feudalism unleavened by
resident boots on the ground able to stop the looting. This was in place for at least a thousand
years and the country was fully depopulated and outright despoiled as a direct
result. After all, it you have a better
hoe than I have, I simply take it from you because I can. The return of the Arabs to this wasteland was
inspired by the fresh creation of jobs in the newly emergent Israel.
The same thing is presently happening in Dubai for the same reasons.
The bottom line is that Israel brought sound water management and
massive investment in the resources they found in place.
Israel, Palestinians and
Water Libel
Posted by Jack L.
Schwartzwald on Apr 19th, 2012
On December 13, 2011, the
French National Assembly issued a 320-page report entitled, The
Geopolitics of Water, which dedicated 20 pages to an alleged “water war”
between Israelis and Palestinians. Employing the incendiary terms
“apartheid” and “water occupation,” the report’s lead author, Jean Glavany,
accused Israel of usurping Palestinian water sources and showing favoritism to
450,000 “colonial” settlers who purportedly “use more water than [the West
Bank’s] 2.3 million Palestinians.”
The report won immediate
praise from Palestinian Water Authority Director Shaddad Attili (who made
similar allegations in a 2011 Jerusalem
Post op-ed). Harper’s Magazine likewise reviewed it
favorably, as did the ever-reliable Counterpunch, which proposed
the delusional hypothesis that Israel’s security barrier “closely
follows the line of the Western Aquifer” as part of a sinister plot to divert
“Palestinian” water to Israel. (Just for the record: (i) the Western
Aquifer discharges most of its water beneath Israeli territory, where it
has been readily accessed since the 1920s; (ii) the “line” Israel’s security
barrier most “closely follows” is that separating would-be Palestinian
terrorists from their intended Jewish victims; and (iii) Jews living behind
this barrier, but beyond the 1949 Green Line, get their water from
Israeli — not Palestinian — sources.)
The mendacious French report
is hardly the first word on this subject. In May 2008, National
Geographic gave two thumbs down to Israel’s life-sustaining desalination
plants, pointing out that fossil fuels are needed to run them (thereby
threatening the planet), that they produce water that is “too pure” (thereby
threatening the integrity of water pipes) and that they are vulnerable to
terrorist attack (not to give anyone any bright ideas). Far worse was a 2009 Guardian “exposé”
entitled, “Who will save Gaza’s children?” wherein Victoria Brittain claimed
that Israeli water policy had exposed Gazan newborns to toxic levels of
nitrates, thereby causing an “exceptionally high” incidence of “blue baby
syndrome.” In fact, the number of cases of “blue baby syndrome” — the
lethal form of the medical condition “methemoglobinemia” — stands
at zero. (Although mild, non-lethal cases of methemoglobinemia have
occurred in Gaza, the high nitrate levels that cause them are attributable to
flawed Palestinian fertilizing methods, not to Israeli water policy.)
Collectively dubbed the “water
libel,” by Jerusalem Post blogger, Petra Marquardt-Bigman, the above reports
are unified by their devil-may-care attitude towards established facts. Relying
on Palestinian Water Authority and Joint Israeli-Palestinian Water Commission
documents, Visser and Shaked have wholly debunked Shaddad Attili’s
accusations. For example, Attili claimed that Israelis consume four
times more water per capita than Palestinians. The reader will reach
the same conclusion — provided he uses Attili’s calculus, which (a)
overestimates Israeli usage per capita by nearly 100% (280 cubic meters
annually versus 150); (b) underestimates Palestinian usage by more than 50% (60
versus 140) and (c) grossly overestimates the Palestinian population by
counting 400,000 Palestinians living in Israel (where they
use Israel’s water supply), as well as another 400,000 living
abroad.
As for the French National
Assembly report, it turns out that Monsieur Glavany systematically evaded
essential facts with an aplomb not seen in his country since the second
Dreyfus trial. Moreover, he interpolated a number of
venomous inaccuracies into the report at the 11th hour without notifying
his co-authors, all of whom disavowed his claims on reviewing the
final text.
So what precisely are the
facts? A useful starting point would be to mention that under Jordanian
rule prior to 1967, only 1 in 10 West Bank households were connected
to running water, and that today, owing to Israeli water policy, the figure
stands at 96% (and will soon rise to 98.5%.). Secondly,
Palestinians steal Israeli water (not the other way around as
alleged by Attili and Glavany), while Israel exports volumes to the West Bank
greatly in excess of what is mandated by the Oslo Accords.
(Israel does so primarily to compensate for the Palestinian Water Authority’s
repetitive failure to implement approved water projects and its
substandard maintenance and security procedures, which result in the loss of
an estimated 33% of the Palestinian water allotment annually.)
Mainly because it doesn’t
waste time on such mundane tasks as developing and maintaining its water
resources, the PWA and its director have abundant time to level false charges
against Israel. And mainly because Israelis aren’t doing any of the
things of which they stand accused, they’ve had abundant time to work on the
region’s very real water crisis. Indeed, they’ve been working on it since
before Israel was a state. It was the Jewish community
that drained the swamps of Mandatory Palestine’s coastal plain in the
1920s in order to access springs from the Western Aquifer which lay
beneath. In 1937, this same community founded the Mekerot (or
national water company). Since that time, they’ve attacked the water
problem from multiple angles. For example, “drip irrigation”
methods pioneered by Israel in the 1960s, deliver water to plant roots with an
efficiency approaching 80% (double the rate seen with open irrigation), and
newer “sub-surface irrigation” techniques do even better. Because the
country is mostly arid, Israel built its National Water Carrier (1964) to
transport water from areas of higher rainfall near Lake Kinneret to the parched
Negev, thereby transforming desert areas into productive agricultural
land. Israel recycles 75% of its wastewater (6x the rate of its nearest
competitor), and employs the recovered water in agriculture. They have
developed airborne drones that detect leaks in water pipes via water meter
alarm systems and a “curapipe” process that seals “pinhole” leaks before they
are even detectable. Hi-tech “SmarTap” faucets reduce household water
consumption by 30% with patrons scarcely noticing.
Israel’s most ambitious
program, however, is its “Desalination Master Plan.” Initiated in 2000,
its goal was to build state-of-the-art “reverse osmosis” desalination plants
along the Mediterranean coast capable of producing 400 million cubic meters of
potable water annually by 2005. (By 2020, the figure is projected to be
750 million cubic meters). The first reverse osmosis plant — then the
largest of its kind worldwide — opened in Ashkelon in 2005 with a capacity to
produce 100 million cubic meters annually at a cost of 52 cents per cubic
meter. (Natural drinking water actually costs more since it must be
processed.) A second plant opened in Hadera in 2010, and
when the Soreq and Ashdod plants go on-line in 2013, Israel’s desalination
plants will account for 85% of Israel’s household water consumption and turn
the state into a water exporter.
Abroad, Israeli technology
companies have built more than 400 desalination plants in 40
countries. India has embarked on a pilot project relying on
Israeli expertise, and China has signed a deal with Israel’s IDE technologies
to build a “Green” desalination plant that desalinates via evaporation and
condensation.
While Palestinians blame
Israel, Israelis work on innovative solutions. This March, the
Palestinian Water Authority petitioned the World Water Forum to fund a $450
million desalination plant in Gaza. Within 24 hours, Israel offered to
lend its expertise to the project. Perhaps an
Israeli-Palestinian “water war” is occurring – but it isn’t being waged by
Israel.
Jack Schwartzwald is a
Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University and author
of Nine Lives of Israel (McFarland, 2012).
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