The United States-sponsored water agreement signed last week between Israel and the Palestinian Authority marked the end of Palestinian efforts to obstruct joint water projects in order to delegitimize Israel, an expert on Israeli water technology wrote in a recent op-ed published in The New York Times.
Seth Siegel, author of Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World, noted that the deal announced by Jason Greenblatt, the White House’s special envoy for international negotiations, will provide “billions of gallons of water supplies for each of the three parties,” Israel, the PA, and Jordan.
The PA’s involvement in an agreement with Israel over water marks the end of a Palestinian refusal to participate in joint water projects with Israel. Beginning in 2008, Siegel wrote, “the Palestinian leadership decided to turn water into a political tool to bludgeon Israel.” While falsely claiming that Israel was conducting a policy of “water apartheid,” which gained currency in certain sectors, Palestinian leadership actually refused to participate in water projects with Israel.
In truth, Siegel wrote, “Israel was scrupulously adhering to the Oslo Agreement and providing more than half of all the water used by Palestinians in the West Bank.”
But to maintain the pretext of crisis, “Palestinian academics, hydrologists, environmentalists and others were strongly discouraged from doing water research or working on water projects with Israelis. Funding from N.G.O.s that had to pass through the Palestinian Authority dried up for joint academic projects in water. Palestinian water engineers were told they would not get work from the Palestinian Authority unless they broke ties with their Israeli counterparts.” In addition, the PA stopped sending a representative to the Oslo-created Joint Water Commission.
“Politics in service of the governed,” Siegel observed, “had given way to politics in service of ideology and obstruction.”
While Israelis living in the West Bank were impacted by the reduction in water projects, “the Palestinians suffered more.”
The first part of the project, which Siegel noted was initially announced in late 2013, calls for the construction of a 137-mile long pipeline to transport water from the Red Sea to the southern shore of the Dead Sea (via Jordan). There, the seawater will be desalinated at a plant powered by the electricity created by water running down the gradient, and the fresh water will transferred to still-to-be-built desert farms in southern Israel, with the brine sent to the Dead Sea, where water levels have long been falling. Experts estimate that the canal will cost around $10 billion, and the U.S., E.U., Italy, and Japan, among others, have already committed to part of the cost.
Aside from encouraging the Palestinians to engage with Israel once again over water issues, Siegel argued that the plan’s “strategic genius” is that no “radical rejectionist” future leaders can break the water agreement without creating “substantial hardships for their population.” The “biggest news” out of the press conference for the deal, which featured Israeli Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi and the Palestinian Water Authority’s Mazen Ghoneim alongside Greenblatt, was that it brought senior Israeli and Palestinian officials onto the same stage over important issues, wrote Siegel. The cooperation was a marked change from 2008.
Even last year, PA President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the false charge that Israel sought to poison Palestinian water while addressing the European Parliament.
Akiva Bigman observed in the Myth of the Thirsty Palestinian, which was published in the April 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine:
To the extent that a viable water supply infrastructure exists in the West Bank, it is because Israel built and maintained it. While this infrastructure was certainly constructed, in part, to service Israeli communities, its benefits have not been denied to the Palestinians, and no one familiar with the statistics involved can claim otherwise without being patently dishonest.
That Israel is so consistently blamed for this problem is especially problematic because it makes it less likely that the Palestinians will deal with it themselves. As shown above, the Palestinians have the ability to both live up to their obligations under international law and solve their existing water problems in doing so. The money, technology, and knowledge they need all exist and are available to them from both foreign and Israeli sources. That the Palestinians have either chosen not to avail themselves of such aid or cannot do so effectively due to internal problems is tragic, but it is not the fault of the State of Israel.
[Photo: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv / YouTube ]