Al Jazeera: Can water end the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Could solving the water crisis in Israel and Palestine also help resolve the entrenched occupation and conflict? By Arwa Aburawa

Israeli officials destroy a water storage facility used by Palestinian farmers outside the West Bank village of Yatta, near the Israeli settlement of Sosia, in early June [EPA]

Around three weeks ago on a late Tuesday morning, Israeli soldiers armed with a truck and a digger entered the Palestinian village of Amniyr and destroyed nine water tanks. One week later, Israeli forces demolished water wells and water pumps in the villages of Al-Nasaryah, Al-Akrabanyah and Beit Hassan in the Jordan Valley. In Bethlehem, a severe water shortage have led to riots in refugee camps and forced hoteliers to pay over the odds for water just to stop tourists from leaving.

Palestinians insist that the Israeli occupation means that they are consistently denied their water rights which is why they have to live on 50 litres of water a day while Israeli settlers enjoy the luxury of 280 litres. Clearly, water is at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but commentators are now insisting that shared water problems could help motivate joint action and better co-operation between both sides, which could in turn help end the conflict.

“It’s a shame that water is being used as a form of collective punishment when it could be used to build trust and to help each side recognise that the other is a human being with water rights,” says Nader Al-Khateeb, the Palestinian director of the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME).

Electronic Intifada: JNF plants trees to uproot Bedouin

Bedouin near al-Araqib village protest land confiscation by the State of Israel and the Jewish National Fund, April 2009. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills

Israel has exploited the country’s natural environment for its own political ends for decades. Since 1948 olive trees have been uprooted, quarries mined, the most fertile lands taken for settlements and water illegally extracted.

However, in the Naqab (Hebraized as Negev) desert and the Galilee this ecological occupation takes on a very different form. Instead of uprooting trees, they are planted in huge numbers by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist organization setup in 1901 and which displaced Palestinians during the 1948 dispossession or Nakba, and has since planted more than 24 million trees covering more than 250,000 acres of land in the country.