A World Bank report recently indicated that Israelis have access to four times as much water as Palestinians due to restrictions imposed by Israel. A more accurate way of phrasing the cause is, “due to theft.” Details in the The Real News video.
After the World Bank issued a report commissioned by the Palestinian Authority on the condition of water accessibility in the West Bank, Israel claimed the report’s authors are biased. To understand the conditions on the ground, how they’ve been addressed, and whether the so-called peace process succeeded in addressing them, The Real News spoke to the LifeSource Project, a non-profit organization focusing solely on the issue of water. Susan Koppelman and Taysir Arabasi told The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky that the Mountain Aquifer, the biggest supply of fresh underground water is pumped by Israel even though it lies almost entirely in the West Bank. They also spoke about restrictions on Palestinians to dig water wells, and their dependence on the Israeli national water corporation, Mekorot.
So, the West Bank water supply has been colonized along with the land. Who would have guessed it?
Source: CommonDreams.Org
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/08/24
About the only thing missing at this point is the abduction of Palestinian children to attend Indian schools. Oh that, and Custer.
As an American, the thing that I find most infuriating is that all this nonsense is over a piece of land that, while not the least pleasant place on earth, does rank fairly low on lists of places I’d think were worth fighting tooth and nail over for sixty years unless, like the Palestinians, I happened to be stuck there with nowhere else to go.
Yeah, yeah, I know all about the whole Promised Land shtick. Well, I dunno ’bout you, but if my God had made me wander for a generation in the fucking Sinai Peninsula and then tried to tell me that this was the promised land, I’d be having second thoughts about the golden calf.
But in all seriousness, as a human being, what baffles me is that the Israelis behave so badly, so completely without basic scruples or human decency, and yet so many people — the Israelis included — seem to think that they’re the good guys, instead of a fanatical pack of liars, thieves, and mass murderers. (I have to slip into my human mode instead of my American mode to think this, since America is the result of successfully doing to the Indians what Israel hasn’t yet managed to do to the Palestinians.)
When a people cross the line into nationalist ethnocentrism as Serbia did in the 90s and so many others did earlier, it is possible to justify the abduction of children, or more realistically, their murder, in the name of God and country.