A reader sent me this article in the New Scientist. It is about a neglected aspect of the US/Israel war on the Palestinian population: the fact that it is a water war. I don’t have the statistics with me (Vandana Shiva cites a few of them in her book, Water Wars), but Israeli per capita water use is vast compared to Palestinians. Israeli agriculturalists are allowed to dig wells several times deeper than Palestinians. Gaza is always short of drinking water and every time it is besieged the Israelis essentially use the denial of water as a weapon. And, most tellingly, the Apartheid Wall‘s path follows the West Bank aquifer very closely.
The New Scientist article reports on a ‘plan’ for desalination plants to supply the Palestinian territories with water, while the Israelis freely use the Palestinian aquifer for their own water needs, as they are doing now.
This may come as a surprise to readers, but the US and Israeli officials agree that the plan is a good one, while experts, scientists, and Palestinians all agree that it is a bad one — all strictly from a technical point of view, of course. The immorality of a campaign of ethnic cleansing as part of a wholesale water theft (or is the water theft part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing?) doesn’t really come up in the article.
(thanks to the reader who sent me the article. points to any reader who can identify the song and the artist from which the title of this blog entry was taken and email it to me).