occupation 101
if americans knew what isreal is doing
what would you do if your home was demolished for another race. what would you do if you homeland was occupied. what would you do if you were being removed from your land. would you just give up or fight!!!
Palestine: a visit By Stuart Yates
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Stuart Yates | The Activist
“Water is life, Without water we cannot live; not us, not the animals, or the plants. Before we had some water, but after the army destroyed everything we have to bring the water from far away; it’s very difficult and expensive. They make our life very difficult, to make us leave. The soldiers first destroyed our homes and the shelters with our flocks, uprooted all our trees, and then they wrecked our water cisterns. These were old water cisterns, from the time of our ancestors. Isn’t this a crime? Water is precious. We struggle every day because we don’t have water”
Fatima al-Nawajah from Susya,quoted in the Amnesty International report ‘Thirsting for Justice‘
With a small group of Friends (Quakers) from the UK I arrived in Ramallah a few days before the Amnesty International report came out and was privileged to hear the author, Donatella Rovera, speak to it at the Friends’ Meeting House in Ramallah and answer questions, together with a representative from the Palestinian Water Authority. We already had some awareness of the water situation in the West Bank. On our arrival, on a Friday, we were told that the water tanks had just been filled and they would have to last until the next scheduled filling: the following Tuesday. So we were given the following mantra to learn and put into practice:
“If it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s yellow, let it mellow”
Welcome to the West Bank! Welcome to Ramallah, the supposedly Palestinian-controlled first city! I say ‘supposedly’: one of our hosts pointed out an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military camp on a hill (always on a hill!) overlooking Ramallah. “That is where the tanks come from.” Israeli tanks were last in Ramallah in 2002, laying seige to Yasser Arafat’s compound, but as late as January 4th 2007, Israeli troops entered Ramallah with a dozen or more jeeps, supported by helicopters, killing four Palestinians, including one child. More incursions, unreported, go on daily, or rather, nightly: “Last night we carried out between 15 and 20 actions,” a top Israeli commander said of the West Bank raids, in a recent interview under military rules of anonymity. “That was a fairly typical night. It’s like throwing a blanket on a fire. If we stop for a minute, we will go backwards very quickly. We call it cutting the grass.” (New York Times November 26th 2009) Is it preserving the peace? Or is it random punishment? Or provocation? Who can tell, but those that suffer are those taken without trial into custody and their bereft families.
Outside Ramallah we found the same situation regarding water. The Palestinian inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) have 70 cubic litres of water per person per day. The Israelis living in the illegal settlements in the West Bank get by on around 300 litres per person per day. The World Health Organisation states that 100 litres per person per day are needed on an ongoing basis for sustainable living. (Before readers in the UK get too righteous about this, the UK’s consumption is even higher than the Israeli settlers.) So, illegal settlers consume more than four times the amount of the indigenous population.
“Indigenous” – yes, while we are on this subject, let’s refute the “a land without people for a people without land” so-called justification for Israeli colonialism. Below is a 1945 UN map showing the ethnic breakdown of land ownership by sub-district in what is now Israel/Palestine:
In every sub-district “Arabs” have a greater ownership of land than “Jews”, without exception. These pie charts graphically represent the extent to which the Palestinians have lost their homes, their land. This is not an argument against the existence of the state of Israel, merely demonstrating that the Palestinians owned most of the land and have been dispossessed.
Back to water. The Oslo agreement states: Annex III: “Protocol on Israeli-Palestinian co-operation in economic and development programmes: The two sides agree to establish an Israeli-Palestinian continuing committee for economic co-operation, focusing, among other things, on the following: 1. Co-operation in the field of water, including a water development programme prepared by experts from both sides, which will also specify the mode of co-operation in the management of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and will include proposals for studies and plans on water rights of each party, as well as on the equitable utilization of joint water resources for implementation in and beyond the interim period.” Note the phrase “equitable utilization of joint water resources”. Israel uses around 90% of available water, Palestinians 10%. Population ratios: Israelis 65%, Palestinians 35%. Equitable? Demonstrably not. Although, as indicated above, there is a joint water body, there has been no new well sunk in the West Bank for Palestinians since 1967. Since 1967, all new wells have to be approved by the Israeli Defence Force Administration – no prizes for guessing its policy. In June 2008, the Red Cross was trucking in water to the Southern area of the West Bank. It is no accident that illegal Israeli settlements are built, not just on top of hills, but on top of water sources. It is also no accident that the ‘security’ separation wall follows the line of the Western aquifer. The Israeli strategy is not new. In 1919 the World Zionist Organisation specified the boundaries for a future Jewish state:
Note that it includes the Litani river in Lebanon, the river Jordan and the Yarmouk river. The UN plan in 1947 did not allocate any of these water resources to Israel but Israel now controls all but the Litani river. Lest there be any doubt about Israel’s past and present aims, read what David Ben-Gurion said: “It is necessary that the water sources upon which the future of the Land depends should not be outside the borders of the future Jewish homeland. For this reason we have always demanded that the Land of Israel include the southern banks of the Litani River, the headwaters of the Jordan and the Hauran Region from the El Auja spring south of Damascus.”
Water is part of Israel’s long-standing project to rid “the Land” of all non-Jews. Fatima al-Nawajah is absolutely right in her sentence quoted above: “They make our life very difficult, to make us leave.” That is exactly what the Israeli government wants: historic Palestine emptied of all Palestinians.
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
Moshe Dayan, addressing the Technion University students on March 19, 1969. We have seen above the Zionist map of 1919 – an underlying plan for an Israel larger than that of today even including the illegally occupied territories. Maps show the relentless progress towards the 1919 map:
UN Partition Plan 1947. Note that the land allocated to the ‘Arab state’ was contiguous. Note also that the land allocated to the ‘Jewish state’ was rather smaller than that seized in 1948. There is also a rather forlorn hope embedded in the words “with economic union” in the original plan.
The following maps graphically illustrate the process:
