Israeli Refusal to Yield Control of West Bank Water Forces Deferral of Issue

By Frank Collins

The unyielding Israeli position on water very quickly led to one of the initial deadlocks in the conference on the extension of limited Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank beyond the Jericho area. The Israeli edict delivered at the conference, "Any increases in water supply for Palestinians are not to come out of the Israeli share of the water," only hardened the deadlock. The Palestinians could by no means accept that condition.

The 1995 negotiations, dubbed "Oslo II," were to reach agreement on the conditions of the Palestinian autonomy for the remainder of the five-year interim period provided for in the Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP). The West Bank water issue generally was acknowledged to be the most intractable, next to Hebron, of the more than two dozen major issues under negotiation in Oslo II.

More than a year after the signing of the Cairo agreement implementing Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area, the protracted negotiations were concluded with the signing of Oslo II on Sept. 28 in Washington, DC.

To get around the failure of the negotiations on the management of West Bank water during the interim period, the Israelis insisted that further negotiations on the question be abandoned and the subject be pushed over into the final status negotiations. Therefore, any agreements reached would not take effect until after the five-year interim period is over. In conformity with the provisions of the Oslo Declaration of Principles of Peace, the final status negotiations will begin no later than May 1996. There is little likelihood that an earlier start will be made on them in view of the glacial rate of the most recent ones.

Elimination of the water question from the Oslo II negotiations means that the status quo now will continue for another four years. That status quo of limited and diminishing water rations for Palestinians in the West Bank constitutes an almost intolerable situation.

Recognizing the seriousness of the Palestinian water crisis, the Israeli negotiators offered to raise the Palestinian allotment by 28 million cubic meters (25 percent) but only over a four-year period, with the major increments to take place only in the third and fourth years. This will do little to remedy the immediate water shortages. It is not clear where this water is to come from in view of the Israeli refusal to grant water increases to the Palestinians out of Israel's current supplies. Most likely is an Israeli plan to develop the eastern aquifer in the West Bank running down into the Jordan valley and not yet fully pumped. The time required to develop this aquifer would account for the delay in offering the Palestinians the promised increase of 25 percent.

Immediately after their 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli military occupation authorities issued orders to the effect that no new wells were to be drilled to supply water to the Palestinian population. All new wells drilled in the ensuing 28 years provide water only for Israel and for the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Israeli wells have proliferated to the point that 80 percent of the water pumped from West Bank acquifers now is diverted to Israeli usage, reducing the Palestinian portion to only 20 percent. The total pumping rate has reached the maximum, or average annual rainfall replacement rate of the aquifer, and is possibly beyond the safe point, given the highly variable rainfall of this semi-desert region.

The drilling of new and deeper wells by the Israelis has diminished the output of the Palestinian wells. Many of the latter have dried up completely because Israeli authorities will not issue permits to deepen them, even where the water table has dropped. The water from the remaining wells now has to serve the needs of a vastly increased Palestinian population.

When the drilling of new wells by the Palestinians was forbidden at the beginning of the military occupation, West Bank population was 940,000 (World Bank figures based on the Israeli census taken immediately after the conquest). No census of West Bank Palestinians has been taken since then. However, 1993 estimates ranged from the low Israeli figure of 1.9 million to the high Palestinian figure of 2.15 million, the latter taking account of the 150,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem. Since the West Bank population is growing exponentially at a rate above three percent, it may be expected to reach more than 2.3 million in 1999 when the final status agreement is scheduled to take effect. This estimate takes no account of immigration to the West Bank from the Palestinian diaspora nor, indeed, of the possibility that no permanent agreement on West Bank autonomy will be reached.

Because the 1967 supply rate already was insufficient and the current severe water shortage grows worse year by year, something must be done to relieve the Palestinian water crisis, and quickly. But the Israelis refuse to yield any of their share of water to the Palestinians. It is in these circumstances that Israeli insistence on the extension of the status quo for another four years presents the Palestinians with an insurmountable problem. So long as exclusive Israeli control of West Bank water continues, there is ample water for the Jewish settlers but almost none for their Palestinian neighbors.

In a prime-time program on Israeli TV this August, scenes of lush lawns and children playing in full swimming pools in the Kiryat Arba Jewish settlement (population, 6,000) were contrasted with parched fields and empty water faucets in the nearby Palestinian city of Hebron (population, 120,000).

The TV program caused something of a sensation in Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered an investigation and called for water to be trucked into Hebron from Kiryat Arba. A total of 27 cubic meters of water were brought in, literally a drop in the bucket compared with the city's daily consumption under normal conditions of 25,000 cubic meters of water per day.

The Israeli authorities blamed the water shortage on negligence by the Palestinian municipal government, claiming that 40 percent of the water delivered is wasted through leaks in the distribution system. The Palestinian mayor of Hebron, Mustafa Natshe, responded by pointing out that a new $700,000 water distribution system funded by the U.N. had been installed in Hebron and that the actual problem was that the city was not getting its allotted share of water from the deep well at Herodian which was being delivered instead to Kiryat Arba, the 400 Jewish settlers in Hebron and other settlements in the area.

The intervention of the U.N. to replace the Hebron water distribution system should have been unnecessary. Under the Geneva Conventions, the occupying power is responsible for infrastructure maintenance, using the taxes it collects from the local inhabitants. While the leaks in the distribution system in Hebron may have been reduced because of the good offices of the U.N., large amounts of piped water are being lost through leaks in other Palestinian towns and villages with antiquated distribution systems.

The Israeli occupation authorities have displayed a total lack of concern for their responsibility for maintaining infrastructure. For example, two years ago the Palestinian village of Bethlehem made a request of the occupation's civil administration to repair leaks in their water distribution system. Thus far, there has been complete silence from the Israeli authorities in spite of repeated inquiries.

Beit Ula, a village near Hebron, has a sad story to tell about the growing Palestinian water shortage. Twenty years ago, Beit Ula was connected to the national water carrier, Mekorot, to replace the old wells, many of which were unused because they had gone dry. However, beginning four years ago, the water pressure and the quantities of water piped to the village went into a steep decline, with numerous total cut-offs in the summer. The village no longer can depend on the piped water from Mekorot but instead must buy from tank trucks at high prices water which is pumped into old family wells. The wells drilled in Beit Ula after 1967 have been ruled illegal and destroyed by the Israelis.

The high price paid for tank truck water does not constitute the only economic exploitation of Palestinian water users. The prices charged Palestinians for piped water by the Israelis are four times higher than the subsidized prices paid by the Jewish settlers. In terms of ability to pay, the price of water for Palestinians is even more iniquitous. Israeli incomes are at least 10 times higher than those of Palestinians in the West Bank. The low price of water to the prosperous settlers simply subsidizes waste of the area's most precious resource.

The Israeli insistence that any additional water for Palestinians not come out of the Israeli share of water removed from the West Bank ever since the 1967 military conquest is not only a violation of international law. It also displays complete callousness for pressing Palestinian needs.

Seventy percent of Israeli consumption of water is for agriculture, an amount which is 175 percent higher than the Palestinian allocation. The water is sold to Israeli farmers at a highly subsidized price, less than one-third that paid by Israeli city dwellers. Israeli observers of the agricultural sector have pointed out that this subsidy for agriculture is tantamount to a $200 million annual subsidy for the agricultural produce exported to Europe.

The subsidized water encourages the growing of water-intensive crops such as cotton that otherwise would be uneconomical for Israel and hence would not be grown. The water subsidy is in addition to government financial support of the kibbutzim (collectives) and the moshavim (cooperatives) that are large factors in Israeli agriculture.

In recent years Israel's subsidized agricultural sector has accounted for only three percent of the Israeli Gross Domestic Product. This makes the refusal to meet the Palestinian water deficit from the Israeli share not only heartless, but ridiculous.

The West Bank water issue in the autonomy negotiations may be expected to have profound repercussions in Israeli domestic politics. Heretofore, the question of West Bank water has never been of major concern to the Israeli public, since Israel has taken as much as it wanted. Now, since the signing of the Oslo DOP, it has become possible for right-wing politicians to persuade Israeli consumers that they have a personal stake in the autonomy negotiations, falsely arguing that handing over control of West Bank water to the Palestinians would surely lead to water shortages and higher prices in Israel.

The impending confrontation in the autonomy negotiations over control of West Bank water comes at a particularly fortunate time for Israel's Likud bloc politicians. Likud has been campaigning vigorously against the Oslo DOP and the subsequent agreements based on it. Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu has threatened to annul all such agreements if Likud is voted into power in the Israeli general elections in 1996.

Should Likud actually win control of the government and halt the ongoing autonomy negotiations, leaving Israel in control of West Bank water, the Palestinian water shortages could become catastrophic.

As prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin has been promoting the prospective benefits for Israel of the peace process in his campaign platform for the 1996 elections. Rabin's pursuit of this strategy, however, has prompted Likud and the right-wing settler organizations to accuse him of selling out Israeli settlers to the Palestinians. Already opposition posters outside his Jerusalem residence depict Rabin wearing Arafat's characteristic keffiyeh .

The prospects of a close vote in the 1996 elections, therefore, make it extremely unlikely that Rabin will in any way modify Israel's uncompromising stance on the issue of West Bank water. Rabin's choices are thus locked in, although he must certainly realize that failure to achieve some early resolution of who is to control West Bank water that is satisfactory to the Palestinian public will almost certainly destroy the peace process.

Frank Collins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Report, has recently returned from a month of interviews in Palestine and Israel.