Report Uncovers 'Water-Apartheid' in the Occupied West Bank

[shira]

9. The water libel

Last edited Fri Apr 12, 2013, 07:46 PM - Edit history (1)

A recently released official French report that blames Israeli “apartheid” water policies for Palestinian water problems was angrily rejected by Israel, and a Foreign Ministry spokesman noted that the “systematic evading of simple facts that are available for verification within the field indicate the blatant bias of the author.” But the French report was (unsurprisingly) not the first one to falsely accuse Israel of depriving the Palestinians of water that is rightfully theirs.

In October 2009, Amnesty International made similar charges in a report that was poetically entitled “Troubled Waters.” Israel responded to the allegations by pointing out that the Amnesty report “ignore[d] Israeli data, papers and reports, although they contain verifiable facts presented with total transparency. This questionable approach, which consists in systematically disregarding Israeli material while relying exclusively on Palestinian allegations, raises doubts as to the real intentions of the report’s authors and of the organization itself.” The Water Authority also provided a detailed response refuting Amnesty’s claims.

By now, there is also a new study by Professor Haim Gvirtzman, a hydrologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University, who highlighted how ridiculous the charge of “apartheid” was by pointing out that since 1967, Israel had connected more than 700 Palestinian villages to running water. Or, to quote the statement by Israel’s Water Authority:

Before the Six Day War in 1967, only about 10% of Palestinian households in the West Bank were connected to a central water system, while today more than 90% receive regular supply of water.

Yet, there is no reason to assume that any of Israel’s detailed refutations will prevent the recycling of the claims made by Amnesty or the new French report – and, needless to say, the media and the anti-Israel blogosphere also love to deal with this subject.

I think of it as the “water libel” because it often echoes the medieval accusations that Jews were poisoning wells. One widely noted example is the “Stinking Op-ed” penned by the now disgraced British columnist Johann Hari to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008. Another arguably even more revealing example is a Guardian article by Victoria Brittain that was published in December 2009 under the title “Who will save Gaza’s children?” Brittain claimed that due to Israel’s blockade of Gaza...

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http://blogs.jpost.com/content/water-libel