When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Author:Fred Pearce
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780807085868
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2006-03-16T21:00:00+00:00

The West Bank has few permanent rivers, but the dolomite hills are honeycombed with caves and crevices, where rainwater collects. There are three aquifers beneath the West Bank. The largest is beneath the western slopes and drains toward Israel proper and the Mediterranean. The second, around Nablus, drains north and supplies much of Galilee. The third drains east to the Jordan Valley. Collectively they are called the mountain aquifers. They are virtually the only source of water for Palestinians, and they are at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over water.

In the 1950s, when the Palestinians lived here under Jordanian rule, the West Bank seemed to have ample water. Far more rain was falling and filling the aquifers than the Palestinians needed. The excess water in the western aquifer gushed from springs along the boundary between the West Bank and Israel. Those springs were the sources of two of Israel’s largest rivers, the Yarkon and the Taninim, which flowed west into the Mediterranean. But as Israel’s population grew, Israelis began to tap the water of the western aquifer by sinking well fields close to the border. Soon they were taking far more of the water under the West Bank than the Palestinians ever had, without actually setting foot on the West Bank.

“By the early 1960s, we were taking about 240,000 acre-feet from the aquifer and the Arabs about 16,000. Between us we were fully utilizing the aquifer, plus a little more,” said Ze’ev Golani, who became an Israeli official on the West Bank. The water table in the western aquifer began to fall, and the two rivers died. The Yarkon’s bed became an open sewer for the fast-growing communities of the Tel Aviv urban area. So, said Golani, “When Israel took control of the West Bank after the Six-Day War in 1967, we said there should be no additional pumping by anyone—certainly not for agriculture. And not much has changed since.” In that way, almost by accident, Israel came to take the lion’s share of the western aquifer and, in the name of conservation, decreed that it should take the lion’s share forever.

Israeli hydrological rule on the West Bank since 1967 has been absolute and unyielding. Across most of the West Bank, Palestinians have been largely forbidden to sink new wells, and they rarely get permission to replace old ones. Before the Israelis took control, said Clemens Messerschmid, a German geologist working for the British Department for International Development and the Palestinian Water Authority, the West Bank Palestinians had 774 wells. Thirty-five years later, only 321 were still operating. The rest either dried up or were off-limits in areas requisitioned by the Israeli military. Israel even prevents Palestinians from expanding use of the estimated five hundred springs and spring tunnels. Its only concession is to sell water to villagers with piped distribution networks. But they are in the minority and constantly fear being cut off.

As the existing springs and wells deteriorate and their population grows, Palestinians find they have less water per capita than when the Israelis invaded.

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