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Stephen Glain Last Updated: April 28. 2009 6:58PM UAE / April 28. 2009 2:58PM GMT As a former, and by many accounts successful, finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu presumably knows his way around economics. So when the Israeli prime minister says he will work to provide the Palestinians with economic, if not political, independence, might that not suggest his hard-line government understands that a prosperous Palestine would be an important first step towards a more stable Middle East? Not according to the World Bank, which last week issued the latest in a series of reports about how the Israeli government is systematically pre-empting the evolution of a viable Palestinian economy. The 154-page “Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development” is written with a blandness suited to the banality of this particular Israeli outrage. The report offers a detailed look at how Israel deprives the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic commodity for human survival, a deficit that consumes a growing share of Palestinian GDP. The report is another indictment, as if one were needed, of the now-defunct Oslo Accords. Just as Oslo lacked adequate mechanisms to enforce Israeli pledges to sharply reduce its occupation of Palestinian land, so too has Israel been allowed to abrogate its commitment to revise interim agreements relating to water systems in the Arab territories it controls.
Instead, according to the World Bank report, Israel has aggrandised a growing share of available water supplies while intensifying Palestinian reliance on Mekorot, the Jewish state’s national water carrier. The report states that Israel, without the approval of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) – a legacy of the Oslo process – draws more than 50 per cent from the aquifers that support both the West Bank and Israel beyond what it is authorised under the accords. Needless to say, Palestinian protests of such violations are routinely ignored, according to the report. document.write(''); The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about resources as it is about land. It is no coincidence, for example, that West Bank settlements are located on top or near groundwater wells, a strategy that dates back to the earliest days of the settler movement. But the situation has worsened over the past decade, when Israel began restricting mobility in the West Bank and Gaza following its “withdrawal” from certain Palestinian areas under the terms of Oslo. Palestinians must now pay an estimated 8 per cent of their household budgets for adequate water supplies, about double the globally accepted standard. That is beyond the capacity of many Palestinian families, and revenues have fallen precipitously in the parts of the West Bank under Palestinian administration. Rural villagers who are unconnected to the water grid must allocate up to 20 per cent of their household income for tanker-born drinkable water, an increasingly expensive enterprise due to the proliferation of Israel-controlled checkpoints, the massive, serpentine security wall and other barriers to mobility throughout the West Bank. The World Bank estimates the added expense of transporting water by tanker amounts to about 1 per cent of the Palestinian GDP. In Gaza, water availability has reached “crisis levels”, while utility revenues have collapsed and tax collections rates are down 20 per cent. Water quality is deteriorating and there is growing evidence of rising water-related diseases. The public health costs of waterborne illness for children below the age of five alone is 0.4 per cent of GDP, the report estimates. The environmental impact, meanwhile, is devastating. Sanitation and sewage systems have been badly neglected due to unstable security conditions and Israeli restrictions on movement. Sewage is returned untreated into lagoons, wadis and the sea or seeps into the soil where it ultimately contaminates aquifers. In rural areas, septic tanks are not properly emptied, while Israel’s settler population routinely dumps raw sewage on to Palestinian soil. Just as Israel controls the borders, roads, air and sea ports, airspace and export revenue on which the Palestinian economy vitally depends, so too does it control Palestinian water resources via Mekorot, an unhealthy reliance intensified by Israeli over-extraction of available supplies. Mekorot’s dominant role in water distribution, the report states, “makes [the West Bank and Gaza] vulnerable to Israeli decisions and interventions, and may increase commercial risks and costs”. The report concludes with a raft of proposals that might ameliorate the crisis, all of which require Israeli co-operation and consent. It suggests, for example, the wholesale reform of the JWC, which is strongly biased in Israel’s favour due to its disproportionate levels of power and capacity. Only half of the US$121 million (Dh444.4m) worth of Palestinian-proposed projects have been approved since 2001, while all but one mooted by Israel have been granted. Israel, the report lays out, routinely decides unilaterally how regional water sources will or will not be developed. An economy without access to clean water supplies is by definition unsustainable. Mr Netanyahu either fails to understand this or his commitment to Palestinian economic independence is nothing more than political palaver. Either way, Palestine’s man-made water crisis should be at the top of the agenda when the Israeli leader meets his US counterpart early next month. |
 By Uri Blau
The office at the Adiv fabric-printing shop in south Tel Aviv handles a constant stream of customers, many of them soldiers in uniform, who come to order custom clothing featuring their unit's insignia, usually accompanied by a slogan and drawing of their choosing. Elsewhere on the premises, the sketches are turned into plates used for imprinting the ordered items, mainly T-shirts and baseball caps, but also hoodies, fleece jackets and pants. A young Arab man from Jaffa supervises the workers who imprint the words and pictures, and afterward hands over the finished product.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T- shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."
There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit's commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about. Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere. For example, shirts declaring, "We won't chill 'til we confirm the kill" were banned in the past (the IDF claims that the practice doesn't exist), yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year.
The slogan "Let every Arab mother know that her son's fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit's shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
"It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him." |
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Palestinian human rights activists are suing the UK government for alleged "flagrant" breaches of international law in its dealings with Israel. The organisation Al-Haq has called for a High Court judicial review into the UK policy of selling arms to Israel. It says Britain broke international obligations not to render "aid or assistance" to Israel following its invasion of Gaza last year. The Foreign Office said Britain's arms trade was tightly regulated. Al-Haq said the UK government appears to have "positively assisted" Israel in its invasion of Gaza last year by continuing to sell it weapons. The organisation also says a record amount of UK arms exports to Israel were approved in the first quarter of last year. Following the lodging of papers in the High Court calling for a judicial review, Phil Shiner, a solicitor representing Al-Haq, said he believed the issue deserved a full court hearing. He said: "It is Al-Haq's position that if the UK were to meet its international obligations now, Palestinian lives and limbs in Gaza would be saved. "There would be a much greater chance of accountability for Israel's actions and a change in the policies of all key players so that nothing like it can ever again befall the Palestinian people." Al-Haq's case is that Britain has an obligation, under international law, not to assist Israel because it says Israel has interfered with the Palestinian right to self-determination, has acquired territory by force and has committed war crimes. Other pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for the legal action. Bruce Kent, vice president of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, said: "This government is complicit in arms sales to Israel some of which have been used to commit war crimes." |
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More than 1,500 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem could be made homeless after Israel told them their homes are illegal and are to be demolished. "The owners of 80 houses in the al-Bustan neighbourhood have received eviction notices saying that the structures will be destroyed because they are illegal," Hatem Abdel Kader, an official responsible for Jerusalem affairs in the Palestinian government, said. Kader said that several of the houses served with demolition orders had been built before the 1967 war, when Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan, but that numerous extensions have been built since. "The [Jerusalem] municipality used this as a pretext to issue the demolition orders despite appeals by the residents," he said. No comment was immediately available from the city authorities. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed the Arab east of the city, but under international law east Jerusalem is considered to be occupied and has not been recognised by world powers as the Israeli capital. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, Israeli authorities have demolished about 350 houses in east Jerusalem since 2004, saying that they were built without permits. Source: Al Jazeera and agencies |
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