Can You Imagine? Amira Hass, Ha'aretz Publish False Water Charges

...The bottom line is that virtually every charge leveled by Amira Hass is either flat out wrong or blatantly deceptive and Ha'aretz should immediately run a forthright correction.

Alex Safian, PhD..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
15 February '14..

In a front page article in Ha’aretz (Feb. 13, 2014; click here for the cached version), Amira Hass claims that “Israelis – including those in the settlements – use three times more water a day in their households as West Bank Palestinians do,” and goes on to charge, among other things, that this is:

just one aspect of the large discrepancy between Israelis and Palestinians in access, development and use of water resources ...

Hass is dead wrong about the relative usage of water by Israelis and Palestinians, but before getting into details and numbers, it’s important to illustrate a deeper distortion in her claims.

What if, for example, one society uses most of its water for agriculture, in a very wasteful old-fashioned way, like flood irrigation of water-intensive crops, and therefore has only limited water left for residential use in households?

And what if, in contrast, a neighboring society saves water in every way possible, starting with low flow toilets and low flow shower heads, and it also invents and uses extremely efficient agricultural techniques like drip irrigation? And what if that society also recycles its sewage – say eventually it treats 78% of its sewage – devoting most of that reclaimed water to agriculture, thereby saving an equivalent amount of fresh water? And what if that society also builds some of the largest desalination plants in the world, turning sea water into fresh drinking water?

And if as a result of all these efforts the second society has much more clean water available for its people to drink, does that mean it is discriminating against the first society?

Obviously the answer is no, any claim of discrimination here would be nonsense.

But if the first society is the West Bank Palestinians, and the second is Israel, then Amira Hass’s conclusion would evidently be that yes indeed, this is proof of Israeli discrimination against Palestinians.

In other words, just looking at basic realities, and without even examining detailed numbers, Hass’s discrimination claims are nonsense.

‘Water Apartheid’? - A consistent anti-Israel narrative, but simply not backed up by the data

...while, proportionally, “settlers” use a bit more water per capita than Palestinians – Palestinians consume roughly 4 times more total water than Israelis “settlers” in the West Bank.

Adam Levick..
CiF Watch..
11 August '13..

Harriet Sherwood published a report in the Guardian on Aug. 8 about a new Palestinian city being built near Ramallah (Rawabi rises: new West Bank city symbolises Palestine’s potential) which will eventually be home to 40,000 residents. The new city of Rawabi is being built by the Palestinian conglomerate Massar International and the government of Qatar, and will, Sherwood informs us, be a hi-tech center which will boast “shopping malls…landscaped walkways, office blocks, a conference centre, restaurants and cafes”.

However, though we’ve at times praised her modest improvements covering the region, and her tendency to provide a bit more balance to her previously one-side stories, Sherwood still has journalistic tick which continually betrays her sympathies and biases, even in otherwise unproblematic reports. A case in point is the following passage from her Aug. 8 story on Rawabi.

Water has been another huge challenge, both for construction and to service the finished buildings. Israel controls almost all water supplies; 600,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem consume almost six times as much water as 2.7 million Palestinians.

(Read full article)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!.

.

Water management as a weapon in Arab-Israeli conflict

The glass is arguably half empty, but also half full. 
Either way, there's no doubt someone was paid 
to fill it, and that money has gone somewhere. 
Where?

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
04 February '13..

Last summer, we wrote here about a campaign of allegations against Israel by, and in relation to, the terrorist regime in Gaza. The immediate trigger was a troubling essay published in Australia by the local correspondent here for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Ruth Pollard. We made efforts to engage her in discussion about it but got no response, and eventually resorted to publishing a rejoinder (entitled "Muddying troubled waters") to her claims in a different Australian paper. See "5-Jul-12: Needed: Bridge over troubled Gazan waters". Her own editors declined to consider publishing our op ed, but were kind enough to offer to pass it along to the letters editor down the hall.

Now there are some startling revelations about the exploitation of the water issue. They appear in a Jerusalem Post article by the well-connected freelance writer, Yochanan Visser. See "How water became a weapon in Arab-Israeli conflict" in yesterday's Jerusalem Post. The whole piece is worth reading if, like us, you believe that an understanding of who is and is not doing intelligent things with water is a key to understanding who does and does not want peace and a decent life for all the people living in this neighbourhood.

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

.

Shragai - Palestinian water theft is tapping Israel dry

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
15 February '12..



Palestinian theft of water in Judea and Samaria has reached nightmare proportions. Every year, 10 million cubic meters of water are stolen from the mountain aquifer under Israeli control, while drilling permits for Palestinians allow for much less. As if that wasn’t enough, just a fraction of the sewage generated by the Palestinians is properly treated, causing considerable damage to the environment.

On a cloudy night a few months ago, shortly after the residents of a number of Arab villages and Israeli settlements in the Hebron Hills region discovered that their faucets had run dry, the Israel Defense Forces descended on the Mekorot water pipe, which runs from Beit Gobrin to Hebron. It was assumed that the disappearing water was caused by illegal Palestinian re-routing and diverting of water from dozens of illegally drilled holes in the main pipeline. Yet, when IDF troops arrived on the scene that night to investigate, what they discovered was hundreds, not dozens, of re-routing points.

The pipes which the Palestinians plugged into the main conduit provided water to pirate irrigation pools which served as makeshift reservoirs of stolen water. The Palestinians used these reservoirs for agricultural needs. Fortunately, the IDF destroyed these reservoirs. Likewise, similar incidents have been reported on the Shiloh-Migdalim pipeline as well as in other areas. The IDF troops came away surprised at the number of illegal holes drilled for purposes of re-routing stolen water. Every year, 3.5 million cubic meters of water in Judea and Samaria are stolen in this fashion.

Dozens of irrigation pools have now been torn down. Dozens of kilometers of illegal piping have been confiscated. This is an endless Sisyphean war, but, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg.

A new study by Professor Haim Gvirtzman, who heads Hebrew University’s Hydrology Studies Program, and whose report was published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, reveals that Israel loses some 10 million cubic meters of water per year as a result of state-sanctioned theft. In broad daylight, Palestinians illegally drill in hundreds of spots without receiving the necessary permits from the joint Israel-Palestinian Authority committee that handles water issues., Either Ramallah willfully ignores these incidents or expresses its approval. Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game.. When Israel shuts down one drilling site, unfortunately, another pops up.

Marquardt-Bigman - The water libel

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
20 January '12..

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:

Visser/Shaked - The devastating truth about water and Palestinian statehood

The owner of the local Snow bar,
swimming in his pool in the hills of
Ramallah: quite a decent place

Yochanan Visser/Sharon Shaked
JPost Opinion
28 August '11

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235772

Documents prove PA claims are all wet.

On June 15, 2011 The Jerusalem Post published an article about the Palestinian water crisis, written by the head of the Palestinian Water Authority, Dr. Shaddad Atilli.

In his article, Atilli wrote that Israel’s ‘discriminatory policies’ are to blame for the lack of water in Palestinian society. He claimed that Israel uses the Joint Israeli Palestinian Water Committee (JWC) to veto and delay Palestinian water projects. He also wrote that Israel illegally exploits 90% of the shared water sources.

Furthermore, he claimed that because of the Israeli theft of water and the destruction of water wells and treatment plants, people realize that the two-state solution is rapidly fading. His libelous article, full of distortions, outright lies and false accusations, was yet another proof of the PA’s intransigence.

Recently our organization, Missing Peace, obtained authentic papers documenting meetings of the Joint Israeli Palestinian Water Committee (JWC), and correspondence between Colonel Avi Shalev, head of the International relations branch of COGAT, and Dr.Atilli. These documents paint an entirely different picture.

Contrary to Atilli’s outrageous accusations, the Palestinian Authority has been sabotaging the two-state solution by preventing the development of an independent water infrastructure for the future Palestinian state.

Let’s examine some of the claims in Atilli’s article and compare them with the picture that emerges from the JWC and COGAT documents.

‘Israel delayed and vetoed Palestinian water projects,’ says Atilli.

First of all, article 40 (14) in the Oslo Accords clearly states that all JWC decisions about water projects in the West Bank need mutual agreement. Once approved, JWC projects for the territories under Palestinian control (Areas A and B) do not need any further Israeli involvement. Projects in Area C, where Israel is in control, need approval from the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA).

Since 2000 the PWA submitted 76 requests for permits to the office of the Civil Administration. Subsequently 73 permits were issued by ICA and three denied because there was no master plan.

In a letter of June 8 2009, Shalev responded to Atilli’s complaint that ICA did not honor a PWA request to issue 12 of these permits. Shalev wrote that these permits had already been issued in 2001, and that ICA wondered why the PWA did not execute these projects.

Another 44 JWC-approved projects, the majority in Areas A and B, like the construction of a waste water treatment plant (WWTP) in Jenin that received approval in 2008 - have not been implemented. The German government even withdraw a plan to build a WWTP in Tulkarm when it concluded that the PWA could not handle the project. When, back in November 2009, the PWA complained about a lack of funds, the Israeli government offered to finance water projects for Palestinian communities. The PA has yet to respond to this offer.

HRW critique that doesn’t hold water

Netanyahu: "We must expose the hypocrisy of human rights organizations that turn a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world."

JPost Editorial
21 December '10

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night attacked the ostensible anti-Israel bias of some human rights watchdog groups. “We must expose the hypocrisy of human rights organizations that turn a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world... and instead target the only liberal democracy in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu’s comments appeared to be a reaction to a 166-page report entitled “Separate and Unequal,” issued by Human Rights Watch earlier Sunday. In addition to descriptions of alleged Israeli violations of human rights, the report, the longest and most comprehensive issued on any Middle East country this year, called on the US to punish Israel by deducting aid in accordance with its spending on settlements.

There is a tendency among politicians, including the prime minister, to make sweeping charges against HRW and other human rights NGOs, generalizing that they are riddled with malicious intent without providing specific examples. It is worth focusing on one of the many tendentious claims in HRW’s report to illustrate the unfortunately frequent validity of official Israel’s sense of grievance.

THE REPORT takes Israel to task for a purportedly discriminatory water allocation policy. HRW stated that, “Average Israeli per capita consumption of water, including water consumption, by settlers is 4.3 times that of Palestinians in the occupied territories (including Gaza).”

This is true, as far as it goes: Per capita water consumption among Palestinians is 70 liters a day, compared to Israel’s average per person of 300 liters a day. What HRW failed to mention, however, is that access to piped water has dramatically improved in recent decades and is significantly better than in Syria or Jordan, which would have been in control of the West Bank had it not attacked Israeli in 1967.

In fact, as Alon Tal of the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University noted in a recent article in the Israel Journal for Foreign Affairs, Israel has significantly exceeded its requirement as set down in the 1995 Oslo II Peace Accords, increasing supply by 60 million cubic meters (mcm) a year, instead of 28.6 mcm as required.

The 10 percent of the Palestinian population on the West Bank who do not have reasonable access to running water might usefully be contrasted with, say, Romania, where one-third of the population has no running water, or closer to home, the Jordanian city of Irbid, where 400,000 residents lack access.

(Read full "HRW critique that doesn’t hold water")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

National Geographic, Israel and Water: The Facts

Alex Safian, PHD
CAMERA
Media Analysis
16 June '10

National Geographic Magazine has an unfortunate habit of regularly publishing inaccurate and intemperate articles about Israel, which have falsely blamed Israel for expelling Palestinians, for being responsible for declines in the Arab Christian population (which has actually increased in Israel), for discriminating against Israeli Arabs, and for oppressing Bethlehem. To this list of false accusations the magazine has now added stealing Palestinian and Syrian water, as alleged in Parting the Waters, part of the magazine's April 2010 Water Issue.

The article, by Don Belt (who wrote the earlier report on the decline of Christian Arabs), is notable for a dubious achievement – there is a deception even before the text of the article actually begins.

The opening picture spread, showing an Israeli couple on the beach of the Sea of Galilee, has a caption that charges "since 1967 Israel has blocked Syria's access to the lake's shoreline."

Technically true, but at the same time extremely deceptive. What Belt doesn't tell his readers is that Syrian control of the eastern shoreline before 1967 was a violation of both the international border between Israel and Syria, and the 1949 Armistice Agreement between the countries.

According to that international border, set in 1923, the Sea of Galilee was entirely within the Palestine Mandate, and therefore within Israel as the successor to the Mandate. To quote from an article by Frederic Hof (appearing on the very pro-Palestinian Jerusalem Fund site):

The boundary itself was a product of the post-World War I Anglo-French partition of Ottoman Syria. It was demarcated so that all of Lake Tiberias, including a ten-meter wide strip of beach along its northeastern shore, would stay inside Palestine.

Lake Tiberias is another name for the Sea of Galilee, and the border was set in this way because the territory of the Syrian Mandate already had an excellent water supply, including the massive Euphrates River. The Palestine Mandate was not similarly blessed, thus the decision to place in its sovereign territory all of the Galilee and the Jordan River.

(Read full analysis)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.