...The WCC makes much of how Palestinians are "thirsting for justice." Only it has turned its eyes away from the thirst of Palestinians for justice from the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself. These very days, a Palestinian legislator, Najat Abu Bakr, sought refuge in the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council after PA President Mahmoud Abbas ordered her arrest. Her offence was to accuse one of Abbas's ministers of -- wait for it -- stealing Palestinian water and selling it privately.
Malcolm Lowe..
Gatestone Institute..
06 March '16..
Two recent Gatestone Institute articles were addressed to the current campaign of the World Council of Churches (WCC) called "Seven Weeks of Water 2016." In response, the WCC has issued an
open letter to Gatestone. This author is responsible only for what
his article stated. Conversely, we can examine the WCC's response exclusively as referring to that article.
The article concerned the "sermon" preached by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Olav Fykse Tveit, when he launched the campaign in a Jerusalem church. The sermon
can be downloaded from the WCC's website.
From this viewpoint, the WCC's open letter contains a plainly false statement. It says: "The information and statistics we employ in the campaign are derived from United Nations sources. None are from the Palestinian Water Authority."
Read the sermon from beginning to end and back, and you will find only one reference to a United Nations source: that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 100 liters of water per day per person (a target that is missed in many parts of the world). Regarding Palestinian water, Tveit's "information and statistics" are drawn, as the sermon explicitly says, from the "advocacy group of Palestine, EWASH" (that is, from the Palestinian website "Thirsting for justice"). So, contrary to what the open letter states, Tveit's sermon, which constituted the opening statement of the campaign and sets the tone for whatever follows, is based on a source openly engaged in pro-Palestinian agitation.
The criticism in my article was addressed to what Tveit unhesitatingly accepted from that source. So note, too, that the open letter makes no attempt to answer, or even to mention, what that criticism was. How could it, since it alleges that Tveit's sermon is part of a campaign that cites UN data alone?
Moreover, the web page of the campaign
contains various "reflections" by Palestinian clerics and WCC employees in the same spirit as Tveit's sermon. The contribution of
Bishop Younan, for instance, makes the same claims about water as Tveit does. It is absurd to claim that the campaign is based exclusively, or even mainly, on UN sources.
The WCC does, however, have good reason for not attempting to deal with my criticism. It is that my criticism is so evidently correct, and Tveit's claims are so lamentably wrong, that the WCC would make itself look absurd if it quoted the criticism and struggled to find any way around it.
To save the reader time, let us briefly review three main claims made by Tveit and why they are wrong.
First, Tveit claims that "80% of the ground water from Palestine's mountain aquifer is pumped underneath all the way to Israel." Likewise Younan: "80% of the water is pumped to Israelis." You have to be a blind believer in Israeli iniquity not to notice that this statement is prima facie incredible. The suggestion is that Israel has created a network of pumps and pipelines that gather water from wherever it can be found and transfers it all to Israel. Of course, there is no such network.
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