By Vijay Prashad / Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water.
“Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.
“Israel,” he noted, “must stop using water as a weapon of war.”
Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair.
In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said on 10 October, “Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
On March 19, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted that Gaza needed “spare parts for water and sanitation systems” as well as “chemicals to treat water,” since the “lack of these critical items is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis.”
“Malnutrition crisis” is one way to talk about a famine.
The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is “currently facing high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to Oxfam and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with force.
A U.N. report released on World Water Day (March 22) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2 billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that 4 in 5 people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems.
As a consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of 5 die from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to these deficiencies.
The U.N. report notes that, since women and girls are the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school.
A 2023 study by U.N. Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls:
“Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.”
The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people.
Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture.
Already, as the U.N. Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly.
According to the United Nations, half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, while one quarter faces “extremely high” levels of water stress. “Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability,” the U.N. notes. The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing tens of millions of people into flight and starvation.
Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so is the rules-based international order.
Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in creating the water crisis.
For instance, over the past several decades, governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. Consequently, 42 percent of household wastewater is not treated properly, which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact that only 11 percent of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused.
Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of the freshwater available to us on the planet.
There are several sensible policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis, such as those proposed by U.N. Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of nature.
In March 2018, we launched our second dossier, “Cities Without Water.” It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed then, six years ago:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI (IPCC, June 2008) is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this document is that the changes in weather patterns — induced by carbon-intensive capitalism — have a negative effect on the water cycle.
Areas where there will be higher rainfall might not see more groundwater due to the velocity of the rain, which will create a rapid movement of water to the oceans. Such high velocity rainfall neither refills aquifers (natural water sources), nor does it allow water to be stored by humans.
The scientists also predict higher rates of drought in regions such as the Mediterranean and Southern Africa. It is this technical report that put forward the number that over a billion people will suffer from water scarcity.
For the past decade, the United Nations Environmental Programme has warned about the growth of water-intensive lifestyles and of water pollution. Both of these — lifestyles and pollution — are consequences of the spread of capitalist social relations and capitalist productive mechanisms across the planet.
In terms of lifestyle use, the average resident in the United States consumes between 300 and 600 litres of water per day.
This is a misleading figure. It does not mean that individuals consume such high amounts of water. Much of this water is used by water-intensive agriculture and by water-intensive industrial production, including energy production. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends per person usage of 20 litres of water per day for basic hygiene and food preparation.
The gap between the two is not accidental. It is about a water-intensive lifestyle — use of washing machines and dishwashers, washing of cars and watering of gardens, as well as the use of water by factories and factory farms.
Water pollution is a serious problem. In Esquel, Argentina, the people saw that the contaminants from corporate gold mining were ruining their drinking water. ‘Water is worth more than gold’ (El agua vale más que el oro), they said. Ruthless techniques of extraction by mining corporations (by use of cyanide) and of cultivation by agribusiness (by use of fertilisers and pesticides) have ruined reservoirs of clean water.
Their blue gold, say the people of Esquel, is more important than real gold. They held a public assembly in 2003 that asserted their right to their water against the interests of the private corporations.
It is worth pointing out that the amount of water it would take to support 4.7 billion people at the WHO daily minimum would be 9.5 billion litres – the exact amount used every day to water the world’s golf courses. The water used by 60,000 villages in Thailand, for instance, is used to water one golf course in Thailand. These are the priorities of our current system.”
In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing piped water to the thousand of children under the age of five who die every day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Vijay Prashad
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.