A Long-Term Project

The scrupulously engineered effort to deprive Gazans of water and food is widely condemned as a singularly extreme act of barbarism. Yet those who know that history did not begin on October 7 recognize it as the gruesome endgame of a long-term colonial policy of controlling and tightening Palestinian access to vital resources.

Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been intermittently bombed since the start of the cruel blockade in 2007, while in the West Bank, population centers have long suffered from an artificial water shortage. In the summer, some village households have access to water only once a fortnight, and even in some Ramallah neighborhoods, only once a week.

Ramallah is a city with a greater annual rainfall than London. Although it sits on top of the abundant Central Aquifer, residents are forbidden to dig wells and draw water. There is no absolute water scarcity; the shortage is entirely manufactured by Israeli authorities, who supply the West Bank with a quota that has not changed since the Oslo agreement of 1994, despite a population increase of 75 percent in the intervening years. Israel has its hand on the water tap and can turn it on or off at will, either as a collective punishment or as a threat reminder, whenever it wants. In the meantime, settlers nearby enjoy an abundant supply for their swimming pools and organic vineyards.

Water deficits throughout the fast-growing Middle East are increasingly a prominent feature of climate stress. But, as elsewhere in the world, the real picture is one of uneven distribution. The lands between the river and the sea have been the site of a long-standing struggle to match Jewish population growth with water availability. The balance between the two has always been the key to the colonization of Palestine.

In his seminal Zionist novel, the Old New Land, Theodor Herzl correctly imagined that the future of his desired Jewish homeland would depend on the heroic efforts of hydraulic engineers. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a delegation from the Zionist Organization, led by Chaim Weizmann, urged the great powers of the day to include the River Jordan’s headwaters, along with the Litani and Yarmouk Rivers, in their carve up of Ottoman lands that led to adjudicating the border between Palestine and Lebanon. They were unsuccessful at that time, though the goal of diverting the Jordan’s waters in the north to supply settler growth in the south to “make the desert bloom” became a number-one Zionist priority in the decades to follow.

By 1919, the dream of fertile colonies in the south was already alive in advertisements to recruit would-be Jewish settlers to Palestine. The seductive prose about fruitful land lying in wait was redolent of the sales pitches of arid lands in the American West. Leopold Bloom, no less, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), ponders one of these pitches on a flier issued by “Agendath Netaim” (a garbled version of Agudath Netaim, a real colonization association):

To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel, and construction. Orange groves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds, or citrons. . . . Your name entered as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly installments.

Bloom is not moved; his association of Palestine is with “a barren land . . . a dead sea in a dead land, gray and old.” “It bore the oldest, the first race,” he muses, but now, in his mind, it is little more than “the grey sunken cunt of the world.”

Under the British Mandate, the principle of “economic absorptive capacity” was applied to determine the Jewish immigration quota. Evaluations were based, in large part, on surveys of the available water supply. In the estimate of a controversial 1939 white paper, Palestine’s natural resources, including its water reserves, could only support a population of two million, 500,000 more than the existing population. As a result, the authorities recommended limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 annually for five years, after which the Arab majority would have a say-so on any further immigration.

This arrangement would have effectively preempted any Jewish majority in Palestine. Zionist pushback was intense and sharpened the resolve to exploit all water resources to support a much larger population. David Ben-Gurion vowed that “no square inch of land shall we neglect; not one source of water shall we fail to tap; not a swamp that we shall not drain; not a sand dune that we shall not fructify; not a barren hill that we shall not cover with trees; nothing shall we leave untouched.”

After 1948, one of the Israeli state’s first formal acts was to implement a massive infrastructural effort to pump out the Jordan’s water in the far north and convey it southward over distances of up to 130 kilometers to irrigate the Mediterranean coastal plain, Jerusalem (al-Quds), and the Negev (Naqab).

Completed by 1964 and partially subsidized by the United States, the extensive network of canals, tunnels, reservoirs, pumps, and pipes known as the National Water Carrier (NWC) was Israel’s primary nation-making achievement. Every cubic foot that flowed through the NWC to service the new immigrant settlements in the south was taken away from the once-abundant source that irrigated the traditional Palestinian farms of the Jordan Valley.

After the settlement movement kicked into high gear in the late 1970s, the NWC’s grid would be extended much further east to supply Jewish colonies in the West Bank. Integration of the occupied territories into Israel’s national water system was promoted to the international community as a benefit of the occupation, but it was also the clearest indication that these lands would someday be annexed, either partially or wholly. The capacity to deliver water securely to settler locations far into the West Bank or to permit their residents to drill deep wells nearby would, over time, facilitate the seizure of large areas of land, as is now occurring throughout the Jordan Valley.

The gaping inequality between the well-supplied hilltop settlements and the drip feed to Palestinian villages below gave rise to the labeling of “water apartheid” on the part of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. But the apartheid designation does not fully capture how the control over water supply drives the active process of land seizure through dehydration.

Water deprivation is a prime military tactic in the “battle for Area C,” the portion of land administered by Israel, which comprises 62 percent of the West Bank’s land but houses only 5 percent of its population. The strategy is to parch these residents, with a view to pushing them into urban cantons in Areas A and B.

In Gaza, this weaponization of water, along with all other resources, has been taken to its genocidal limits. But, again, it is useful to know that the backdrop to the ethnic cleansing is a long-standing Jewish insistence on demographic supremacy. In 2022, Arnon Soffer, Israel’s leading demographer alarmist (known by his detractors as “Arnon the Arab-Counter”), announced that Jews were now a minority between the river and the sea, accounting for only 47 percent of the population of Israel/Palestine. It was the latest in a series of estimates, dating back to his 1987 studies that conjured up a threat to Israeli Jews of the “demographic time bomb” of the high Palestinian fertility rate.

Reportedly, his numbers helped to persuade Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005. Disengaging from the strip meant that Israel could preserve its Jewish majority even if it annexed the West Bank and granted citizenship to all its Palestinian residents.

But Soffer was not comforted by this scenario. In a May 2004 interview with the Jerusalem Post, a month before the Knesset approved the withdrawal, he predicted that “when 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day,” and “if we don’t kill, we will cease to exist.”

For Stoffer, and those who respond favorably to such exterminationist incitements, the pathway to genocide as a guarantee of demographic superiority was laid out quite clearly long before October 7. “The only thing that concerns me,” he added in the interview, “is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

Water Is the Final Means to Remain

For a hundred years or more, the bloodlines of Palestinian families have been at risk of erasure. The attempted annihilation of Gazans’ right to reproduce for decades to come is a grisly reminder that bearing and rearing children have long been seen as acts of resistance in themselves.

Yasser Arafat used to boast that “the womb of the Palestinian woman” is the “strongest weapon against Zionism.” Recruiting reproductive power in this way relegated Palestinian women to a traditional role as mothers, whose contribution to the liberation movement would be to bear and raise children, or to be honored as a mother of a martyr (um al-shahid). It was consistent with the patriarchal view, also expressed by Arafat, that gender justice would have to wait until the primary battle against the colonizer was over.

But the barbaric nature of Israel’s campaign has revealed how significant even that limited role is. While world media has been overly focused on the slaughter of women and children as “innocent victims,” it has highlighted Israel’s targeting of the entire system of social reproduction in the strip, now widely seen as a systematic endeavor to put a stop to the next generation of Palestinians.

Palestinians are justly lionized for their resolve to be steadfast — sumud — and to stay on their land no matter what. But to take away their water is to eliminate the final means to remain. When West Bank settlers seize artesian springs and shoot holes in storage tanks, or when Mekorot, the Israeli water authority, turns off the big tap or when the Israel Defense Forces detonates wells in the Gaza Strip, they are not just waging environmental violence. They are following a logic of colonization by dehydration clearly implied by Zionist founders more than a century ago.