Claims Israel deprives Palestinians of water are groundless

[Proto Profile]

Claims Israel deprives Palestinians of water are groundless
By Israel Harel

The blitz continues: After the Human Rights Watch and Goldstone reports (which were only the two most prominent among many, including some homemade ones), Amnesty's rocket, "Troubled Waters," has landed. The gist: Israel is drying out the Palestinians.

Any libel involving discrimination against Palestinians immediately makes headlines and is repeatedly broadcast in Israel more than anywhere, usually without fact-checking and sometimes without even a request for a comment from the authorities. The news editor knows, for example, that there are around 300,000 settlers and not 450,000 (if only there were) - guzzling rogues that they are of the Palestinians' water (some may say the blood). The motive for the Israeli media's extensive coverage of lies that besmirch their country is not very different from the motive of the foreign organizations themselves: undermining Israel's moral standing in its own eyes and those of the world.

Since military efforts have failed to damage Israelis' motivation to sustain the Jewish state, those who want to destroy the country have focused recently on trying to demonize that state, to make life in it unbearable (by directing their lies at the Jews' soft underbelly or soft heart: sensitivity to injustice), and to shake the Zionist sense of justice. Not only did we come from far away (some add in the service of colonialism) to plunder the Palestinians' land, but even after driving most of them out, we continue carrying out war crimes (in Gaza) and drying up (Suha Arafat even said poisoning) their wells (in Judea and Samaria). Jews are among those gleefully jumping onto this bandwagon of anti-Israel psychological warfare, including many whose wages are paid by foreign governments and organizations like Amnesty.

Amnesty's accusations on the water issue are groundless. Most of the settlements get their water piped in by the Mekorot water company from inside the Green Line not, as the organization claims, from wells in Judea and Samaria that belong to the Palestinians. And the Palestinians do not "have to make do" with 70 liters a day ("or less") per capita. According to the Oslo 2 accords they signed, they are entitled to 23.6 million cubic meters a year - but in fact they pump, with Israeli consent, 70 million cubic meters. On top of this, the Israeli Civil Administration supplies, over and above the Oslo requirements, water to villages that really are suffering from a shortage. A key question the Israeli media has left unasked is why doesn't Israel prevent the wildcat pumping in violation of the Oslo agreement that is both draining and polluting (along with the sewage that seeps through) the mountain aquifer?

Amnesty and the rest of the pro-Palestinians do not ask where the millions of dollars that flowed to the Palestinian Authority for the construction of an efficient and economical water system have vanished, or where the money is that the World Bank and other aid agencies have provided for a sewage system that would protect the environment and prevent the seepage of wastewater into the aquifers.

Another Amnesty lie: On the Jewish side, the report says, agriculture is flourishing while the Palestinians' fields are dry. The truth is that Jewish agriculture only existed in the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. Yields there reached world records and provided a handsome living for those who worked the soil, before the blade of the uprooting fell on them. Most Jews in Judea and Samaria - and this is actually one of the arguments used against them - work outside the settlements and return only at night. One reason for this is that apart from some orchards here and there that are irrigated by rainwater, there is no income-providing agriculture in Judea and Samaria in the classical sense because of the hilly terrain. -These facts are certainly known to the Israelis who work as researchers for these organizations. But the end, or the wages, justify the means.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124454.html

[Ogmios Profile]

I suppose the main point of contention is: why should Israel be deciding how much water Palestinians get? I'm coming round to the opinion that UN peacekeepers should be sent into Israel too sort all of this out.

By the way, you were on that other Israel thread saying that most Palestinians fled and you quoted numbers like 20,000 here, 30,00 there.

UNRWA provides assistance, protection and advocacy for some 4.7 million registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territory, pending a solution to their plight. The Agency’s services encompass education, health care, social safety-net, camp infrastructure and improvement, community support, microfinance and emergency response, including in times of armed conflict.

UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions. The Agency’s core budget for 2010-2011 stands at $1.23 billion. In 2009, emergency appeals for the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon amounted to $827.4 million.

http://www.un.org/unrwa/english.html

I would suggest it is you who is economical with the truth. 4.7 million of them ran away, but they weren't pushed off their land. That's almost the population of Scotland.

[Astrodicted Profile]

You know whats funny proto?Same posts on other forums.
Only thing you hasbarats quote is Israeli news/bs(2sources mainly).Stop promoting fucking genocide


"Suleiman al-Romaniyim, the mayor of the small West Bank village of Uja, says the water shortage is making it impossible for many of Uja's 4,500 residents to continue farming. They can't drill wells without Israeli permission, and yields are down from nearby springs. Al-Romaniyim blames the problem not just on low rainfall but also on "mainly Israeli wells that are located nearby the spring and that are pumping the water out."

"The 1994 Oslo Accords establishing the Palestinian Authority included an agreement to divide the water resources of the so-called Mountain Aquifer, the sole underground water source for the West Bank and a major source for . But Dr. Shaddad al-Attili, head of the Palestinian Water Authority, said that has systematically blocked Palestinian efforts to develop further water supplies. "International groups came here with cash for these projects, but we couldn't receive approval [from ]," he said."

Cant wait till you start yelling "anti semite"

[Proto Profile]

and if you would have read the article i posted in one of those threads
then you would know why that is .

Palestinian refugees are treated differently from other war refugees. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than by the existence of two U.N. bodies for dealing with refugees – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) deals exclusively with Palestinians; the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is charged with responsibility for all other refugees around the globe. The mission of the UNHCR is to assist refugees to begin a new life As a consequence of its activities tens of millions of former refugees are no longer classified as “refugees” when they gain citizenship in their new host countries.

By contrast, not a single Palestinian has ever lost his refugee status. There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees or their descendants who are citizens of Jordan. Yet as far as UNRWA is concerned they are still refugees.

Indeed the number of Palestinian refugees continues to expand rapidly. That is so because a unique definition of refugee is applied to Palestinians. Everywhere else in the world only those who fled their previous place of residence are classified as refugees, but not their descendants. With respect to Palestinians, however, refugee status is transmitted from generation to generation. Even if one’s children never set foot within Israel’s 1949 armistice lines and are as wealthy as Bill Gates, they are still classified as refugees.

Moreover, UNRWA applies a far more expansive definition of refugee to Palestinians than that applied by UNHCR to refugees anywhere else in the world. According to UNRWA’s definition, an Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, or Syrian citizen whose primary place of residence between June 1946 and May 1948 was within Israel’s 1949 armistice lines is classified as a refugee, even if he was only temporarily in the country in search of work.

The effect of the special treatment of Palestinian refugees by the U.N. is not to solve the plight of Palestinian refugees but to perpetuate it. As the number of those classified as refugees grows year by year, the only consequence is to make any solution of the underlying Palestinian-Israeli conflict that much more difficult.

[Proto Profile]

Stop promoting fucking genocide

they only genocide that happens in this case is in your head .

[Ogmios Profile]

Proto you just keep posting articles. Other people quote figures from Amnesty, the UN etc, the only people who really can be trusted, and you reply with a newspaper article. There is no point just keeping arguing about it just for the sake of it.

[Astrodicted Profile]

they only genocide that happens in this case is in your head .

[Proto Profile]

Proto you just keep posting articles. Other people quote figures from Amnesty, the UN etc, the only people who really can be trusted, and you reply with a newspaper article. There is no point just keeping arguing about it just for the sake of it.

maybe i'll stop posting articles when you actually start to read them

it's not just for the sake of it , it's for the sake of balance , you guys
present one side of the argument and i present the other side , i
think that's only fair .

[Proto Profile]

@ astrodicted

[Ogmios Profile]

maybe i'll stop posting articles when you actually start to read them

They have absolutely no authority. They are all biased. I can't be arsed reading more than a paragraph of any of them. From what I've read they do not concede ground on any issue ever. Is this the state of journalism in your country? But then it would have to be to paper over the war crimes and the inhuman treatment.