In Palestine, Plant Your Resistance

Together with the support of locals, four environmentalists setup Bustan Qaraaqa or 'Tortoise Garden' in the summer of 2008.

Looking over the rugged landscape of the West Bank, it's hard to believe that even nature's resources are under Israeli control. Yet over the years of occupation, the fertile lands of the West Bank have been confiscated for illegal settlements. Palestinian water supplies have also been hijacked so that Israeli citizens enjoy four times as much water as Palestinians.

Israeli control of the West Bank's natural resources has led to stunted development in the region, with Palestinians increasingly dependent on Israel for their food and water. In response to this, a group of environmentalists in the West Bank have come with a unique and eco-friendly way to fight the Israeli occupation: they are growing their own food!

"More Independent, More Self-sufficient"

In the village of Beit Sahour on the outskirts of Bethlehem, UK environmentalists have decided that the best way to empower Palestinians is to teach them to grow their own food and utilize naturally available resources. Alice Gray, an environmental scientist who helped launch the project explained to IslamOnline.net, "All of these things, these dependences, are being used as weapons against the Palestinians. So our point is that the more independent, the more self-sufficient you are the less these things can be used as political tools."

Together with the support of locals, four environmentalists setup Bustan Qaraaqa or 'Tortoise Garden' in the summer of 2008. It is entirely independently run by these environmental activists who hope to pass it over to Palestinian management over the next five years. Since the project launched it has grown to include a guest house for volunteers and a 4-acre plot of land dedicated to experimentation with permaculture techniques.

Permaculture is a method of growing food using sustainable methods which advocate a close relationship between people and nature on ethical grounds. Gray, however, sees it in a very different light insisting that "Permaculture is a political act and the politics of it is in taking back control and moving away from dependence."

Whilst this new-found green concept may seem irrelevant for Palestinians struggling to put food on the plate, Gray also argues that it is these very people that the project is aimed at.

"In Palestine, [permaculture] is not just answering some ethical concept but also [fulfills] a dire need. We are always experimenting with lots of ways of growing vegetables and resource-use such as water conservation, but everything that we do we will do at low cost so that it is easily replicable for Palestinians."

Water Shortages

Water is one of the most contentious issues affecting Palestinians in the West Bank as it is inextricably linked to farming and food security.

In fact, the project has already gathered a wide base of support ranging from Palestinians in refugee camps to the Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Yigal Palmor who reportedly said in The Jordan Times that such a project would be "very positive".

"Everyone we talk to, on all levels of society can relate to it as it's practical and needed," said Gray. "There is no Palestinian who has not experienced problems like water shortage, which we are trying to resolve."

Water is one of the most contentious issues affecting Palestinians in the West Bank as it is inextricably linked to farming and food security. A recent report by the World Bank found that Palestinians have the lowest access to fresh water in the region and 50% of households have reported quality problems in their drinking water supply. The World Bank also found that Israel has been over-extracting water from the West Bank's resources, reducing the amount left for Palestinians and increasing Palestinian dependency on Israeli water supplies.

The lack of water in the region also means that vast expanses of Palestinian West Bank farmland are currently drying out and unable to grow crops. The agricultural sector is already an important lifeline to the West Bank, which given better access to water could create more jobs, independent food security and even contribute to poverty reduction. The World Bank has estimated that the restrictions in agriculture and declining availability of agricultural water carry significant losses as high as 10 percent of GDP and 110,000 jobs (World Bank, April 2009, West Bank and Gaza: Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development).

Water shortages are also pushing up the price of water for Palestinian farmers who in some cases are paying 12 times more for the same amount of water in comparison with Israeli farmers. Bustan Qaraaqa has been trying to resolve the issue of water shortages by encouraging farmers to build underground cisterns which catch and store large amounts of rainwater as well as incorporating sewage systems which don't use any water. "To make sure that people have access to water although they are being denied water infrastructure, you have to store every drop so nothing is wasted," asserted Gray.

Bustan Qaraaqa also practices what it preaches and has recently built a rainwater system to support its flourishing orchards of olive trees, figs, pomegranate and apricot as well as wheat. "The tree nursery is my great love!" beams Gray. "We collected all of the seeds ourselves.We didn't buy it from anyone; we just walked around and took it from the trees we saw and so far we have collected around 200 species."

Reconnecting with their Land

As well as tackling the dependence of Palestinians on Israel for food and water, Bustan Qaraaqa is also aiming to resist the occupation by reconnecting Palestinians with their lands.

Before the Nakba of 1948, many Palestinian communities were traditionally centered around agricultural farms which fostered a strong bond between people and their land. With the invasion of Zionist militias, however, many fled or were forced from these small villages into highly urbanized areas which undermined the importance of land and agricultural farming.

Ever since, Palestinians have been losing their lands to 'security zones', the Apartheid Wall as well as to illegal Israeli settlements scattered across the West Bank. "A real concern for modern Palestine is that people are being severed from their land, even their consciousness of it is disappearing as they are being shut into ghettos behind 8 meter walls," Gray explains.

"Part of the strategy of dispossession of the Palestinians is to kick them off their land and so part of resisting it must be to reconnect them with it again."

Link to Article

West Bank water access mired in politics

Arwa Aburawa, The Electronic Intifada, 26 May 2009

Workers from the Israeli water authority backed by armed soldiers take water samples in the occupied West Bank town of Qalqiliya. (Khaleel Reash/MaanImages)

Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) is calling for the replacement of committees, which control the West Bank's water, for having "failed both sides" with "catastrophic" consequences.

"It is time to replace the failed mechanism of the Joint Water Committees established under Oslo [the peace accords of the mid-1990s], with an institution where Palestinians and Israelis are true partners in both water supply and management responsibilities," said Nader Khateeb, the Palestinian Director of FoEME. This denouncement follows a recently published World Bank report which also found that the Joint Water Committees (JWC) "fall short of the needs of the Palestinian people."

Established under the Oslo accords, the JWC was set up specifically to oversee management of shared aquifers and to ensure that the West Bank and Gaza Strip received extra water accorded to them under the agreement. Palestinians and Israelis were intended to be equal partners working towards integrated water management and infrastructure. In reality, however, the JWC simply entrenched Israeli influence over the West Bank's water resources and introduced a complex permit system that has severely limited water development projects ever since.

Alice Gray, a former water consultant in the West Bank, said that the most significant impact of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian environment has been the suspension of development. "My job at the time was basically to tell people all the reasons that they probably wouldn't be able to implement their project," she explained. "The reason that they [projects] are not built is because in order to build them under the Oslo accord, you need permission from the Joint Water Committees -- that's one big problem already."

Out of $121 million worth of Palestinian projects presented to JWC in 2001-2008, only half (or $60.4 million) were approved and only a third have been implemented or begun implementation. The World Bank also reported that 106 water projects and 12 large-scale waste-water projects are still awaiting JWC approval, some of them since 1999.

These startling statistics are all the more unsettling when compared with Israeli-proposed projects for development in the West Bank, where all but one have been swiftly approved by the JWC. Decisions made by the JWC are in theory based on consensual agreement between the two parties, yet the World Bank's report openly acknowledges that Israel alone has virtual veto power on all water issues.

In the West Bank, when plans are being drawn up for vital water infrastructure such as waste-water plants, the only space that is generally available is in Area C (which is 60 percent of the West Bank and is under total Israeli military control). So finding enough land that is at an "acceptable" distance from walls, checkpoints and even future Israeli settlements is another obstacle that projects need to overcome. Even when this condition is met, other complications with Israeli settlements arise.

Water consultant Alice Gray said, "When the Palestinians go to the Israeli authorities to ask for a permit to build a sewage treatment plant for their town, the Israelis say sure, but you also have to network and treat the sewage of the Israeli settlements."

She added, "The Palestinian position then generally would be no, they are not happy with that because if you build infrastructure for settlements then you are contributing to their entrenchment -- it's like admitting that they have a right to be there. So politically it's a nightmare."

Overcoming these constraints has proven so difficult that only one in seven proposed waste-water treatment plants is actually operational, and consequently only 31 percent of Palestinians are connected to a sewage network.

The underdevelopment of the West Bank's water infrastructure has a direct impact on the daily lives of Palestinians who face high costs and low quality water resources. Overall, Palestinians spend around eight percent of household expenditure on water, which is twice the globally-accepted standard. In addition, the poorest spend up to one-sixth of their household budget or more on providing clean water for their family.

By regional standards Palestinians have among the lowest access to fresh water, forcing Palestinian communities to engage in unlicensed drilling simply to obtain drinking water. The Israeli Water Authority has used its de facto role as regulator to prevent Palestinians drilling for water, despite growing demand from Palestinian consumers. Meanwhile, Israel has increased its own off-take from the aquifer above the agreed levels. This practice allows Israeli citizens, including settlers in the West Bank, to consume four times more fresh water per capita as Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The World Bank also found that although Palestinian agriculture accounts for a bigger share of economic output and overall employment in comparison to Israel, the Palestinian per capita water budget for agriculture is one-fifth of Israel's.

"You are dealing with a situation of vast inequality," Gray asserts. "In terms of the water situation, it is not experienced in the same way by Israelis and Palestinians ... and that creates a very different scenario for those Israeli farmers who have access to subsidized water and so never have to deal with the situation in the same way as Palestinian farmers."

As it stands, irrigated agriculture is an important economic sector in Palestine, contributing about 12 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and employing 117,000 people, according to the World Bank. Improved water resources would enable agriculture to play a key economic, social and political role in rebuilding the Palestinian economy. The World Bank's report, "West Bank and Gaza: Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development," states that "the cost to the economy of foregone opportunity in irrigated agriculture is significant, with upper bound preliminary estimates that could be as high as 10 percent of GDP and 110,000 jobs."

Taken together, the implications caused by restrictions from the JWC are hard to ignore. Not only is it limiting the development of vital infrastructure within Palestine, it's reducing the Palestinians' quality of life and crippling economic growth. As Khateeb, the FoEME Palestinian Director, explained, "After 15 years of JWC failure ... It's urgent to free the water sector and water needs of both peoples from the conflict."

Arwa Aburawa (http://arwafreelance.wordpress.com/) is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10547.shtml