The Stink of Control
Reageer (0)26-8-2010
Sewage thickens the waters of the once pristine Zomar river in northwestern West Bank. With no nearby treatment plants, sludge like this coats the lands, poisoning wells and aquifers, polluting fields and infecting children.
“There is no real life there - it is just waste water,” said Iyad Aburdeieneh, Palestinian Deputy Director of Friends of the Earth Middle East.
Called The Alexander in Israel, the rancid Zomar is not unique in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Twenty-five million cubic meters of untreated sewage - or five Zomar rivers - leak into the West Bank’s environment every year, according to the World Bank.
Israel has allowed the Palestinians to build only one waste water treatment facility in the West Bank - and let others deteriorate.
“To even dig and line a septic tank, you need a construction permit at a household level. To dig and put in a cistern to get water, you need a construction permit,” said Michael Talhami, consultant for the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA). “There is an actually policy here resulting in actions taken by the Israelis over the past fifteen to make the Palestinians more dependent not only on water but waste water treatment.”
One in five families are connected to sewage systems, 69 percent use outdated septic tanks (often prohibitively expensive to maintain and empty), and more than 90 percent of all West Bank waste water is untreated, according to a B’Tselem report titled Foul Play.
This is an environmental calamity for people - especially the poor and marginalized. Over 200,000 West Bank Palestinians do not have running water, and rely on easily, continually contaminated surface sources. Old wells have dried up, fields are tainted, and underground cisterns fester. Outside Nablus, the World Bank reported 450 cases of Hepatitis A in the town of Burin. Amoebas sickened one-fifth of nearby Jurish village. Twelve percent of children surveyed in 2006 had diarrhea associated with poor water quality.
Cara Flowers, an officer with the Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Group (EWASH), saw the terrible effects of Israel’s waste-water freeze while visiting Salfit.
“It was just disgusting - industrial waste and lots of pollutants,” Flowers said. “You can see a lot of children playing in the river - there’s not a lot of spots they can go to. It’s having a pretty huge, negative impact on their lives. We heard people have been sick from eating crops grown in that area.”
The polluted Zomar flows west from Nablus, converges on the border town of Telkarem, before crossing the Green Line into Israel and becoming the Alexander near Emek Hafer. There, the modern waste water treatment plant of Yad Hana sanitizes the water for use in Israel. Then Yad Hana sends the Palestinian Authority the treatment bill.
“The amount being charged is unjustifiable,” Talhami said. The amount of sludge billed is “impossible” for the West Bank to produce. “We’re basically being charged for additional flows that are not are own.”
Over 200 million shekels, or $53 million, are deducted annually by Israel from Palestinian tax revenues, according to a PWA statement.
The PWA doesn’t want to pay Israel or stay beholden to their treatment facilities. They’d rather do it themselves and keep the cleaned water. But Israel continually denies the necessary permits to do so, perhaps for financial as much as political reasons.
The West Bank buys 52 percent of it’s water from the Israeli company Mekerot - but this official statistic is misleading, according to Flowers. In southern Hebron, Palestinians purchase, at inflated prices, most of their water through private, proxy companies supplied by Mekerot.
The West Bank desperately needs water - fresh or grey - since their access to water sources is strictly limited by the occupation. Historical water sources like the Jordan River are off-limits to Palestinians and drying up. Construction of The Wall has cut off seventeen springs and twenty wells. Few new wells are approved and old ones are left to rot, denied maintenance permits. While 80 percent of the enormous Mountain Aquifer’s recharge area is Palestinian, they get just 12 percent of it’s water.
Palestine’s capacity to treat waste water has been systematically retarded by Israel, according to the World Bank report Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development. Through the managing water agency of the Joint Water Commission (JWC) and the Civil Administration, the Israeli government has consistently blocked Palestinian projects for independent treatment facilities, despite acquiring German investment. According to the report, the JWC represents a “power asymmetry” which gives Israel ultimate power in Palestine while denying Palestinian say in the watershed both people share.
Continual bids to clean the Zomar rivers with a Palestinian-built, operated and controlled plant has been denied since 1996. Despite nine JWC-approved projects, only one facility functions today in the West Bank, reflecting Israel’s use of Oslo’s JWC for political pressure.
“What we typically see in the JWC is Israel trying to leverage their projects over Palestinian projects. It comes down to almost a form of horse-trading,” Talhami said. Israel targets specific lands for settlement expansion, stunts local Palestinian development there, and then use their veto power in the “inherently flawed” JWC to force PA to approve the construction.
“These settlements are illegal under international law,” Talhami said, “but you basically don’t get Palestinian development unless you approve Israeli projects.”
Downstream in Israeli, the Zomar still reeks. Government officials blame the Arab communities upstream, not the JWC’s documented obstruction. In July, managing Director of the Alexander River Authority Nissam Almog told the Jerusalem Post that Palestinian fiscal ineptitude keeps the flow foul. His upstream neighbors “don’t seem to mind that their waste is being sent in our direction.”
The sewage from the OPT isn’t all Palestinian, however. Of the West Bank’s yearly discharge of 91 million cubic meters of waste water, 38 percent comes from Israeli sources. According to B’Tselem, every year Jerusalem and illegal settlements channel 35 million cubic meters of waste water into the West Bank.
Jerusalem pipes half of this deluge to the east, creating the raw sewage nightmare of Wadi Kadrun. Settlements match this outflow; some lack sewage systems and others spill excrement onto Palestinian villages below them.
Forty settlements or colonies east of the Green Line are not connected to any waste water facility at all. The settlements of Kfar Adumim, Ofra, and Kiryat Arba for example, don’t treat any of their water. Instead, they fill cesspits, pollute the Mountain Aquifer, and dump into the Hebron river, which flows through Israel to Gaza. Many settlements’ treatment plants are kaput.
When the treatment plant broke down at the settlement Elon Moreh, it leaked toxic water from it’s leather works and meat processors to a neighboring village, according to B’Tselem’s 2009 annual report. Acidic enough to burn skin, the sludge “flowed to the olive orchards of ‘Azmut and continued along an open trench in the center of the village, a few meters from homes and alongside the school.”
The Israelis have offered to treat the water. But their price is double-edged: in shekels and independence.
An already cash-strapped Palestinian Authority would pay Israel for increased treatment and lose precious grey water, while it’s local watershed and aquifer spoils. Israel would be able to plug the drain and use waste water treatment as political leverage - in effect adding another control to the matrix.
“That’s another form of leverage the Israelis use,” Talhami said, “to pit your humanitarian needs against permanent status issues.”
Noxious muck is today’s problem - but the inundation menaces a lasting scourge. If the contamination continues, an independent Palestine could inherit a water source stricken, sickened and sullied.
“You don’t see what’s going on below the ground,” said Aburdeieneh. “A deep column of waste water is slowly, slowly going down. If we continue like this, we wont be able to use the [Zomar] basin for many years.”
If Palestinians can’t drink Palestine’s waters - who will they pay to quench their thirst?
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