Left claims:
"80% of the water in the West Bank being guzzled by Jewish Settlers"
For clarity's sake I should make a few remarks on a special term I use in of my writings. I do not use the terms "West Bank" as these are geographically and sociologically fallacious, a popular fiction that I will not perpetuate. First, the official geographical terms for the mountainous spine that runs north-south through the length of Israel are "Judea" and "Samaria" and have been known as such since at least Roman Occupation of this area 2,000-plus years ago. State Dept. maps that can be viewed on the internet show both this official geographical term as well as the popular political term of the West Bank on their maps. Second, the reason this area has been called the West Bank originated from a single interview by a journalist with the late King Hussein of Jordan" who, not wanting to call this land by it's official Jewish term known in all the maps up until that time as "Judea", decided to call it "the west bank of the Jordan." A fallacious term as this label includes not only the Jordan River Valley but the both eastern and western slopes of the Judean & Samarian Heights and this term includes a great deal of land that is well outside the Jordan River Valley. In any case, once King Hussein mentioned his new label in that interview it swept like wildfire throughout the world as many of the journalists and world leaders jumped on it, as it psychologically and semantically his new term disconnected that parcel of land from any historical ownership of the Jewish people. Since many journalists and world leaders were against us Jews reestablishing our homeland to begin with, this new handle was very useful politically in their eyes. Third, instead of using the term "West Bank" I use the Hebrew abbreviation of "Yesha". Yesha stands for Judea or (in Hebrew) "Yehudah"; Samaria or "Shomron"; and Gaza or " 'Azah." I also do not use the term "Occupied Territories" as these areas are not "occupied", for Israel took them in a miraculous defensive war when the surrounding Arab countries attacked Israel in 1967, Israel rebuffed the attacking armies and took the territory. Now under international law and international norms, any country that is attacked and takes land from the attacking countries gets to keep it all, and in the many occasions that this has happened to other countries (e.g.: the USSR got to keep portions of Poland and maintained forces in Germany for decades) without protest of them being an "occupiers". It should also be noted that Israel had no internationally recognized borders in 1967, only armistice lines that were determined by previous wars and maintained in that status by counties that insisted that their war with Israel was ongoing and that they were merely in a period of a temporary cessation of hostilities, and that the war would only be finished by Israel's complete destruction. Considering all this Israel can not, by any rational thinking, be called an "occupier". Finally, in consideration of all the above the Jews who live in Israel but outside the pre-1967 armistice lines can not, therefore, be regarded as "settlers" so I prefer to use the term "residents" and the when others in the media or in political positions will use the term "settlers". If I use the term "settlers" it will only be surrounded by quotation marks to indicate that others unfairly label these Jewish residents of Yesha as such.Most people in the west, especially those who have never visited Israel, think of the Holy Land as a dry desert with nothing but sand dunes and camels. Although there are portions of Israel that fit this image the bulk of the land is quite different. The Judean and Samarian Heights are quite green and verdant owing to light and absorbent soils that soak up winter rains. The winter rains here absorb very quickly into the earth and percolate down to deeper layers. A good deal of this water remains in a shallow water table. Ultimately the rain water that is absorbed into these Heights will percolate down through the strata of rock and resurface in the aquifers of Israel's Coastal Plain, where it is pumped out and used to supply the bulk of Israel's population. The underground water source is so vital for Israel's needs that in the early 1990s the Mikorot Water Authority took out a full-page in Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Ma'ariv, and announced that the water sources that originate in the Judean & Samarian Heights were absolutely vital to supplying Israel's Coastal Plain with water that for any government to give Yesha away in a peace-deal, like the Oslo Accords, was nothing more than committing national suicide. The announcement added that to allow a body like the Palestinian Authority to manage -- or mismanage -- the Judean & Samarian Aquifer could lead to the destruction of Israel's Coastal Plain Aquifer. They were particularly worried that contaminated waste water would be allowed to flow back underground and thus contaminate the entire aquifer, after which there would be no way to repair the damage and it waould remain polluted forever. Well, our governments have continued to try to give away Yesha, if only from a water standpoint.
Regarding the claim made in some circles, that Jewish "settlers" in Yesha consume an unfairly large 80% of the water of Yesha being a small minority of the residents of Yesha, let it be known that this statistic can not possibly reflect the reality of the situation for the following reasons:
1. The truth is that all of the water consumed by the Jews, every drop that is consumed by the Jews of Yesha, is metered by the Israeli Water Authority known as "Mikorot". It can not be understated that literally every drop of water consumed by Jews -- that includes every bit of water used for Jewish agriculture -- is measured and make part of the public information available to everyone.
In contrast, a vast quantity of the water consumed by the Arabs of Yesha is not metered and thus is not recorded by any authority of any sort. The truth of this can be plainly seen if one should drive through the area that I live in, known as the Etzion Bloc of communities located between Bethlehem and Hebron in the Judean Heights. Jewish orchards and vineyards can be seen on the roadsides and up hillsides, and black drip irrigation tube run under every single orchard tree and under every single grape vine. We Jews require the use of efficient drip irrigation to water our crops, while Arabs have no need for irrigation, as their markets and the choice of their crops do not require outside irrigation. A vast majority of Arab agriculture, that is trees and vines, take advantage of the abundant sub-surface water in the shallow water table a few meters below the surface. It must also be noted that the Arab agriculture occupies nearly all the valley floors were the brown loess soils are fairly fertile and deep, and in those valleys the water table is extremely close to the surface. The truth is that the Arabs took the fertile valleys for agricultural use while Jordan held this land for 19 years and avoided planting on the terraces. Jews who returned to their communities after the Six Day War(communities that were destroyed in Israeli's 1948 War of Independence, Kibbutz K'far Etzion, for example) were unable to resume farming on their property and had to mostly take the very inferior unused land on the terraces to farm. While the Arab fields are in the valley bottoms which have deep, fertile soil and plenty of sub-surface water, the Jewish terraces have very shallow soils with relatively little sub-surface water and often these soils are poor and calciferous due the abundance of alkaline chalk from the degraded limestone foundations of the terraces. So the result is that a vast majority of Jewish agriculture utilizes the terraces on the mountain sides rather that the water-rich valley floors. So the big difference is that there is very little sub-surface water that Jewish agriculture can take advantage of. With this in mind it should be obvious why Jewish agriculture requires outside irrigation while Arab agriculture does not.
Arab agriculture extends throughout the valley floors and up into the terraces of the hills and mountains over the entire length and breadth of Judea and Samaria. Thousands upon thousands of acres of their agriculture use tremendous quantities of subsurface water daily, but not one drop of this water is metered and not one drop of this water could possibly be accounted in the above claim that "Jewish settlers consume 80% of the water of the West Bank and Gaza." Obviously, to claim that Jews use too much water can not even be supported as Arabs don't meter their water usage.
2. In the last 15 years the water situation has been critical, mostly due to an 8-year drought where yearly rainfall was well below average, so the Jewish communities set up purification of waste water in sewage treatment plants. That recycled water is used exclusively for agricultural use and today not one drop of fresh drinking water is used for Jewish agriculture as every bit of recycled water is used to irrigate Jewish crops -- and Jewish farmers pay for this water at a reduced rate compared to fresh potable water, but they pay for every drop of it just the same. The claim that we Jews gobble up the water doesn’t give us credit for reusing and recycling waste water. In contrast, the Arab communities, if they bothered to install sewerage lines to begin with, allow all the raw sewage to flow over the land and seep back into the water table and contaminate it.
3. The claim that we Jews use 80% of the water of Yesha is based on the assumption that all the water for Jewish communities in Yesha comes from locally pumped water. This is far from the case. It is a fact that just in our Etzion Bloc of communities, which includes the communities of Alon Shvut, K'far Etzion, Rosh Tzurim, Neve Daniel, Carmay Tzur, Elazar, the water for all of these towns is pumped out of wells in the Bet-Shemesh area of Israel's Coastal Plain and these wells are definitely located within the pre-1967 armistice lines. The water that comes out of those wells is then pumped up the side of the Judean Mountain's western slope and is then distributed to the above mentioned communities and their agricultural holdings. The reason that this is done was because when Jews started to repopulate these areas of Yesha, since the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan expelled all Jews that were living there in 1948 (e.g: Kibbutz K'far Etzion) in a blatant act of ethnic cleansing, in 1967 Jews started to return there to rebuild their destroyed homes and create new communities so water wells could not be dug quickly enough to support the growing influx of Jews. Also in Israeli leftist political circles many had thought seriously of giving that territory to the Arabs in a future peace deal, so it was thought to be more expedient to run water lines up from the Coastal Plain rather than dig new well in the Heights. So there are significant numbers of our communities that still take our water from outside Yesha and it's obviously not accurate to assume that just because a Jewish community resides in Yesha that it necessarily draws water from that area.
4. Arab water use in Yesha is only partly based on piped-in water from area wells. There are many, many Arab homes and villages that still have no water mains supplying their needs, and thus can not be possibly included in any water data supplying the Arab population. Although one may regard those Arabs who have no water mains supply to be seriously disadvantaged this is not the case. Arabs have learned how to make do quite comfortably without being linked to area water mains. One method to get around this is to dig a well on one's property. Although the Oslo Accords, the agreement that both Rabin and Arafat signed, forbids Arab residents to take individual initiative in digging their own wells (the reason for this is that the water table in Judea and Samaria is very fragile and unsupervised pumping WILL create problems for everyone, Jews and Arabs alike) many many Arab towns and individuals violate this and hired well diggers to dig private wells. For several months after the Oslo Accords were signed I was witness to giant trucks with huge well-digging derricks frequently traveling on the roads here and especially on the main highway between Bethlehem and Hebron. All those trucks had Palestinian Authority license plates so the Arabs themselves were digging private wells at a phenomenal rate -- illegally according to the Oslo Accords but neither the Palestinian Authority nor Israeli authority ever attempted to halt illegal well-digging activities by Arabs. In contrast, Jews may not, never, no-how, dig private wells and any an all violations of this law will be swiftly halted and all parties involved will endure stiff fines or jail terms.
It must be mentioned that well-digging is only one way that an Arab family out in the open country can have their own water source. Another way is for the family to build their home over an existing brook that bubbles out of the rocks in the hill country here and build a cistern to store the perpetual flow. Another option is to build a home over an existing cistern.
Cisterns were chiseled out of the softer forms of limestone in these hills or even soft chalk. Ancient cisterns that were cut out of rock may be huge, sometimes holding hundreds or even thousands of cubic meters. Jews from Biblical times carved these cisterns out of the bedrock in places were a large stretch of slightly-angled surface slab rock would act to collect rainwater, channels cut in surface rock were frequently used to divert rainwater into the cistern's opening, thus the winter rains would automatically refill the cistern with no human intervention required. Out in the country, Arabs seek out existing cisterns, build their homes over or next to them, and divert all rain water that falls on the flat roofs of their homes into these cisterns. With this arrangement large extended families can have several years of water stored. Obviously whole families can have their water source with none of this water ever metered.
Every Arab home that I have ever seen in these parts has water tanks on the roof. If an Arab family has recourse to a bubbling spring, a cistern or water mains they place water tanks on their roof. They buy water from a water dealer that arrives with a tanker-truck and this water is then pumped up into the huge plastic or sheet-metal tanks on the roof top. It costs money but then those who have dug the wells illegally profit quite handsomely by selling water to their Arab brethren at premium prices. I know personally of a case where the local well-owner in the UNRWA Camp ("Refugee Camp") was engaged in price-gouging to the point where his local customers preferred to go without water rather than pay extreme prices. This happened a few years ago to an Arab resident of the UNRWA ("Refugee") Camp called El-Arub, located about a mile south, on the main highway between our Etzion Bloc of communities and the Arab town of Hahhul. It happened that a certain Arab construction worker from El-Arub was working on building an addition to my neighbor's house and this Arab bitterly complained that the Arab who owned the only local self-dug well was charging such exorbitant prices that his family went without showers for a month and they had to beg distant friends and relations for Gerry cans of water to meet their most basic needs. My neighbors gladly let this Arab take a shower in their home, as well as let him fill up several 5-gallon Gerry-cans of water to take home for his family.
5. A number of years ago I was driving due east on the road between the Jewish towns of Efrat and Tekoa. At the T-intersection where I turned left toward Tekoa, there stood a huge piece of well drilling equipment that was working at a furious pace. Not so unusual, I thought, as Arab drilling was going on all the time. But when I looked closer I noticed a sign in both Arabic and English. The sign said, in nutshell, that 'this drilling was a project undertaken by the US State Dept. in an effort to provide a series of interconnected wells and pumping stations in order to serve the Palestinian people in obtaining potable water.' Curious, I thought, how the State Dept. is assisting the Arabs by establishing a network of wells. Since that time the well was completed, the drilling derrick has been removed and what remains is a pumping station with a 36'-diameter water pipe going into the station on the south side and another going out on the north side. A 36-inch diameter water pipe can carry an enormous amount of water. Obviously the Arabs in Yesha are being well served with local water.
6. Mention should be made of the water situation in the Arab city of Hebron. The water system was installed at least 80 years ago by the Turks in the Turkish occupation. The system is very old and extremely leaky and for years up until the Oslo Accords the Israeli government gave huge sums to the Arab administrators of town of Hebron to replace the water system of the city. The Mayor of Hebron (at least until 1996) was the wealthiest man in the wealthiest clan in the area, Mustafa Abdel Nabi Natshe, and was given a lot of money by the Israelis government over the course of a number of years specifically earmarked to replace the Hebron water system. Not a bit of work was ever done to improve the system and that money went into Natche's pocket or in order to pay "baksheesh" to his cronies.
7. The Gaza Strip was handed over to the Palestinian Authority due to the Oslo Accords and immediately large-scale well drilling took place. The Arabs there were warned if they over-pumped the Gaza Aquifer then saline sea water would seep into the vacuum and the aquifer would be destroyed forever. Well, the PA did nothing to control the large-scale pumping and the aquifer is now brackish from seawater, predictably enough. That aquifer is now useless and the Arabs of Gaza depend entirely on water from Israel -- which they refuse to pay for!
8. There are 7 water wells that surround Amman, Jordan. During this last major drought in the early 1990s one of those wells was over-pumped to the point where it ran dry. So those genius Jordanian water engineers decided that since that well was dry it was obviously of no further use to anyone as a water source, so they decided to use it as a sewer in order to dispose of raw sewerage in a supposedly convenient way. So they pumped large quantities of sewage down that well. Due to this gross mismanagement and profound stupidity by (presumably) professional and rational Arab water engineers the sewage that they pumped down there had spread out underground and contaminated the other six wells that supplied Amman with water! The result was that Amman, Jordan, the capitol of the country, was under severe water rationing and water was pumped to neighborhoods of the capitol only in rotation and only for 2 hours a day! When the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was signed between King Hussein and Rabin Hussein demanded that Israel GIVE Jordan several tens of millions of cubic meters of water a year for the next 5 years, despite the fact that Israel was under severe water restrictions to Israeli homeowners and farmers due to the unprecedented drought. Rabin complied. Not only did Rabin agree and comply with this agreement as per the treaty, ALL subsequent Israeli governments have continued to pump the same volume, tens of millions of cubic meters of water, to Jordan even though the agreement has long since expired. Really stupid! This is the high price Israel is willing to pay to BUY friends.