Of all the issues often raised with regard to the Israeli occupation’s injustices and the attitude of Israeli authorities and settlers to the Palestinians in the West Bank, environmental issues are at the margins of the sociopolitical agenda, even in the rare cases where environmental issues in Israel itself are brought up for debate.
However, during more than 40 years of Israel’s destructive occupation, the West Bank has become, either consciously or unconsciously, a garbage dump for Israelis, particularly that of the settlements and illegal settlement outposts in the area.
Toxic sewage from Israeli settlements and its industrial zones pouring into Palestinian agricultural and pasture areas is a daily routine. Israeli authorities abandon and neglect the handling of their pollutants as long as the result surfaces a few kilometers away, outside their municipal area. On the other end, Palestinian residents are left to deal with the pollution and filth of their “occupying neighbors.”
The essence of the environmental problem in the Palestinian territories starts, like everything that stinks, from the top. The responsible party — the Israeli military commander through the Israeli Civil Administration which coordinates nonmilitary activities of the Israeli government in the Palestinian territories — is not fulfilling his legal duties, which oblige him to actively safeguard West Bank residents’ fabric of life and life itself.
In certain cases, the Israeli military commander goes further by mounting obstacles when it comes to the establishment of garbage dumps for Palestinian residents, thus making it difficult to remove the waste to sites located outside their communities. In other cases, Palestinian garbage trucks are confiscated and their drivers either imprisoned or fined.
The Israeli Ministry of the Environment does not display the required determination and involvement, unlike what goes on inside Israel. We should add the regrettable fact that Palestinian accessibility to “Green Police” stations is very limited, not to say nonexistent due to Israeli measures.
The result of this Israeli criminal neglect is catastrophic: Palestinian residents find themselves surrounded by mountains of waste, sewage and garbage; both because their villages and farming land have been turned into illegal waste sites for Israelis and because of Israel’s strict waste removal policies.
The sewage and waste cause irreversible destruction and damage to the natural springs in these areas and to ground water in aquifers. Olive trees which are the main agricultural source for Palestinians and crops belonging to residents in the territories are damaged forever; nature reserves or areas that were supposed to be declared as such are damaged and neglected, along with the direct damage to flora and fauna, and to the entire delicate ecological system that exists in the Palestinian territories.
As for Israelis, they are already accustomed to seeing Palestinian territories as the Jewish states’ backyard. Israelis are only concerned of human rights violations in “democratic Israel” not in Palestinian territories. The environmental issue constitutes yet another link in this patronizing Israeli attitude and reflects reality as it is.
However, Israelis would do well to take a broader look and think a few steps ahead: The environmental hazards will not disappear even by the snake-shape Separation Wall or by defining the Palestinian territories as “enemy territory”. The area, in and of itself, is homogenous, despite the two peoples living there.
The long-awaited two-state solution for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not prevent the destruction of ecological systems, aquifers, and nature reserves that cross political boundaries, and ultimately may lead to immense and irreversible destruction in the entire region, both on Israeli side and on Palestinian one.
