RIYADH, 10 March 2003 — “The way water is being used as a method of control in Palestine is a hidden agenda that rarely reaches the media headlines,” said Dr. Nidal Salim of the Palestinian Water Authority. “It’s a hidden war that has been going on since 1948.”
In a presentation greeted with complete silence, Dr. Nidal demonstrated the political implications of water use and ownership. “One of the major problems we face in Palestine is that the aquifers under our territory are not under our control,” he said. “Because we have no political sovereignty — the Oslo 2 agreement has yet to be ratified — we have no wider control of who pumps water.”
As a result, Israel controls 85 percent of the water pumped from the three aquifers under Palestine and uses eight times per capita the water used in Palestine.
Dr. Nidal detailed the complex relationships between rainfall catchment areas that recharge the aquifers located under Palestine and the complex network of pipelines and controls that have rendered the River Jordan effectively useless for Palestinian agriculture.
He pointed to the Tiberius Pipeline Project as a major contributor to the problem. This is the pipeline that takes water from the River Jordan to the north of Palestine and bypasses the cities and towns of central Palestine and delivers water to agricultural projects in southern Israel.
“The result is that there has been a demographic change in Palestine,” he said. “Farms die; people move into towns and, in effect, the country is controlled by the supply of water we can get from Israel.”
One delegate, an authority on desalination who wished to remain anonymous, told Arab News that while essentially true, this description did not give the whole picture. “Taking the area as a whole, there is simply not enough water for the people living there,” he commented.
