Friday, October 30, 2009

Water – the new "blood libel"

Jews are long accustomed to the blood libel, namely, that the blood of Christians is used in the baking of matzoh for Passover. While that libel is certainly not dead, a new one has arisen. This one claims that Israel deprives Palestinians living in the West Bank of water to drink while Israel builds settlements with swimming pools.

Designed to inflame sensibilities, judged by the amount of news coverage the water libel is getting it is succeeding. The story couldn't be further from the truth. While Israelis have reduced their per capita consumption of water from 1967, the Palestinians have increased it beyond proportion.

In the meantime, Palestinians continue to dig illegal wells and build illegal cisterns that deprive their neighbors of water. They also refuse to treat sewage properly with the runoff polluting underground aquifers.

Water is a precious commodity to all in the Middle East, it's sad that the Palestinians use the issue to inflame hatred.


Read this report from Haaretz

1 comment:

Joachim Martillo said...

I've worked in the OT. That Haaretz article is a bunch of fairly outrageous hasbarah.

Harel is not counting Zionist interlopers in E. Jerusalem as settlers. In addition, Israel expands the borders of the Jerusalem district in order to count (by its own logic) many Westbank settlers as non-settlers.

Ariel does not pipe its water in from pre-1967 Israel (Stolen Palestine). It has its own wells and distributes to Zionist squatters throughout Occupied Palestine.

I worked on EU infrastructure development projects. There was no corruption. The EU carefully accounted for the money, but the Israeli government had a trick of preventing the importation of one or two critical components so that the whole project would go for naught. I ran into this problem myself: Joachim Martillo used to do business in Israel. Now he supports Divestment.

I could fairly thoroughly debunk Harel's hasbarah, but I notice Palestinian commenters on the original article did a fairly good job.

It is worthwhile to point out that the issue of the blood libel is not as simple as Stephen seems to think it is: Consuming Everything but Palestinian Tears.