As a former, and by many
accounts successful, finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu presumably
knows his way around economics. So when the Israeli prime minister says
he will work to provide the Palestinians with economic, if not
political, independence, might that not suggest his hard-line
government understands that a prosperous Palestine would be an
important first step towards a more stable Middle East?

Not according to the World Bank, which last week issued the latest
in a series of reports about how the Israeli government is
systematically pre-empting the evolution of a viable Palestinian
economy. The 154-page “Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water
Sector Development” is written with a blandness suited to the banality
of this particular Israeli outrage. The report offers a detailed look
at how Israel deprives the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic
commodity for human survival, a deficit that consumes a growing share
of Palestinian GDP.

The report is another indictment, as if one were needed, of the
now-defunct Oslo Accords. Just as Oslo lacked adequate mechanisms to
enforce Israeli pledges to sharply reduce its occupation of Palestinian
land, so too has Israel been allowed to abrogate its commitment to
revise interim agreements relating to water systems in the Arab
territories it controls.

Instead, according to the World Bank report, Israel has aggrandised
a growing share of available water supplies while intensifying
Palestinian reliance on Mekorot, the Jewish state’s national water
carrier. The report states that Israel, without the approval of the
Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) – a legacy of the Oslo
process – draws more than 50 per cent from the aquifers that support
both the West Bank and Israel beyond what it is authorised under the
accords. Needless to say, Palestinian protests of such violations are
routinely ignored, according to the report.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about resources as it is
about land. It is no coincidence, for example, that West Bank
settlements are located on top or near groundwater wells, a strategy
that dates back to the earliest days of the settler movement. But the
situation has worsened over the past decade, when Israel began
restricting mobility in the West Bank and Gaza following its
“withdrawal” from certain Palestinian areas under the terms of Oslo.
Palestinians must now pay an estimated 8 per cent of their household
budgets for adequate water supplies, about double the globally accepted
standard. That is beyond the capacity of many Palestinian families, and
revenues have fallen precipitously in the parts of the West Bank under
Palestinian administration.

Rural villagers who are unconnected to the water grid must allocate
up to 20 per cent of their household income for tanker-born drinkable
water, an increasingly expensive enterprise due to the proliferation of
Israel-controlled checkpoints, the massive, serpentine security wall
and other barriers to mobility throughout the West Bank. The World Bank
estimates the added expense of transporting water by tanker amounts to
about 1 per cent of the Palestinian GDP. In Gaza, water availability
has reached “crisis levels”, while utility revenues have collapsed and
tax collections rates are down 20 per cent.

Water quality is deteriorating and there is growing evidence of
rising water-related diseases. The public health costs of waterborne
illness for children below the age of five alone is 0.4 per cent of
GDP, the report estimates. The environmental impact, meanwhile, is
devastating. Sanitation and sewage systems have been badly neglected
due to unstable security conditions and Israeli restrictions on
movement. Sewage is returned untreated into lagoons, wadis and the sea
or seeps into the soil where it ultimately contaminates aquifers. In
rural areas, septic tanks are not properly emptied, while Israel’s
settler population routinely dumps raw sewage on to Palestinian soil.

Just as Israel controls the borders, roads, air and sea ports,
airspace and export revenue on which the Palestinian economy vitally
depends, so too does it control Palestinian water resources via
Mekorot, an unhealthy reliance intensified by Israeli over-extraction
of available supplies. Mekorot’s dominant role in water distribution,
the report states, “makes [the West Bank and Gaza] vulnerable to
Israeli decisions and interventions, and may increase commercial risks
and costs”.

The report concludes with a raft of proposals that might ameliorate
the crisis, all of which require Israeli co-operation and consent. It
suggests, for example, the wholesale reform of the JWC, which is
strongly biased in Israel’s favour due to its disproportionate levels
of power and capacity. Only half of the US$121 million (Dh444.4m) worth
of Palestinian-proposed projects have been approved since 2001, while
all but one mooted by Israel have been granted. Israel, the report lays
out, routinely decides unilaterally how regional water sources will or
will not be developed.

An economy without access to clean water supplies is by definition
unsustainable. Mr Netanyahu either fails to understand this or his
commitment to Palestinian economic independence is nothing more than
political palaver. Either way, Palestine’s man-made water crisis should
be at the top of the agenda when the Israeli leader meets his US
counterpart early next month.