Water in Palestine: Segregated Sea Access and Running Water in the Israeli Apartheid - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
▻https://thefunambulist.net/cartography/water-palestine-segregated-sea-access-running-water-israeli-aparthei
To observe that water is a luxury inaccessible to many has become a cliché of the humanitarian discourse. What this narrative tends to leave asides are the political systems determining the unequal conditions in access to water, whether it is capitalism and its privatizations, or colonialism and its ethnic segregation of this access. Similarly, the so-called “international community” can, at times, recognize the illegally of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (cf. Resolution 2234 voted by the UN Security Council in December 2016) but does not seem to consider the totality of the territorial, social, administrative, judiciary, policing, and resource-management apparatuses that constitute the Israeli apartheid in Palestine – the term “Palestine” designates here the historical region that now includes Israel, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
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Map by Léopold Lambert for Aman Iwan (2017). (click here for a larger version)
Before even evoking water as a resource necessary to human survival, we can address the access to the three seas of Palestine (the Mediterranean Sea, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee) as fundamentally restrained through the various apparatuses that restrict Palestinian movements:
– All Israeli citizens – this includes the 1.8 million of Palestinians – have a total access to the coasts of these three seas, to the exception of the coast along the Gaza Strip since the 2005 Israeli disengagement. They even have full access to the East coast of the Sea of Galilee since the invasion and subsequent occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
