A recent Amnesty International report condemned Israel for withholding water supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. The sub-head on their website news article reads “Israeli settlers enjoy lush lawns and swimming pools while Palestinians reduced to a trickle of water,” and has been published across world news organizations such as CNN, BBC, AP, Reuters, and The Times of London.
Amnesty’s 112-page report - Troubled Waters: Palestinians denied fair access to water - shows how Israel uses over 80% of the water from the Mountain Aquifer, the main source of underground water in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), while restricting Palestinian access to a mere 20%. The Mountain Aquifer is the only source of water for Palestinians in the West Bank, but only one of several for Israel, which also takes all the water available from the Jordan River.
The NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) Monitor discovered that the Amnesty International report “ignores evidence that not only does Israel provide West Bank Palestinians with more water than required under the Oslo framework, but that Palestinian water thieves are responsible for stealing up to 50% of supplies in some areas.” The report also found that “Amnesty’s report provides legitimacy for a speaking tour beginning November 1 at universities in the US organized by the Palestinian Cultural Academic Boycott of Israel (PCABI) movement entitled, “Israel’s Control of Water as a Tool of Apartheid and means of Ethnic Cleansing.”
In advance of Amnesty’s report, NGO Monitor’s President Prof Gerald Steinberg said, “Amnesty’s report manipulates the issue of water and ignores the complexities of history and law in order to again falsely portray Israel as a brutal regime.
Rather than recognize that water supply is a complex regional issue, Amnesty focuses only on Palestinian shortages. The report adopts a painfully simplistic narrative which places blame solely on Israel, to the extent that the Palestinian leadership is absolved of responsibility for the agreements signed under the Oslo framework.
This report has been cynically timed by Amnesty to boost a new wave of Israel boycott campaigning. It is a pointed example of Amnesty’s ongoing campaign of hostility towards Israel.”
A Jerusalem Post reporters discovered that the Israeli Water Authorities were not even given the opportunity to present information to the Amnesty researchers and a JP editorial points out that:
Water availability to Israelis has fallen sharply in recent decades. In 1967 it stood at 500 cu.m. – so today’s figure represents a 70% drop. Until the Six Day War, Palestinians could count on a mere 86 cu.m. yearly. Their situation has improved by 22%.
This is the sort of misinformation and propaganda that fuels blind hatred towards Israel in the Western world. You would not be able to decipher any of this if you only got your news from the mainstream media. Unfortunately most people only get their news from the mainstream media… that’s why they call it mainstream.
Below is a very funny depiction of the biased BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an Israeli SNL-type TV show.
