From Yesha to Lebanon – The Water Trail

To paraphrase: “It’s the water, stupid!”

Conspicuously missing from the ubiquitous Iraq war critique was the subtle agenda of water rights in the parched Middle East region,” writes Leah C. Wells. “The dialogue about access to clean water is commonplace in peace talks throughout the Middle East, but Western diplomats rarely broach the topic. An anonymous U.S. State Department official quoted in National Geographic said, ‘people outside the region tend not to hear about the issue (of water). It just doesn’t make the news.’ By design, not by accident, this issue is obscured from Western eyes because the propaganda machinery from Washington, DC has not allowed it. (Source) 

Not surprisingly, water is also absent in mainstream coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. Yet not everyone is taken in by the run-of-the-mill explanations and justification for the onslaught. It just does not make any sense! As one blogger puts it: “The huge mystery of the current Israeli adventures is why Israel is sacrificing so much international goodwill in murdering innocent Lebanese civilians, when its stated goal is ‘self-defense’ against Hezbollah.” 

Perhaps if one understands the threat of Hezbollah to Israel in terms of religio-political ideology rather than in terms of military might, the overall picture of the current conflict would be that much clearer. Hezbollah is indeed more dangerous to Israel on the streets of Gaza than it is on the other side of its northern border with Lebanon. Disillusioned by the inability of the Sunni Arab authorities – most notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan – to help bring a solution to their plight, the Palestinian resistance looked for assistance elsewhere. Hezbollah. 

Indeed, what Israel’s resistance to a peaceful settlement in Palestine has spawned is what one analyst has referred to as a new coalition of the willing!

Had Israel wanted a settlement with the Palestinians, that would have happened a long time ago. Why has that not happened? The reason lies in YESHA: “Much of the major underground stores of Israeli water is in YESHA  - in Gaza, in Samaria and in Judea,” wrote one researcher. [Thanks to fellow blogger Bill-Muskoka for the link]

And so it may well be that all these years it has not been the Palestinians who wanted to “throw Israel into the Sea” but the other way around. 

In other words, Israel desperately NEEDS the occupied territories and has no intention of giving them back – at the very least not entirely! In his paper on The Israel-Syria Track, author Sami Hajjar writes, quoting former Netanyahu’s national security advisor Dore Gold:

[...] Gold believes that although the Palestinians are not a military power, Israel must have access to the West Bank as defense against a potential Arab enemy from the east. His conclusion: “….Israel will have to take a conservative approach to outstanding territorial differences with its neighbors. Premature Israeli withdrawal, while the basic elements of Middle East instability persists, ethnoreligious conflicts, frontier disputes, serious economic differences would destabilize the region and could increase the chances of war more than continuation of the status quo.”

It is the desire to perpetuate the status quo that is the key to Netanyahu’s attitude and policy toward the peace process. The military-strategic considerations are buttressed by Likud’s ideological inclination to claim the occupied territories as part of the historical land of Israel, which belongs to the Jews.

Thus, having posited the need to oversee the occupied territories in terms of “military-strategic” considerations instead of its need for water, Israel only needed to sit back and manage the occupied territories as best it could.

The legitimate election of Hamas changed everything. Which explains the vicious and vigorous US/Israel campaign against Hamas for with Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian people, the status quo was no longer an option for the Israeli government.

Worse still, Hamas entered into an alliance with Hezbollah!

Revised July 25, 2006

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Update: “[T]he issue of water resources in the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours is caught in a vicious circle. There can be no basic agreement on an equitable distribution of water resources until a formal Middle Eastern peace settlement has been concluded; but no such settlement can be concluded until an agreement on a balanced distribution of water has been reached.” [Full text]

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