Israel’s weaponisation of water for the benefit of settlers and de facto annexation can be regarded as a long-standing practice of settler colonialism. But how can one explain Israel’s water policies in the Gaza Strip – one of the most densely populated places on earth – where Israel evacuated its 21 settlements in 2005? Since then, Gazans have no longer experienced Israel’s military occupation as the steady takeover of land. Instead, they have confronted an existential threat to their health and lives that Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, among others, has called “incremental genocide”. Some Israeli human rights lawyers firmly reject this application of the term. But water is life, and the impact of Israel’s nearly 16-year-long blockade and five major military offensives on the severely limited clean water supply available for a rapidly growing population, half of them children, has raised questions about whether the Gaza Strip remains a “livable place” (to use the UN’s phrase)… Rather than pressuring Israel as the occupier to respect the human rights of Palestinians including the right to water, the international community has thrown money and technical expertise at a problem which calls for a political solution. In so doing, it is attempting to forestall calamity while acquiescing in Israel’s violations of international law.
… Genocide, wrote Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term, “refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight”. If that blight is to be averted in the Gaza Strip, the international community must immediately end its complicity in the collective punishment of the Palestinian people and pressure Israel to lift its blockade.
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