Water and the Ways of Peace

 When I was seventeen I spent the summer visiting Israel with a synagogue youth group. It was a transformative experience, but not necessarily in the way the organizers intended. I am sixty-nine now and my memories of that summer are still strong and still disturbing, especially in the light of things that have happened in the last fifty-two years.

I remember riding around the West Bank - sometimes in school buses, more often in the back of flatbed trucks - and seeing the cisterns as we entered the villages. It didn't occur to me then that the presence of a natural spring might determine the location of a village and I didn't know that there were over 300 springs on the West Bank alone. I did notice open, rectangular cisterns where the water could accumulate. They looked a little like swimming pools. Sometimes there were two or three at descending levels: for drinking and cooking, for washing, for irrigation. 

I paid a lot of attention to this because we were reminded again and again that Israel is a dry country and that "we" (meaning Israeli Jews) were "making the desert bloom." Israel has a rather varied climate for such a small country. It is roughly the size of New Jersey. Much of the north averages 40" of rain a year, which is similar to New York. Parts of the south get less than 1" a year, which is less than Death Valley. But much of the populated middle part of the country gets just half the rainfall that we do in New York. So I was always looking at water.

I looked when we went to Ein Gedi, an oasis with waterfall-fed natural pools in the desert next to the Dead Sea. ("Ein" means "eye" in both Hebrew and Arabic and also refers to natural springs.) I looked when we went swimming by the waterfalls in Banias, a park at the foot of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights.

That summer it had been only two years since Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and the infrastructure of occupation was still new. Since then, though, water has become an important weapon of that occupation, along with the construction of settler towns that take the water.

This summer, apparently under orders from Naftali Bennett, the new Prime Minister, the Israel Defense Forces waged an active war against Palestinian water.

In July, the army demolished a cistern in Faroush Beit Dajan, a village near Nablus. That cistern was the subject of ongoing litigation in the courts.

Settlers dig deep wells near natural springs, draining them of their water supply. The oasis at Al Auja, near Jericho, was a source of water for farms, flocks, and homes, as well as an ecotourism site. Now it is drying up because settlers are taking the water from underneath.

Two days ago, Israeli bulldozers destroyed a water pipe that irrigated farmland east of Tamun in the Jordan Valley. The justification - the usual justification - was that it had been built without a permit. I say "usual" because Israeli authorities almost always deny permits so all Palestinian water infrastructure can be routinely declared illegal.

In Talmud (Gittin 60b) the sages (Rav and Shmuel) disagree about who gets to  irrigate first, upstream users or downstream users, but they agree that the ways of peace (dar'chei shalom) should prevail. And all the sages agree that water should be available to all who wish to drink. I am forced again to conclude that Israel is not a Jewish state.