A Good Story About Israelis and Palestinians

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This week, Jason Greenblatt, the US president’s Middle East envoy, did announce some welcome news at a press conference: The Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians will be cooperating on a large water infrastructure project, which will provide billions of gallons of new water supplies for each of the three parties.

That project — first announced in December 2013 — will take water from the Red Sea, near Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat, and use gravity to carry the water 137 miles via the kingdom of Jordan to the southern part of the Dead Sea. There it will be desalinated, with the brine deposited in the shrinking Dead Sea and the fresh water transferred into Israel for still-to-be-built desert farms. In exchange, a water pipeline will be built from Israel into Jordan’s capital, Amman.

The strategic genius of the plan is that it weaves vital economic interests of these sometimes-antagonists together.

The biggest news out of the press conference is that senior water officials from Israel and the Palestinian Authority shared a stage and warmly engaged with each other. It is, so to speak, a high-water mark in Israeli-Palestinian history regarding this precious resource.

Beginning in 2008, the Palestinian leadership decided to turn water into a political tool to bludgeon Israel. The claim, which gained currency among some in the human-rights community and the news media, was that Israel was starving Palestinians of water to oppress them and to break their economy.

To keep this manufactured water crisis from being exposed as a sham, it was necessary to have Palestinian water projects grind to a halt. The self-sabotage of the anti-normalization campaign was felt nowhere more strongly than in water. Israel’s settlements suffered from a lack of new water projects, but the Palestinians suffered more.

Quietly, the Palestinian business community made clear that the value of blackening Israel’s name in some quarters was not worth the price being paid in quality of life and lost business opportunities.

ISRAEL FIRST IN WASTEWATER REUSE, PALESTINIANS ARE LAST

Clive Lipchin  February 19, 2017

At international water conferences, Israeli participants always make a point of claiming Israel is the world leader in wastewater treatment and reuse, and indeed this is true. Israel treats over 90% of its sewage and reclaims 80% of it for reuse in agriculture. Only Singapore and Spain come close to this achievement. I too make this claim when I attend such conferences, but I also point out that all of Israel’s water sources are transboundary. All of Israel’s rivers that drain into the Mediterranean Sea originate upstream in the West Bank and most of these rivers are heavily polluted.

The reason for the pollution is that unlike Israel, wastewater treatment and reuse in the West Bank is only a fraction of that in Israel. Lacking wastewater and sewage infrastructure Palestinian and Israeli settlement communities drain their sewage untreated into open cesspits or directly into the environment. The result is that the sewage flows into the regions’ rivers and streams, blighting the landscape, posing public health risks and most importantly contaminating the precious groundwater resources that Israelis and Palestinians both use for drinking. Indeed, the most serious environmental hazard in the West Bank is untreated wastewater, but sewage does not recognize borders and this untreated sewage is as much a problem for Israel as it is for the communities in the West Bank.

According to a recent report from Israel’s Civil Administration, the body responsible for environmental management in the West Bank, 82.5% of Palestinian sewage is disposed of into the environment, an amount of around 60 mcm/year. In Israeli settlements the amount of untreated sewage discharged into the environment is around 12% or around 2.5 mcm/year.

The reasons for this large disparity in wastewater management between Israel and the West Bank is a complex mix of politics, financing and capacity. Many plans for the implementation of centralized wastewater treatment facilities to service Palestinian towns and cities get mired in disagreements on whether or not to connect Israeli settlements to such infrastructure and an arduous process of permitting and approvals, according to the Joint Water Committee that was set up under the Oslo II accords to manage such projects. However, many Palestinian communities are off grid, meaning they do not have access to a sewer network and without a network they cannot connect to centralized wastewater treatment facilities. The result is that sewage is disposed of into cesspits or directly into the environment.

The Arava Institute’s Center for Transboundary Water Management, together with Palestinian partners, is promoting a decentralized response to wastewater management in these off-grid communities where sewage (black water) is disposed of in sealed septic tanks and greywater from the kitchen and bathrooms is treated and then reused for localized agriculture. This onsite approach to wastewater management both reduces the flow of untreated sewage into the environment, helping to reduce the flow into the transboundary streams and rivers, and provides an additional source of water for irrigation for these agrarian communities.

The decentralized approach is just one way by which, working together, Israelis and Palestinians can help to reduce untreated wastewater discharges into our shared environment. However this kind of approach is not enough. Ultimately, agreements need to be forged between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on transboundary wastewater treatment that will replace the unilateral response undertaken so far by Israel, where it treats the sewage downstream as soon as it crosses the Green Line but charges the Palestinians for doing so. This creates tension between the parties as Israel claims the Palestinians are not doing enough to treat their sewage and the Palestinians charge Israel that they are paying for sewage treatment downstream but do not get any benefits of the treated sewage for use in agriculture upstream.