Amnesty: Israel Restricts Palestinians' Water

damn jews controlling rainfall?

you cant deny a person the right of drinking water, oh wait they just did. WHAT JERKS!

so drought is an act of god
unless your in gaza then its an act of jews
i heard the one where we control the banks or hollywood but never the weather
carefull your stepping into paranoid schitzophrenic territory

so vierotchka evil jews harvesting organs totally plausable but any ideas that oppose yours are bullshit. well with that reasoning i stand corrected

Vierotchka,

Your 5 or so "absolute bullshit" comments serve you no purpose. Someone posts well thought out counter arguments, and all you can say is "bullshit?" If they are bullshit, tell us how. Post a link.

Please don't join your local debate team.

they have enough water to mantain a zoo with zebra striped donkeys but lack the water to serve its population? dont tell me its a smaller population in the region the zoo is in its a large population thats why the zoo is there. it wouldnt yield revenue in a region with a small population

Israel is under fire yet again for supposed human rights contraventions. Hot on the heels of the Goldstone Report, which at the behest of the UN Human Rights Council charged Israel with war crimes against Gazan civilians in Operation Cast Lead, Amnesty International this week accuses Israel of depriving the Palestinians of the most basic and vital of all commodities - water.

An empty reservoir in the West Bank.
Photo: Amnesty International
Both reports assail Israel for supposedly robbing Palestinians of fundamental liberties and provisions. This simplistic premise underlies the approaches of the UNHRC, Amnesty and a whole host of similar organizations whose verdicts, as National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau noted, "are a foregone conclusion before any fact-finding effort is ever under way."

So-called human rights organizations have become the prime weapon of choice with which to whack Israel. In the name of ostensible liberality, Israel is repeatedly placed in the dock of world opinion, where it is tarnished as the villain among nations. There's almost no sphere where Israel can remotely expect a fair shake.

Amnesty's latest report is a case in point. It set out to examine the assumed victimization of the Palestinians. Thereafter, everything proceeded true to pattern. The inevitable bottom line is that the Palestinians are aggrieved. No blame is apportioned to them. The causes of the situation aren't considered.

Thus Israel's Water Authority was prevented from making any sort of presentation to Amnesty's researchers or responding to the report's charges before publication.

The report, moreover, focuses on the Mountain Aquifer, neglecting to so much as suggest that Israel might possess legal rights by virtue of the fact that it was first to discover, develop and pump from it. Other arrangements, it can credibly be posited, hinge on the outcome of final status negotiations, which Israel cannot conduct unilaterally.

In fact, Israel draws less water from the Mountain Aquifer today than it did 40 years ago, while Palestinian consumption of fresh water has tripled since then.

Additionally, the Israel Water Authority notes that, when all water uses are combined, it emerges that 149 cubic meters are available per capita per annum for Israelis, and 105 cu.m. for Palestinians. The difference, though not negligible, is far from Amnesty's claim of a super-acute shortage, well below the World Health Organization recommended minimum allotment. 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%.

Had it been given the opportunity, the Water Authority would also have highlighted that Israel supplies water to the PA well in excess of its 1995 Oslo Accords undertakings. Systematically overlooked by Amnesty, meanwhile, are Palestinian breaches of these accords - including pirate drilling, water theft and routine damage to pipelines, failures to purify waste water (despite massive contributions by donor nations), irrigating crops with fresh rather than reclaimed water, dumping untreated sewage into streams, severely contaminating Israel's Coastal Aquifer and forcing Israel to deal with PA sewage.

It is very hard to resist the conclusion that Amnesty's report was commissioned to serve a specific agenda.

NGO MONITOR charges that Amnesty deliberately timed its report to coincide with scheduled events on American campuses entitled "Israel's Control of Water as a Tool of Apartheid and Means of Ethnic Cleansing." These are sponsored by the Palestinian Cultural Academic Boycott of Israel movement.

Whether or not that was the case, there is considerable resonance to the accusation by NGO Monitor's president, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, that Amnesty is "manipulating the water issue"

http://www.jpost.c

speaking of history the jews of the israeli/palastinian territory have been treated less than human for just shy of 2k yrs.
the jewish zionists of the 20s through the 40s were killed for sport.
classic palastinian pastime before that was to let jews pray at the wailing wall only to throw stones at them for sport.
it was common place that regularly jews would be rounded up and killed under islamic law.
christians and jews have been subject to this in the middle east especialy in jerusalem long before the zionists.
zionism is the new reason replacing dimi law wich replaced the blood libel.
all of wich are forms of institutionalized hatred for non muslums without the courage to outright say it
just as the crusades were the persecution of muslums in the name of spreading the word of christ.
how many govts occupy territories and offer freedom and peace to be met with rockets and suicide bombers?

they want to make sure no land is owned by anyone determined to kill thier populas

The reason there is no peace is because israel is not jacking all the land yet, especially east jeruselam, they want to make sure that no land in that area is owned by any palestinian

Galwayman, what about the West Bank? It didn't elect Hamas and they've been trated like shit for years now. Your argument falls apart there.

Freecrack, you have a completely warped sense of time. The people of Gaza didn't just wake up one morning and say "I hate Jews, let's shoot rockets at them!" You're talking about 70 YEARS of conflict that was initiated by Jews with the removal of Palestinians from their homes and has been a tit-for-tat battle ever since.

Your notion of Israeli innocence is stunningly ignorant. You might as well say that Iraqi insurgents are aggressive against U.S. troops. Gee, ya think that might have something to do with being occupied, oppressed and angry?

if we bombed saudi arabia would you also be mad at them for denying us oil? no it would be the obvious conclusion. why would israel lift a finger to help the survival of a people who function to kill them

i still dont get how they screamed and rioted to have a gaza free of any israeli presence so that they may direct thier future independantly and still complain that its israels fault thier lives suck. they have thier own govt who has made no steps towards rectifying this yet israel thier enemy is supposed to. maybe if you dont have the resources to support your population you dont demand independance and fuck your nieghbor.

i dont see egypt helping hmmm wonder why?

Lets all remember that these people elected hamas,a known terrorist group to run their government! hamas has made it clear that the extermination of the jewish people is their main goal! Israel made it clear that if hamas was elected then a state of war would exist until hamas was no longer running the government.these people have no one to blame but themselves for this situation! If you lie down with terrorists then you should expect any fair treatment! I have no bad feelings about saying this and if they want water then vote the terrorists out of office! Israel can not be blamed for it's fortress mentality either Hamas and every other terrorist group in the middle east has been trying to exterminate them since the countries founding! Current censored me for my comments on moslem terrorists today however I will not be politically correct! how many innocent people have died due to their waped world view? how many will die in the future? why aren't these "people" brought to justice wholesale? Why do we let them into Europe and the US when they are our enemies? It makes no sense to me that whats happening in denmark,all over europe,and the US is allowed to happen! By 2020 they will outnumber us in our own countries and that means convert or die! Why is current censoring this truth?What are they afraid of the moslem lobby? the west must save itself before its too late or our way of life,and our freedom of choice to enjoy music,movies,books,sex,will disappear because they hate all that,and want to live in some 14th century fantasy where no enjoyment of life is allowed!

Thanks for posting this Viero.

I am partial to addressing the issues equally for both parties, however, from what I have been able to gather seems to me Israel's handling of Palestine and its resources is inhumanitarian and disgusting.

I do not have good enough scope to actually "know" here, so maybe you all can help with this... my sense is that Obama's 'direction' has been to continue to lend support in favor of Israel, and that the US has backed off of any support for equal handling of Israel~Palestine issues whether in Washington or in its UN involvement, regardless of inviting JStreet to table... am I mistaken in this?

I am just waiting for the US to finally stand up and say "what the fuck is going on" and drop Israel as a so called alie. .

AS IF THIS IS NEW PEOPLE, ISRAEL RESTRICTS THE MOST BASIC NEEDS THAT WOULD PROVIDE A SENSE OF DIGNITY, EVEN WATER. WHO KNOWS, MAYBE AIR OR SUNSHINE WILL BE NEXT....

Wont be long b4 we are all at war over water.

Water is one reason these two are still at war. all the water sits on Palestinian territory,..guess who wants control of it?

I'm waiting for the "you hate Israel" posters to tell us that Amnesty International is an unreliable source, and therefore none of this can possibly be true.

I do believe that the denial of free access to water is a crime. And --if it is not, it OUGHT to be.

Then that means some people will be drinking pee ?
I mean come on its water for gods sake !