Testing the waters

I took my 7-year-old, Micha-el, swimming at a neighbor’s last Shabbat. After an unseasonably cool June, July began with the full brunt of summer, and he was thrilled with the invitation. A growing number of Israelis have blow-up pools, thanks to the country’s enormous desalination plants that have enabled us to ignore the perennial water crisis (water and environmental experts say the jury is very much out on the ultimate viability of large-scale desalination, and they insist that Israel still needs to conserve water, but that is a topic for another column).

The afternoon was terrific — our adult hosts had gone upstairs for an afternoon rest so I sat inside with the weekend newspaper and a cool drink while the kids splashed and squealed. Pretty hard to think of a more relaxing way to spend a Shabbat afternoon.

But as I listened to the kids play, I couldn’t get my mind off the afternoon I’d spent in Hebron earlier in the week, getting to know a Palestinian family I’d been introduced to some months ago. We’d agreed to meet at 3 p.m., so I took the opportunity beforehand to visit the Cave of the Patriarchs to study a little and to pray the Mincha service, and then made my way to their home, adjacent to the Tel Rumeida neighborhood and archaeological dig. It being Ramadan, there was no food or drink on offer, but that hardly put a dent in the afternoon. Sitting under a lush canopy of grapevines and olive trees, we talked about my host’s teaching career and her adult daughter’s life growing up in 1980s and ’90s Hebron (I’m leaving the family anonymous because its members do not know I’m a settler, and I fear for their safety if it got out that they’d hosted one). Of course, the conversation also focused on Israeli violations real and imagined, and eventually the topic turned briefly to water.

The topic is one I’ve known about tangentially for years: According to the Btselem human rights organization, there is no limit to water consumption for Israeli citizens, whereas average water consumption for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria for domestic, urban and industrial purposes is approximately 73 liters per person per day, far below the World Health Organization recommendation of 100 liters per person per day.

But although I knew about the discrepancy, I had never paid any attention to it, certainly not in any real terms. Now I heard about the impact of the shortage.

“We usually have water to drink, but in every other area of life we have to take extreme caution not to waste,” my host said. “Everyone relies on water tanks on their roof. They get filled up about every 10 days by the baladiya (Hebron municipality). In the summer when there is a water shortage, we have to wait longer for them to get filled, so people run out and have to fill bottles at their neighbors’. I lived in one apartment that did not have enough water tanks, so we ran out every two weeks and we had to develop creative ways to save water. We kept a big tub under the shower so we could save the water and wash our clothes in it while it was still warm. Then it stayed in the bath to flush the toilet. We only flushed after solids, not for every pee.”

The conversation left me with an unfamiliar feeling of guilt — I routinely have to force my teenagers to cut their showers “down” to five minutes or so. But while driving home, I remembered an article I’d translated a year ago by Haim Gvirtzman, a professor of hydrology at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University and a member of the Israel Water Authority Council. Gvirtzman asserts that rather than a result of Israeli discrimination, the Palestinian water shortage stems mainly from a calculated Palestinian Authority policy not to develop PA water resources, despite the fact that the Oslo Accords provide for it.

“The Palestinians refuse to develop their own significant underground water resources, build a seawater desalination plant, fix massive leakage from their municipal water pipes, build sewage treatment plants, irrigate land with treated sewage effluents or modern water-saving devices, or bill their own citizens for consumer water usage, leading to enormous waste. At the same time, they drill illegally into Israel’s water resources, and send their sewage flowing into the valleys and streams of central Israel. … (The Palestinian Authority is) not interested in practical solutions to solve the Palestinian people’s water shortages, but rather perpetuation of the shortages and the besmirching of Israel,” Gvirtzman wrote.

All of which is probably correct, and would have been wholly relevant had we been onstage for a Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. But my visit was about caring and identifying with a family that cannot take for granted the privileges that I live with, not about pointing fingers or assigning blame. In Efrat, our kids don’t hesitate to fill a blow-up pool. In Hebron, they think twice about flushing the toilet.

For me, that’s a lot to think about.

Andrew Friedman is a member of Shorashim/Judur, a grass-roots movement of local Israelis and Palestinians creating relationships and friendships in Judea and Samaria, as well as of the Interfaith Encounter Forum.