No life without water: How Israel’s actions in Gaza echo other genocides
Of all the many forms of deprivation imposed on Palestinians, Israel’s strategic control and denial of water stand out as particularly insidious. Taken alongside the denial of entry of life-saving aid, dismantlement of medical services, and imposed hunger, Israel’s long-term disruption of water services in Gaza redefines the limits of acceptable suffering of civilians. This weaponization of water echoes historical genocides and threatens to normalize violations of humanitarian standards.
Depriving people of water is a very low-tech but devastatingly effective form of coercion. Every human needs water—daily to drink, more to stay clean, and even more to grow food. Siege starvation, including water deprivation, undermines the foundations of society, as thirst, hunger, and anger ferment. According to the UN Genocide Convention, deliberately inflicting on a group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part can constitute genocide.
During Germany’s 1904 genocide against the Herero and Namaqua peoples in Namibia, the colonial authorities poisoned water wells and expelled most inhabitants to camps in the desert. Dehydration, starvation, and disease killed up 100,000 (or 75 percent) of the Herero population. Just as there are ideological links between this genocide and the Holocaust, so too may there be a lineage of water-based tactics to destroy taught through state political and military institutions. In Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust, the denial of clean water imposed by the Germans led to disease and death on a vast scale.
Similar conditions were engineered during the Armenian genocide from 1915 to1917, the Srebrenica genocide in 1995, and the Sudanese government’s devastating campaign against the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa from 2003 to 2005. In each case, supremacist ideology and hatred were the drivers of massacre; dehumanizing discourse, chauvinist administrative procedures, weapons and water were the means.
The consequences of the conditions of life created by Israeli state organs in Gaza are so predictable they are almost banal, in Hanna Arendt’s sense of the term. Israel’s blockade restricts access to fuel required to pump and clean water, equipment to restore damaged systems, and even bottled water. Bombing water infrastructure contaminates drinking water with raw sewage. This causes diarrheal disease like dysentery, which leads to malnutrition and increased vulnerability to further illness. Forced crowding into displacement camps and the spread of antimicrobial resistance worsen the cycle. As a result, many Palestinians have resorted to drinking salty water, damaging their kidneys. This past week alone, over 10,000 new cases of acute watery diarrhea (more than half in children under 5) were added to nearly one million cases, along with 90 new cases of Acute Jaundice Syndrome.
These are the conditions of death. If shrapnel doesn’t kill you, microbes in polluted water might within days; wounds untreatable with antibiotics, within weeks; water-related disease, within months; kidney failure, in decades. Survivors will face a poisoned environment—a toxic biosphere of war—for just about forever. [Continue reading…]