in this region.5 It is thus not surprising that, through specially constructed tunnels equipped with grills and drainage pipes, the Wall seeks to be as permeable to water as it seeks to be impermeable to people.
Indeed, one of the most crucial battlegrounds of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is below the surface. About 80 per cent of the mountain aquifer is located under the West Bank. Israeli politicians generally believe, although this fact has recently been contested,6 that Israel’s future depends on these waters, and have therefore been unwilling to give control of it to the Palestinians, regardless of the question of who may control the surface terrain above. The erosion of the principles of Palestinian sovereignty in its subsoil is carried out by a process so bureaucratically complex that it is almost invisible.7 Although the aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses 83 per cent of its annually available water for the benefit of Israeli cities and its settlements, while West Bank Palestinians use the remaining 17 per cent.8 Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and virtually all Palestinians in Gaza thus receive water irregularly and in limited amounts.9 Israel’s ‘politics of verticality’ is also manifested in the depth to which water pumps are allowed to reach. Israeli pumps may reach down to the waters of the common aquifers whilst Palestinian pumps are usually restricted to a considerably shorter reach, only as far down as seasonal wells trapped within shallow rock formations, which, from a hydrological perspective, are detached from the fundamental lower layers of ‘ancient waters’.
Under the terms of what former Minister of National Infrastructure Ephi Eitam termed in 2005 ‘the Water Intifada’, the Palestinians were accused of deliberate waste and sewage dumping in order to ‘pollute Israel’s ground water’.10 In the imagination of the military general-cum-leader of the settlers, Palestinians were using the mountain topography as routes for a new kind of ‘chemical-biological warfare’. His accusation did not acknowledge the fact that the Israeli authorities failed to provide the minimum necessary sewage infrastructure for Palestinians throughout the period of direct occupation although this is the legal duty of an occupying force.11 The sanitary conditions of West Bank Palestinians were aggravated by Israel’s segregation politics that isolated Palestinian towns and villages behind barriers of all kinds. This policy generated more than 300 pirate dumping sites where truckloads of waste were poured into the valleys beside towns and villages.12 Paradoxically, the restrictions on the flow of people accelerated the trans-boundary flow of their refuse. Furthermore, Israeli companies have themselves used sites in the West Bank for their own waste disposal. Some tens of thousands of tonnes of household garbage from the Tel Aviv metropolitan area have been dumped, in one example, into the largest disused quarry in the West Bank near Nablus.13 A total breakdown of sewerage systems has occurred throughout. The few existing treatment projects are overflowing, and unpiped sewage runs overground in most valleys. In the wild frontier of the West Bank, Israel’s planning chaos means Jewish neighbourhoods and settlements are often constructed without permits, and populated before and regardless of sewerage systems being installed and connected. This sewage runs from the hills to the valleys, simply following the force of gravity and topography, through and across any of the boundaries that may be put in front of it. The topography of the West Bank guarantees that all raw sewage from hilltop settlements will pass down a valley next to a Palestinian town or village14 and that, mixing with Palestinian sewage, travelling along the same open valleys, it will eventually end up in Israeli territory. Instead of fresh water flowing in the specially conceived water pipes installed under the Wall, Israel absorbs large quantities of raw sewage from all across the West Bank. The closures and barriers of the recent Intifada thus created the very condition against which they sought to fortify. The accumulated dirt within the walled-off Palestinian areas confirmed the hygienic phobia of Zionism. Blurring the literal with the metaphorical, the piles of dirt and sewage affirmed a common national-territorial imagination that sees the presence of Palestinians as a ‘defiled’ substance within the ‘Israeli’ landscape, or as ‘matter out of place,’ to use Mary Douglas’s words, in whose book, Purity and Danger, dirt is defined and understood in terms of transgression of boundaries.15 By inducing dirt and raw sewage, Israel could go on demanding the further application of its hygienic practices of separation and segregation. The legitimacy of these acts is defined as an immediate reaction to its own violation. The result is an ever-radicalizing feedback loop, by which sewage marks the point of collision between the two meanings – a metaphorical political notion concerned with the health of the state, and the literal physical sensation of abjection. The politics of separation has thus accelerated the emergence of a physiognomy of a carved up and compartmentalized landscape of discrete units, pulled apart by sharp contours, and woven together by the flow of sewage. At points where the separation walls are so high that they create the illusion of complete separation, the thin path of foamy dark waters flowing across and under it, remains the last remnant of a shared ecosystem.
Sewage flowing down Shiloh Valley in the West Bank.
Sewage is also used as a tool in the hands of government agents. As part of the state effort to dislocate the Bedouin tribe of Jahalin, camped on the lower slopes of a mountain onto which the settlement-town of Ma’ale Adumim is now expanding, the military civil administration disconnected one of the settlement’s sewage pipes, flooding large areas within and around the Bedouin camp with streams and ponds of polluted matter, forcing it to relocate.16
Only half of Gaza Strip residents are actually connected to the central functioning sewerage system. Raw sewage flows overground the length of some Palestinian refugee camps, pouring out onto the sand dunes that surround them or directly onto Gaza’s beaches. When sewage overflows and ‘private shit’, from under the ground, invades the public realm, it becomes a private hazard but also a political asset.17 In some places, efforts by UN departments to replace existing systems of infrastructure with permanent underground plumbing have been rejected. The raw sewage affirms the refugee camp’s state of temporariness and with it the urgency of claim for return.
For Israel, the same sewage continuously affirms another preconception – the connection between pollution and terror. At the beginning of 2005, Avi Dichter, then head of the GSS – Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) – and now a government minister explained to the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Security and Foreign Relations Committee: ‘From the level of the satellites’ the rectangular grid of streets in the Gaza refugee camp of Jebalia ‘looks like that of Manhattan, only when you get nearer to it, one notices that the large pool at its centre is not the lake in Central Park, but a huge pool of sewage.’18 Indeed, in the eyes of generations of Israeli security officials, the refugee camps are seen not only as the locus of resistance, but the very condition responsible for its perpetuation. Accordingly, if sewage breeds terrorism, these Palestinian spaces must be disinfected.
Indeed, in his only commitment to release Palestinian money held by Israel to fund Palestinian public services since the outbreak of the Intifada, in 2003 Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allocated funds in order to pre-empt a hygiene crisis, hoping the money would be used to construct a few sewage treatment facilities near Palestinian cities. His actions echo the confession of Jerusalem’s long-standing mayor Teddy Kollek: ‘For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Zilch! … Yes, we installed a sewage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system.’19 He further remembered: ‘When modern sewage and drainage systems were finally installed the unbearable stench that was prevalent in east Jerusalem before the [1967] war was finally eliminated …’20
The Jewish neighbourhood of Shmuel Hanavi, early 1970s. Image courtesy of the archive
