Needing to use the toilet when you’re out and about is always embarrassing. After days going between different spots without returning to the hostel, it is inevitable.
But that embarrassment is multiplied tenfold in the home of a West Bank Palestinian. There, water is too scarce a resource to be wasted. The cistern is never full and needs to be filled up only in extremis. You can imagine my horror at being the cause for such a use of water when visiting people in Nablus.
You can recognise which homes are Palestinian in the West Bank because they have enormous water tankards above their rooves, which they fill up whenever possible. Unlike the settlers, they are cut off from the grid and cannot access basic running water.
Consider what this means for people. Clean drinking water is hard to come by in a valley thar, yesterday, reached highs of 44°C. You have to severely ration showers in the dustiest place I’ve ever been.
Yesterday, all the Bedouin men were called up to fix a problem. There was a leak in one of the water tankards by the grazing pastures. It was a hole at the bottom of the barrel that was spilling out the region’s most precious resource. Just a small gap, but enough to risk livelihoods.
They got all their resources together over a few hours in the hottest part of the day and patched it as best they could. It will do for now, but it will not last.
It is so unjust. The authorities could simply hook them up to the water supplies. Only meters away, Israelis are having baths and watering lawns.
Yet the Palestinians cannot even access water on their own ancestral lands, as an entire machinery seeks to destroy them.
Isaac returned and dug water-wells that were dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had stopped up after the death of Abraham. He gave the wells the names that his father had given them. But when Isaac’s servants were digging the wells in the valley, they found there a spring of fresh water. The shepherds of Gerar argued with the shepherds of Isaac saying: “this water is ours!” Genesis 26
Sim Lev 