AL-AUJA — The Jordan Valley, in the West Bank, has two faces. One is made of dry fields and animals emaciated by the lack of water. This is the Palestinian side. The other looks like an oasis in the desert.
This is where the Israeli settlers are. It’s easy to spot them while driving through the valley, because oalf the lush green plants. Water is clearly abundant in these settlements. The first doesn’t have water for children to drink and for their mothers to wash them. The other has enough for their children to have swimming pools and all their houses to be connected to the water supply.
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It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and the air is finally cooling, when the Palestinian herders head out from their town of Al-Auja by tractor, carrying large steel containers. They are headed to the nearest water source, but they are not alone. Escorting them are a group of Israeli activists who have been accompanying them for years. Their role is as a “protective presence,” aimed at discouraging radical Jewish settlers from attacking Palestinians and their livestock, as has happened too often in the West Bank over the years.
Aggressive settlers
Providing such “protective presence” has been part of the activism opposing the occupation of the West Bank since the early 2000s, when organizations such as Ta’ayush and the International Solidarity Movement started bringing in International and Israeli activists to help Palestinians resist land expropriation.
For years the activists have been recording all the abuses they witness and handing out cameras and recorders to the shepherds. If the abuses are not documented, they say, it’s like they never happened.
The eldest among them, Guy Hirschfeld, has been arrested twice in the past month. The first time he was detained for two nights, and the judge expelled him from the water distribution site for 15 days.
“This is the strategy soldiers and settlers use to convince us to give up. They do the same thing with Palestinians,” says Hirschfeld. “The settlers think that if they make their lives hard enough, then they will give up and leave. This is what they do with us, they think that detaining us will make us give up. But we keep going.”
Look them in the eyes
Hirschfeld was a longtime member of Ta’ayush, an Israeli-Palestinian group of volunteers founded during the second Intifada (2000-2005), one of the few groups of Israelis that put their lives at risk to assist Palestinians. Then he decided to create his own organization, called Looking the Occupation in the Eye, and his daily life is now devoted to accompanying the Arab Bedouin shepherds to graze or waiting for water tanks to protect them from soldiers and settlers.
Access to water is not equal for all here.
“Knowing is not enough, you have to look them in the eyes,” he would tell like-minded activists in Israel. He therefore decided to gather all the volunteers of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and others from the Jordan Valley and started taking shifts to sleep with the most vulnerable Bedouins and to protect them from the settlers’ attacks. He brought cameras to document the systematic destruction of their reserves, tents for the volunteers and a fan. Twice a week he still spends the night there on guard duty.
Since he was a child he refers to a verse from the Bible that reads: You must always have before your eyes the poorest, and help them first. For Hirschfield the poorest — the most needy in the country where he lives — are the occupied people, that is, the Palestinians. It is to them that he dedicates attention and presence. “They are suffering because of us, and that’s enough for me to keep me here,” he says.
The fight for water
The fight for access to water resources in this area reflects a broader conflict for control of the entire West Bank. Palestinians see the Jordan Valley as the breadbasket of a future state, while to Israelis its control is fundamental for the protection of the Eastern frontier.
Access to water is not equal for all here. And it comes with a long history. After occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel took control of the Palestinian water sector and introduced radical restrictions and even bans. Palestinians were forced to ask for permission to dig new wells, while Israel exploited its control of water resources — especially in the Jordan Valley — to connect all the settlements to the Israeli water supply.
If obtaining permits to dig wells was difficult before Oct. 7, it has now become virtually impossible. And those dug without permission, just like houses, are demolished. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israeli authorities have demolished nearly 160 unauthorized Palestinian water tanks, sewage systems and wells since 2021.
Last year, Israeli human rights organizations released alarming figures: according to the Jerusalem based non-profit organization Btselem, in the West Bank, Israelis consume an average of 247 liters of water per person per day, or three times the amount used by Palestinians, 82.4 liters. In the numerous Palestinian communities that are not connected to the water network, the average daily consumption plummets to 26 liters per person.
To defend its policies, Israel cites the 1995 provisional agreement signed with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which granted it control of 80% of water resources in the West Bank along with most major aspects of Palestinian life.
Seeing and knowing is the only antidote against perpetual war.
Yet, the agreement was only valid for five years, and the West Bank has changed a lot since then.
The Palestinian population has increased by 75% since 1995, but the quantity of water it has access to has remained the same. To compensate, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is forced to buy water from the Israeli water company at a higher price.
And so today the 700,000 Israeli settlers have uninterrupted access to water, while Palestinians only receive water if and when trucks are allowed to ship it.
Changing mentality
Guy Hirschfeld says that this is yet another example of how Palestinians are being dehumanized. “My government uses basic resources as a medium to achieve control, and water control is also an instrument to achieve political goals,” he explains. “Life becomes unbearable for entire communities, so that they are pushed to leave their land. The sooner they leave, the sooner the settlers will be able to expropriate them.”
Meanwhile, just like in the other occupied territories, expropriations in the Jordan Valley continue. Israel expropriated 8 km² of land to build new housing units, which means new settlements. Israel’s Minister of Finance Bezalel Yoel Smotrich — a settler and far-right Zionist — commented by saying that “this way we will continue to build and strengthen the Jordan Valley, we are strengthening the settlements through serious and strategic work in the whole country.” After all, the annexation of the Jordan Valley was one of Netanyahu’s electoral promises in 2020.
One of his friends was killed by Hamas, while his dad is a Netanyahu supporter.
The Israeli activists think that their government’s strategy is to isolate the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank. The more settlements expand, the less possible it will be to continue theorizing about a Palestinian state.
Hirschfeld has lost almost all his acquaintances and family over the years, but he is still convinced that democracy and freedom cannot be exclusive to one people. He thinks that it’s even more important after Oct. 7 to bring Israelis to Palestinian communities, because seeing and knowing is the only antidote against perpetual war.
Gili, 21, is the latest person to join the group. One of Gili’s friends was killed by Hamas militants at the Nova music festival, while his dad is a Netanyahu supporter. She was raised hearing mantras such as “the only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Like many, a desire of vengeance was brewing inside her the weeks following the attack. But then she asked herself: Who are the Palestinians really? What is really my land?
That is when she decided to join up with Hirschfeld and the others. She had never been inside a Palestinian community before, she’d never seen the way they live, what they are deprived of. Since then, three days a week she has been accompanying individual Palestinian Bedouins to do a simple but perilous task: to fetch water.
