P U L S E

Correctly characterizing the Gaza strip in a typology of repressive institutions isn’t easy. Without question, it’s a refugee camp, but a quite developed refugee camp, and some of its inhabitants have been there for 60 years. When refugees stay refugees for six decades, they’re still refugees, but they’re locked in a “prison for the stateless.”

Actually, in Gaza, “zoo” used to be the more precise descriptor: the sole goal was to keep the inhabitants, or most of them “alive, with an eye to how outsiders might see them.” Freedom was never at issue. Amidst the savagery of Cast Lead and its mounting consequences, zoo may now be a passé metaphor. It’s hard to argue that Israel’s overwhelming concern is how the outside world sees Gaza. Concern for outsiders’ opinions doesn’t lead one to call a massacre “impressive… [its] timing brilliant” in your country’s leading liberal newspaper. Nor to chants calling for the slaughter of Palestinians in city squares.

Concentration camp could no longer be polemical but rather descriptive. In a concentration camp one herds a population into a dense, tightly controlled space. Human beings come to serve instrumental purposes. One controls survival by controlling inputs—food, water, caring only slightly about the inhabitants, sometimes not at all. Some will surely die, and that’s hardly a concern. They’ll die of disease, as at Andersonville. Sometimes they die because one kills them. Sometimes “sometimes” becomes often.

Disease is a convenient form of slaughter for an ostensibly liberal state. “We didn’t mean to,” state officials can demur; “it was unimaginable that when we destroyed their water supply and their sewage treatment facilities, typhoid and salmonella poisoning would break out!” The inevitable feigned ignorance is even less believable in the case of Gazan water than in other socially-forced humanitarian crises. This has been a long time coming. Gaza has the lowest-per-capita capacity of freshwater in the world other than Kuwait, which subsists on desalinated salt-water, the privilege of an ultra-wealthy oil statelet. Desalinization plants aren’t an option for Gaza, which has to physically import shekels, dinars, and dollars.

Clean water can enter the Gaza aquifer, either as rain or from the Gaza Wadi, which begins in the West Bank, just south of Jerusalem, runs through the Negev, and flows to the sea through Gaza. It replenished the aquifer through a coastal wetland. But that was a while ago. Now, the Israelis have built dams on the Wadi. Water can’t reach Gaza. The wetland has become a “sewage sump.”

In Gaza, the water table is plunging. Sewage and salt-water is permeating the “porous rock” upon which Gaza sits. Salt-water has been detected up to a mile in-land. Israel’s fault? In the words of one genial Israeli blogger,

Before Israel evacuated (good word) Gaza, the world and the United Nations maintained that the destruction of Gaza’s water resources was direct consequence of the military occupation, as if Israeli soldiers were forcing Arabs to shit in the wells and the wadis.

In southern Israel, reality intrudes. In the past, Israelis farmed the Negev practically up to Gaza’s borders—“Seen from Gaza, their greenhouses glint in the sun, guzzling up water that could be growing Palestinian crops,” or at least slowing the ravaging of its water-supply. “Israeli soldiers” also damaged the sewage treatment plant during Cast Lead. As the United Nations Environment Program write-up notes [PDF], “Damaged treatment ponds released vast quantities of untreated sewage into the environment.”

“An outbreak of Hepatitis A and parasitic infections could occur at any time,” commented Mahmoed Daher from the WHO in Gaza. “Already the number of people, especially children, suffering from diarrhea has risen dramatically.” The most recent WHO report notes that “Watery diarrhea as well as acute bloody diarrhea and viral hepatitis remain the major causes of morbidity among reportable infectious diseases.” Cases of viral hepatitis broke through the “alarm threshold,” with virus clusters evident in the epidemiological data, although not quite the “pattern” of an outbreak.

“We have noticed an increase in people suffering from kidney diseases from water contaminated with toxins, as well as babies born with an unnatural blue tinge,” Munther Shoblak from Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) told IPS. Nitrates are far above acceptable levels.

UN studies say that the aquifer could be restored in 20 to 30 years if action were to be taken now. But according to Clemens Messerschmid, a German hydrologist, the aquifer could be dry in 13 years. To save it the Palestinians would have to stop pumping water from it and Israel must supply water to Gaza. As he notes, “Israel has plenty of supply in the south of the country. The Gazans will have to pay, of course, but Israel should supply.”

The latest United Nations Environmental Program Report reports that if this remedial action isn’t undertaken immediately, the aquifer will not be fit to supply water to human beings for hundreds of years. Water can come back, eventually, to a desiccated bio-region, but with great care, great patience, over great time and with great effort.  Damage is generally “difficult to reverse.” Sometimes, it can’t be.

So how to slaughter a population with eyes politely averted? Simple. Herd it into a concentration camp. Cut off its clean water. Devastate its sanitation facilities. And let nature trundle along.