Beautiful Water Day

Nearly 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel live in thirty-six unrecognized villages in the Naqab. The State of Israel deliberately limits access to water in these villages, as well as all other basic services, as a means of forcing the Bedouin to give up their just land claims and move to government-planned townships, the poorest in Israel. As the Bedouin community struggles to remain on their ancestral land, most villagers obtain water via improvised, plastic hose hook-ups or unhygienic metal containers, which transport the water from a single water point located far from their homes, causing health risks and daily hardships. The health ramifications caused by the State‘s refusal to provide running water to the residents of the unrecognized villages are potentially severe, and have a role to play in the high and rising infant mortality rates among the Arab Bedouin population in the Naqab.

Some 30,000 Arab Bedouin live in ten recently-recognized villages, which, though recognized by Israel in the early 2000s, still lack many basic municipal services such as sewage, paved roads, and electricity. In these villages, though the ability to demand drinking water is strengthened, the villagers are still required to lay and maintain the water pipes that connect their homes to communal water centers. Further, the government refuses to grant subsidies to Bedouin farmers who want to use their land for agriculture. As such, Bedouin farmers in recognized villages are denied the right to cultivate their ancestral land, while neighboring Jewish farmers benefit greatly from government subsidies on water for agriculture. On World Water Day 2012, Adalah highlights the stories of four Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel, and calls on the State to uphold its obligations under international law and as held by the Israeli Supreme Court to provide equal, adequate access to water to all its citizens in the Naqab.