Water Politics, Swimming, and Sleeping on the Roof in Auja

We were greeted by a bony dog pissing its excitement on the stairs. The air was dryer and hotter than Beit Sehour, the landscape expansive and sandy.  A mountain range lay to the east, which I later learned was Jordan.  Muki and I followed Brahim and his German friend Hans into the Auja Eco Center where we met our host for the day, Hanna, a jovial fellow who was easy to like.

Brahim is related to our “host” family. We had met him when we arrived, and on Wednesday night he invited us to join him and Hans on a trip to Al Auja.  Thursday was the beginning of the 3-4 day celebration of Eid, at the end of Ramadan, so we had work off and decided to accept. 

Auja is just north of Jericho, in the Jordan Valley. It’s a small town that used to have an economy of bananas, watermelons and dates.  The Auja spring used to provide enough water for some 90% of the inhabitants to rely on agriculture as a source of income. That number has recently dropped to less than 5%.  The issue is water.  Well actually water is not really the issue—control of the wells and springs is the issue, as well as climate change.  Below the dry expanse, the Jordan valley is one of the water-richestplaces in the West Bank. This water belongs to the Palestinians, according to international law, with a small portion reserved for Israelis. However, when Israeli settlements began popping up all throughout the area, so did Israeli wells, pumps, and infrastructure to control the water flow. Now, Palestinians cannot get enough water to support their own agriculture, which has created an economic crisis leading many young Palestinians to work on Israeli settlers’ farms- where they have no insurance, benefits, labor rights, or protection.  (Another recent article) Palestinians cannot make wells without permits from the Israeli government, which, Hanna said, “of course they never get,” and they are dependent on buying water from the Israeli company Mekorot, at a high price.

Hanna works for the Auja Environmental Education Center (Eco Center), an NGO that provides workshops and trainings for students from all over the West Bank (and internationals) around water conservation, management, regular ol’ recycling, permaculture, etc.

That afternoon Hanna took us to the Auja spring. He said it dries and flows on and off throughout the year since the wells suck up the aquifer, and we were lucky it still had water. As we drove there, the valley opened before us to acres and acres of date palms- all owned by Israeli settlers.  At the spring we set up the hookah and sat in the fresh cold water.  Small fish nibbled on our feet. A group of local boys swam in a pool just downstream. Hans and I climbed the cliff. Looking down there was the spring, the boys, the rocky hills and a green trail of bamboo leading out of the valley. And a fenced-off area with blue pipes and Hebrew signs. A well or pump? Hanna said even though Palestinians appear to have many wells throughout the West Bank, most of them are very shallow or lead to salty water, whereas Israeli wells are fewer but deeper. He showed us short movie (below) about the water issues in Al Auja, and it had images of a lush Israeli settlement with swimming pools and greenhouses while the French reporter said, “for those that live [in the settlements] water is obviously not a problem.” (Read more, and more and more about water issues in the Jordan Valley.)

We sat in a bloated silence.  Just the heat, the view, the rocks on our skin, and the slope of the valley. A goat bleated a few hundred meters away.  The sand shifted beneath its hooves, perhaps a stone rolled loose.  Three boys walked down a road on the other side of the valley, like they were on a direct route from the empty blue.  Empty snail shells became dust beneath our feet. Little purple flowers climbed out from beneath the crumbling soil, defying the odds again.  The broken bones of a mammal lay sun bleached and forgotten outside a charcoal blackened cave.   A hot wind carried the sound of a clumsy bird scrambling into takeoff.  

That night we slept on Hanna’s roof, overlooking Auja and the twinkling outline of the Jordan mountains. The stars were bright, the smell of shisha was sweet and the temperature lulled us into dreams. 

Driving home the next day we passed one of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It sat unapologetically on the top of a hill, California suburban type houses overlooking the hazy horizon. I was reminded of a section of Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, in which the architecture of Israeli settlements were compared to a Foucault's Panopticon theories (Foucault didn't develop the Panopticon, but he used it extensively in Discipline and Punish)... but I suppose that's another blog post. Stay tuned.