The latest says that Israel is denying the Palestinians water. Are any other people in the world denied water? Can't be, if they were, I'm sure it would have been widely publicised, wouldn't it?
Amnesty has released over 20 reports condemning Israel, since Cast Lead. Has it released this many about any other country? I doubt it. Are more Palestinians dying than any other people? Not even close. This disproportionate attention suggests Amnesty has an agenda...
Amnesty has accused Israel of only supplying between 20 and 70 litres per day to the Palestinians, but the Water Authority said that they actually receive 200 litres per day.
"The Foreign Ministry also refuted the report on Tuesday, stating that according to the existing water agreement, the Palestinians are allocated 23.6 million cubic meters of water per year, but 'in actual effect, they have access to twice as much water.'Robin Shepherd highlights Amnesty's anti-Israel stance as by promoting Ben White's book 'Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide', they endorse the notion of Israel as an apartheid state, and so "it should come as no surprise that the report adopts the Palestinian narrative of the wider conflict in its entirety." Amnesty did not even consult the Israeli Water Authority (so how could they have carried out their research properly?)
In its statement, the Foreign Ministry said that Israel has 'extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity' of water supplied to the Palestinians, while the Palestinians have 'significantly violated their commitments under the water agreement' by neglecting the construction of sewage treatment plants despite 'foreign funding earmarked for this purpose,' as well as drilling over 250 unauthorized wells...
The Water Authority also stressed that it routinely provided the PA with more water per year than the amounts stipulated in the Oslo Accords. It also said Palestinians routinely dug illegal wells and refused to purify and reuse their sewage for agriculture. Instead, they dumped their sewage into the streams in the West Bank, causing massive pollution.
NGO Monitor's president, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, said... 'the report adopts a painfully simplistic narrative which places blame solely on Israel, to the extent that the Palestinian leadership is absolved of responsibility for the agreements signed
under the Oslo framework.'"
Shepherd points out "how Amnesty effortlessly and unashamedly apportions blame to the 'more than 40 years of occupation'", automatically taking the Palestinian point of view. He sums up the other side of the story that was not included in the report:
“There have been more than 60 years of rejectionism and terrorism by Palestinian and Arab leaders. This has had the derivative effects of both reducing their capacity to consume water at first world levels and of depriving them of the kind of statehood (offered on several occasions by Israel) which would allow them to take greater control of their own water resources in particular and their economic development in general."Shepherd observes that the fact that Amnesty consciously
"adopted hook, line and sinker one of of the two available narratives and simply erased the other from consideration... is not a sign of an organisation whose main priority is to promote an unbiased appraisal of an undoubtedly important humanitarian problem. It is a sign of an organisation whose underlying agenda is avowedly political and avowedly anti-Israeli."
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I actually just blogged about this myself.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is a question of narrative. I think Narrative has more to do with the accepted histories and mythologies nations adopt about themselves.
This is a question of fact. AI has chosen to ignore the facts put forward by Israel and to rely on far more dubious eye witness accounts and what amounts to little more than speculation.