In her article entitled “When Strangers Thirst: Zionist Planning and Management of Water and the Destruction of the Nature of Palestine”, urban planner Lama Shehadeh wrote that the Zionist movement has not only built settlements, but has planned a state with all its compounds on the land of Palestine. Its engineers, who came from the West, who did not live in the place, carried maps and pens and drew lines on paper. Within a few years, these lines turned into water projects, streets, agricultural lands and industrial zones that split the face of the earth from the north to the south in order to ensure the military and political dominance of the Zionist project

Shehadeh points out that water planning has been a central tool among the many planning axes that have been used politically since the beginning of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Israeli water planning first encountered nature, adapted it and changed its system, causing the deep connection of Palestinian people to their natural environment.

As I have written, Israeli planning extremism, accompanied by the immigration of millions of Jews to Palestine, has required the effective organization and management of water in order to ensure its access to all parties to its project and its distribution according to its priorities and strategy. The State of Israel also worked in the beginning to control water. A new Israeli law was enacted in 1959 that turned water into the public property of the state, managed by the government water authority, and prohibited the use of any water source without the authority's approval.

The article continues to explain how dealing with water has moved from a vital source for the life and development of Palestinian people on their land to a means of feeding the increasing needs of the Zionist settlement, pointing to the excessive exploitation, pumping and excessive consumption of water that led to the drying up of the Dead Sea and lowering the water level in Lake Tiberias, and how this has changed the course of many rivers and tributaries ending in the Dead Sea.

The damage caused by the Zionist settlement has not been limited to Palestinian land and environment, but has mainly affected people. Water projects have confiscated Palestinian lands in the occupied areas in 1948 and passed through them without irrigation, but rather irrigated large agricultural lands in Jewish towns. This has led to the inability of Palestinians to rely on irrigation crops like others and their inability to compete with the capitalism of the Israeli agricultural market, which owns areas and water. According to the researcher, it threatens the remaining open areas for Palestinians after being stifled by Israeli planning in very crowded towns, which do not exceed their area The 3%.

To shed more light on this topic, we had this interview with urban planner Lama Shehadeh.

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