OVERVIEW
Across historic Palestine, Indigenous communities endure Israel’s water apartheid while its water and agribusiness companies profit from stolen Palestinian natural resources. Since October 2023, Palestinians in Gaza have endured a genocide, including forced drought and starvation. Israel blocks all aid while continuing to target and bomb them, thereby weaponizing water and food.
At the same time, Mekorot, Adama, and Netafim, among other Israeli water and agribusiness companies, position themselves as offering 'sustainable' technology while imposing exploitative models across the Global South.
These entities are complicit in Israel’s regime of settler colonialism, apartheid, and occupation. They promote their technology abroad with racist ideas such as Israel’s foundational myth of “making the desert bloom”.
The campaign against Israel’s greenwashing of its genocide and apartheid connects Palestinian liberation with struggles for water, land, and food security across the world.
Indigenous people from Palestine to the rest of the world are thirsting for justice!
WHY?
The denial of water has been recognized as a central part of Israel’s genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza. These genocidal acts of denying access to water build on a long-standing Israeli policy of water pillage and apartheid with the explicit aim of ethnically cleansing or otherwise destroying the Palestinian population.
Commercial actors and Israeli state institutions, such as Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, and other corporations, such as Netafim, Adama, and others, are crucial in implementing and profiting from these atrocity crimes and apartheid policies.
The same companies are involved in imposing exploitative models of agriculture, privatization of water, and enforcing agro toxins on farms worldwide, especially in the global south. Centuries of colonialism and the contemporary neoliberal regime have wreaked havoc on indigenous communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Israeli companies fit right into this structure of dispossession, thereby engendering joint struggles against them.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF), created in 1901 as an instrument for the Zionist colonisation of historical Palestine, holds 13% of the lands belonging to Palestinian refugees expelled during the 1948 Nakba. It serves on the Israel Land Council, which administers 93% of the land under Israel’s control in its pre-1967 borders. There, it has planted millions of non-native tree species and invasive plants, causing enormous harm to biodiversity. JNF forests are mainly designed to hide the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.
Mekorot is apartheid Israel's national company for water robbery and colonization.
After enabling the theft of Palestinian natural resources and destruction of aquifers, Mekorot ‘sells’ water to Palestinians, including in Gaza until 2023, at inflated prices and sustaining the water apartheid. It is included in the UNHRC database of companies involved in illegal Israeli settlements.
Mekorot has pushed for privatizing water globally. It tries to bluewash its crimes against the Indigenous Palestinian people by marketing false solutions across the world, including in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, and Italy.
Grassroots organizations defending common resources and building solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle are challenging and winning against these contracts which impose water apartheid on Palestinians and export these models to deepen existing inequalities.
Netafim provides irrigation systems to illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land. Netafim collaborates with Israeli arms companies and profits off adapting and commercializing their military technologies for use in exploitative agribusiness.
Netafim also markets its unsustainable and exploitative technologies as "sustainable solutions" to gain government contracts across the world and carry out Israel’s agro-diplomacy, especially in the Global South.
In Africa, Netafim and other Israeli agribusiness companies bring turnkey projects that pave the way for more business with Israel, including arms sales. Activists and civil society groups across the continent, from South Africa to Tunisia to Angola to Mozambique, oppose this agrodiplomacy, which exploits local communities and covers up Israeli apartheid.
Farmers in India oppose Netafim’s “environmentally destructive” technology.
Crop protection products manufactured by Israeli subsidiary Adama Makhteshim have been used in agricultural experiments conducted by settler research institutes in the Jordan Valley, the occupied West Bank, and the occupied Syrian Golan. In November 2016, as part of a conference and tour organized by the Jordan Valley R&D Center, a company representative presented research on the toxicity of its Nimitz nematicide product tested in Jordan Valley settlements. The company's products were also used in agricultural experiments by the same R&D Center in 2017-2018 and 2015-2016. These were carried out in the Tomer settlement and the Centrals' R&D facilities in the Jordan Valley. The company's products were also used in an agricultural experiment conducted by the Institute for the Study of the Golan on the Haifaia Katzrin University campus in the occupied Syrian Golan in 2013. The company employs regional specialists for the Jordan Valley and the Syrian Golan. It has authorized distributors in the settlements of Avnei Eitan in the Golan and Tomer and Naama in the Jordan Valley.
Israel uses pesticides as a form of warfare against the Palestinian people, as detailed in the report Herbicidal War in Gaza by Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London.
