Women's Dignity Scorched in Palestine

When Clean Water Is Cut Off

Nefissa Naguib
U Bergen

The 2006 UN Human Development Report, Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis, demands more international concern for how lack of clean water and hygienic private sanitation impact on women’s health and dignity. Such an international call is motivated by Adam Smith’s philosophy that dignity is among the “necessities” for well-being and must be regarded as a commodity that “the poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without.”

Yet, such philosophical principles presuppose several conditions that remain unrealistic in most developing countries, where institutional breakdown, occupation and war are the norm rather than the exception. The principles evoked by the UN belong in a world where there are funds available for investment in service provision, where institutions are functioning, where there is willingness and ability to pay for services, where there are meaningful ways of involving users in the running of services, and where there are active independent civil societies in which political systems are stable and people do not live under siege.

Water, sanitation and hygiene are three entangled determinants of the UN water-ill-health-poverty spectrum of development, and ultimately human dignity. But there is more than this spectrum suggests. Inadequate access to hygienic and private sanitation is most acutely felt among women in Palestine and elsewhere; it is a source of physical distress and humiliation.

Water and Security

During my 15 years of research among women in Palestine, I have watched lives methodically crushed, not only with arms but also through denying women vital amounts of safe, sufficient water and thus decent sanitary conditions. With escalations of unrest among the Palestinians and the growing brutality of Israeli military occupation, questions about the control of resources and utilities, such as water and sanitation, are not only of life and death, but also of human rights and humanitarianism during times of occupation, conflict and war.

The wells and springs that provided villagers in Palestine in the past with water are today often close to new settlements of Israelis. Thus, these sources of water have become off-limits to Palestinians for security reasons, leading to loss of health and human dignity among many Palestinian villagers, particularly women.

Without piped water or springs, many Palestinian women collect and store rain in pits or cisterns close to their homes. Photo courtesy of Nefissa Naguib

Inhabitants of Kherbet Magda, a fictive name of a village north of Ramallah in the West Bank, for example, received much of their longed-for piped water from the Israeli water company Mekorot in the mid-1980s. For the first couple of years, the advent of piped water was identified among the women as “a good.” The dry toilet sheds were locked up, and flush latrines constructed inside homes. Old and young women hoped that with modern sanitation their workloads would be lighter, more infants would survive and women’s access to water for hygienic and private sanitation would be less cumbersome.

Following the Palestinian uprisings in 1987 and 2000 and the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation, the situation in Kherbet Magda has deteriorated, and the services from Mekorot are no longer available. The water pipes are dry. On my last visit in the village I woke up to a raid on the village. I stood watching, with other women and children, as the Israeli army uprooted olive trees and bulldozed two old springs. My landlady’s granddaughter held her arms around me, asking “Is this the first time you see this, yah khaliti (auntie)?” It was not the first time I had seen the violent uprooting of olive trees, but it was the first time I witnessed blatant and ruthless destruction of people’s life source, water.

Growing Infections

Without piped water or springs, women in Kherbet Magda rely on water “from above,” collecting and storing rain in pits or cisterns close to their homes. They have also gone back to using dry toilets. I have observed them not only making contingency plans day to day in case their village gets hit or demolished, but also having to deal with chronic humiliation, agony and exhaustion that accompanies their incapacity to access adequate clean water and private sanitation.

It is these silent and less spectacular daily threats that distress Palestinian public health workers. They are concerned about the growing bacterial and intestinal infections that disable not only children, but also women, with high fevers and massive diarrhoea. Among women there are never-ending epidemics of fungal skin infections caused by insufficient clean water for washing of skin and hair.

Ambulating Palestinian doctors and nurses I spoke to in Kherbet Magda report intestinal parasites are getting to be ”as common as the winter flu.” Increasingly, they treat elderly women living in villages like Kherbet Magda who have intestinal roundworms which cause no noticeable symptoms, but in cases of heavy infestation intensify dietary insufficiency and cause bowel difficulty. Public health workers are particularly concerned about normalizing an epidemic that is the cause of a growing number of elderly women suffering from not only physical pain but also severe depression and stress-related behavior.

Beyond Shame

It makes little difference if the debate is about war, occupation or whether resistance and uprising is a matter of relative supremacy and military possibilities; Israel is in control of public resources shared by Israelis and Palestinians. The state of Israel occupies the sources of water and systems for its sanitary distribution that safeguards Palestinian health and dignity. Women, especially elderly women, are caught between occupation and their own vulnerability and age. For these women it is not only a matter of situated conflict, but also a matter where their situated life-world and sense of worth are constantly injured.

“The scorch on women’s dignity” is a statement I borrow from a young nurse who demanded awareness “from beyond the wall of shame” to ordinary women’s sense of propriety. I met this nurse in Kherbet Magda; she had her arms around an elderly woman who was crying. Eroding women’s sense of propriety by denying them access to fundamental and intimate human needs is a scorch on their dignity.

Nefissa Naguib is a researcher in the department of social anthropology at the University of Bergen.