Abstract
The Palestinian residents of Aida Refugee Camp have lived under Israeli military occupation for over 50 years. While they struggle against the more legible concerns of the separation wall, unemployment, military violence, and high rates of incarceration, these residents are also acutely aware of a lack of adequate drinking water supplies. This led one young filmmaker, working at a small Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) in Aida, to produce a documentary in 2011 called Everyday Nakba, which suggests that for Palestinians, water scarcity is a continuation of the historical crisis of dispossession that began in 1948. This documentary ignited an interdisciplinary and multimodal collaboration among an environmental engineer, an environmental lawyer, an anthropologist, a Boston-based NGO, and the small Palestinian NGO to investigate problems of water quality that are related to water scarcity. This article—co-authored by members of the group of interdisciplinary scholars and NGO workers—reflects on our practice together to chronicle how small NGOs and interdisciplinary groups of community-engaged scholars can creatively approach multifaceted environmental problems, while also examining the limits of such approaches. Our collaboration has catalyzed water quality testing, point-of-use water treatment, rooftop gardens, awareness about water problems, political advocacy, and environmental education, though it has not been able to address the structural problem of inadequate supply of water. It has led to research that contributed to the literature on water intermittency. This article considers how this collaboration has shifted how members of a refugee community think about justice and the environment. Water concerns often demand a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach because water scarcity has health, economic, social, and political implications. Our research team saw how interdisciplinary collaboration and a network of activists in the West Bank and the USA can lead to multifaceted—albeit modest—outcomes, even though military occupation presents stubborn barriers to major change.
The camera panned slowly across a countertop to a sink full of dirty dishes. The faucet dripped sullenly. A woman sat on a couch with a look of quiet frustration. The next shot showed a desiccated leaf of a cereus cactus, and then a close-up of a shriveled pink rose. The woman explained: “The water comes every month, every week, every three weeks. They are in charge. It depends on their mood.” The woman, the sequence suggests, was a paragon of the dedicated housekeeper. She did not want to be sitting on that couch; she wanted to be doing the dishes. She was also a model of a certain type Palestinian political expert. She had no special training in political science, and no formal position in the Palestinian political leadership, but she spoke what was for the Palestinians of Aida Refugee Camp an essential truth: the Israeli authorities—who did not even need to be evoked by name—ruled over them capriciously, with no concern for their well-being, in ways that cost them even the small comforts of a clean kitchen.
Mohammad Al-Azza, the director, cameraperson, and editor of the documentary short Everyday Nakba (Al-Azza, 2011), lives on the sharp edge of Israel’s occupation, in a Palestinian refugee camp abutted by Israel’s 8-m high concrete separation wall where protests and Israeli raids are frequent (Bishara, 2020). But despite this ongoing intimidation and atmosphere of violence, as the young new director of the Media Unit at Lajee Center, a community-based organization in Aida, he had chosen in 2011 to make a documentary about domestic water scarcity. It was clear his heart was in this documentary—the woman in the documentary was his own mother. Featuring his mother in this documentary was an indication that the problem of water scarcity was an intimate matter. It was her dignity compromised by this lack of water. In the video, we see other mundane but profound imagery of domestic life in a place of water scarcity: flies swirling around an empty old pan on a countertop; a pile of dirty laundry next to a motionless washing machine; a small boy next to a line of dingy yellow plastic jerry cans waiting for his turn to fill one with water from the community tap. From his stance alone, you could see that he was accustomed to the wait.
Later in the documentary comes the fast action drama. As the sequence starts, a man is in repose, suspending a ceramic jug above his mouth to receive a thin stream of water. A boy calls out from off camera that the water is flowing through the pipes: “Aja al-mai!” (“The water has come!”). The man bursts into action, running up the stairs, climbing a ladder to the roof to route the pipes to the proper rooftop tank, running back down to hoist himself out a window to rig a connection to the pump that will move the water up to the rooftop. Then the man calls someone on a cell phone to report that the water is coming through the pipes and that he, too, should hurry home to start his pumps. The person is apparently skeptical, so he confirms: “I swear to God!” Then he tousles a boy’s hair and says, “So you’ll take a shower today?” He laughs, and it sounds half gloating and half absurd. And then, in a sequence about the failure of infrastructure that might be read as an answer (a century in the making) to the utopic, modernist opening of Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929), we see the infrastructure of the abject making do (Anand, 2012; Chu, 2014; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020) as it exists here: a water meter spins; a motley chorus of dusty, rusty motors hums; a tangle of blue and orange plastic water pipes attached to the outer walls of the houses pulses. The sequence signals that this same process is going on across the camp.
The documentary also points to the essential materiality and sociality of water: that it establishes senses of comfort and discomfort, that it demands these physical exertions, that its scarcity connects people to each other (Brewis et al., 2019; Limbert, 2001; Orlove and Caton, 2010). It shows how maintaining the flow of water demands action of people: when infrastructure does not work consistently, it compels its own temporality and pacing (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014, 2020). The documentary also captures what Julie Chu calls “the very tensions between the mundane and the eventful capacities of infrastructure” when infrastructure “sits murkily between ruination and renovation” (Chu, 2014: 353). As she points out, it is at these times of slow breakdown that infrastructure “can lead to a redistribution of the sensible across the political landscape” (Chu, 2014: 352). Finally, it is an example of how understandings of water scarcity can and should “be grounded in daily, lived experience” (Alatout, 2000: 60).
This documentary inspired a network of people into action on two continents, leading to international travel for the filmmaker, 5 years of Tufts University student research on water, a Palestinian student’s graduate thesis on water quality in Aida Camp, two published research papers, and the establishment of an Environment Unit at Lajee Center, eventually sponsored by a small US-based non-profit organization, 1for3. It is well known that documentaries are a key mode by which claims can circulate and campaigns can be waged (Gregory, 2006; McLagan, 2012), but this seemed like a large and unusually concrete impact for a film made with little budget on the whim of a young refugee. How did this all come about? In this paper, we examine what a transnational grassroots politics and a community-engaged science project motivated, for different actors, by environmentalism, visions of decolonization, and a commitment to environmental education can accomplish within a setting where popular politics are flourishing but running up against many structural limitations. We will reflect upon the interdisciplinary and multimodal collaborations involved in this project. We argue that much as this collaboration was developed across a variety of disciplines and kinds of academic and nonacademic practice, the outcomes are likewise various. These outcomes point in different though not conflicting intellectual and political directions, even though the overarching problem of water scarcity was beyond our ability to address. We surmise that this is the kind of outcome we can expect because structural problems—most notably, Israel’s control over water resources in the West Bank—are so daunting and because of the way in which water problems invite cultural, engineering, health, and political interventions, and especially interventions that integrate more than one of these approaches. Though these interventions in Aida have been much more tactical than strategic (De Certeau, 1984), and even though water politics are still often seen to be on the sidelines of “real” national politics, work on water nevertheless rearranges relations of power and opens up possibilities on the local scale of the refugee camp. Distinct from other cases regarding water, colonialism, and indigeneity (De la Cadena, 2010; Estes, 2019; Wilson and Inkster, 2018), water-focused and other environmentalist organizing does not occur in Aida in a way that evokes and re-enlivens other political ontologies; nevertheless, environmental research leaves open the possibility of working toward more imaginative forms of sovereignty based on Palestinian ways of being and values—in this case, starting with that very Palestinian value of a tidy kitchen.
As noted, this research on water testing and the activities that have sprung from it are the result of a coming together of more than one political and epistemic project—and this paper also tracks subtle political and epistemic transformation among the researchers, related organizations, and, to a certain extent, in Aida Refugee Camp as a whole. The co-authors have different relationships to this research, to Lajee Center, and to Aida Refugee Camp. Amahl Bishara, a professor of anthropology at Tufts University in Boston, helped to catalyze this work simply by subtitling Everyday Nakba and submitting it to the Boston Palestine Film Festival. She helped to bring Al-Azza to the USA and advised and (once) accompanied Tufts students to Aida Camp. This paper is also part of her larger research project about popular politics in Aida Refugee Camp. Amahl had already been working with Lajee for about seven years when she did the subtitling of Everyday Nakba. Her work with Lajee has always entailed the wearing of several hats. When Amahl has conducted formal research, she has had institutional review board protocols codifying research procedures. When she has volunteered, she has contributed to Lajee’s media team, written journalistic articles, helped with fundraising, chaperoned fieldtrips, and more. John Durant is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University with a history of research and teaching related to water and air quality and climate change. He has led water quality testing projects, working in part through the Tufts graduate certificate program, Water: Systems, Science & Society (WSSS). This is his first project in the West Bank. He trained Palestinian refugee Shatha Alazzeh in water testing, and she went on to complete a Master of Science program at Al-Quds University; she now leads youth activities on the environment at Lajee Center. Nidal Al-Azraq is a refugee from Aida Camp and a longtime volunteer and past employee of Lajee Center who now lives in the USA. He is the executive director of 1for3.org, a small non-profit that has supported both Tufts students and Lajee Center in these projects. We maintain our individual voices in some passages here to foreground our different perceptions of the process of this work even as we recognize that our individual voices have also been shaped in dialogue and through collaboration.
In this collaboration, as the literature has found about scientific collaborations in other contexts (Evans and Collins, 2008; Hackett, 2005; Knorr-Cetina, 1999), each of us has made distinct contributions and brought different forms of expertise to the project. 1 Thinking about the politics of collaboration across different kinds of skills and across professional and geopolitical hierarchies is something with which Amahl is familiar from previous research on journalistic collaborations (Bishara, 2013). We are encouraged in our approach by another similar collaboration in which scientists, social scientists, and humanists involved in an ecological research project in southern Appalachia established a newspaper column to make scientific knowledge more publicly available and then wrote an academic article about the process. Those authors concluded, “There is value in more intentionally coproducing scientific knowledge through communication, engagement and collaboration” (Burke et al., 2016: 170). Authors found that the collaboration was an “iterative, dialogical, and collective process” (Burke et al., 2016: 182), in which collectivity sometimes allowed individuals to say things that they may not have said on their own. This observation translates in an interesting way to the Palestinian case, where polarization means that people can be hyper careful about what they say. Co-authorship here is not an assertion of unanimity or univocality within each part of the project; instead, it is a mode of recognizing that collaboration and the value of working and writing together.
Finally, a brief note on our identification of Lajee Center’s name and location in this paper; while sometimes researchers assign pseudonyms to the organizations with which they work, this is unfeasible and not preferable in this context. We are writing about media that people at Lajee have already chosen to publish, like Everyday Nakba; moreover, collaborators at Lajee—including Shatha Alazzeh, one co-author, as well as other Lajee Center leaders—wish to publicize their work. During the student practica, as we discuss below, Tufts students identified Lajee Center as their client, and their final reports are online. In contrast, we have preserved the confidentiality of research subjects when we have gathered data about water quality or conducted health surveys.
The politics of water in Aida
The Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza contain great environmental diversity due to geographic difference and variations in the modalities of Israeli rule. Indeed, even in this small collection of papers in this themed collection, we read of several very different settings for environmental degradation in Palestinian villages, refugee camps, cities, and politically isolated urban spaces (Abu Hatoum, 2021, this issue; McKee, 2021, this issue; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2021, this issue). Aida Camp was established in 1950 by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was itself established in 1949 to manage the Palestinian refugee crisis precipitated by Israel’s establishment. Aida Refugee Camp, with an official population of 3150 (UNRWA, n.d.), has remained socially and physically distinct from adjacent neighborhoods and the rest of Bethlehem. Aida’s status as a refugee camp draws stigma from outsiders, but for many residents, this status has continued to be an important marker of history and an integral location from which to resist Israeli occupation. Aida Camp’s sense of distinctiveness also comes through its water infrastructure, because Aida has its own community water tank. Unlike in other circumstances where a common water source means some degree of collective decision-making about water resources (McKee, 2019; Trottier, 2007), in Aida, responsibility for delivery of water to and distribution of water within Aida is shared by the three authorities, none of which the residents of Aida can reliably influence: the Israeli military authorities, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and UNRWA.
Israel is a hegemon over water resources in the occupied territories, even in the post-Oslo era when the PA might be imagined to wield meaningful power (Zeitoun, 2008). The water coordination processes since the Oslo Accords of 1993, which established the PA and granted it limited authority within the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, have only “enabled Israel to compel the PA to assent to its own colonisation” (Selby, 2013: 21; see also Gasteyer et al., 2012). The Interim Agreements in the Oslo framework gave 80% of the water from the mountain aquifer, which sits primarily under the West Bank and which is 80%–90% recharged by rainfall over the West Bank, to Israel (El-Fadel et al., 2001: 50–51). Israel either exerts unilateral control over, or can veto development of, all major shared Israeli-Palestinian water resources. … Simultaneously, it has been able, under the cover of the ‘peace process’, to transfer costs (and responsibility) for the reconstruction and development of the Palestinian water sector, following years of under-investment, to the PA and especially international donors. (Selby, 2013: 18)
This has led to a water crisis. While Palestinians’ “internal” water production (from within the West Bank) declined from 1995 to 2010 by 16.7%, the amount of water purchased from Israel has nearly doubled (Selby, 2013: 19)—even as Israel uses 86% of water resources from the West Bank itself (B’Tselem, 2016). As a result, in recent years, water consumption in the West Bank averaged only 62 liters per capita per day (LPCD) less than the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 100 LPCD for full health and hygiene benefits (World Bank, 2018: 2). Nearly 37% of the West Bank’s water is purchased from Israel, where per capita usage is almost four times that for Palestinians (B’Tselem, 2016). In addition to controlling access to water, during military operations, Israel has also attacked Palestinian water infrastructure (Dajani, 2014); in Aida during the second Palestinian Intifada especially, soldiers shot at rooftop water tanks used to store water due to the unpredictably intermittent cut-offs of water supply.
The PA, for its part, is responsible for delivering water to Palestinians in Areas A and B of the West Bank, designations from the Oslo Accords that name the approximately 40% of the West Bank that is under relatively more Palestinian administration. This includes Aida Refugee Camp. In Aida, this means delivering the water to UNRWA, which stores water in a 100 cubic meter community tank on the edge of the camp. When the quantity of water in the tank is sufficient to provide water to most or all of the camp, UNRWA pumps this water through the camp’s water network. The community tank also has a tap that allows individuals to come and fill jerry cans with water when the UNRWA pumps are off. As in other places where water connectivity can reinforce group boundaries (Anand, 2017; Nucho, 2016), water is one element that has helped establish the social and political boundaries of Aida Refugee Camp, because residents receive water on the same schedule and experience water lack together as well. Water has long been a topic of incipient politics. Nidal Al-Azraq: The notion of waiting versus acting, this is what always fascinates me about my community in Aida, as in other communities in the West Bank. Living under occupation with heavy Israeli military presence requires special skills. One of them is to be patient and wait: Wait for the soldiers to stop throwing tear gas to open the doors and windows in the summertime. Wait for them to get out of the camp at 2 am after they arrest a few young boys so that you can go back to sleep. Wait for the water to be delivered after a week, a month, sometimes more, of no delivery. Wait at the checkpoint for the soldiers to allow you to pass. Wait for a political solution. When patience ends, people turn to struggle. The struggle is not only against the occupation. It is also to give people strength to struggle against the harsh living conditions. One of the hardest struggles, especially in the summer, is against the lack of water. Here we need to be creative: Store water in tanks when water is not coming. Take fewer and shorter showers. Limit laundry and cleaning. When water is not delivered for a long time, people start getting together and protesting. They direct the protests against the PA, but indirectly they are protesting the occupation, too. When that does not work, people start closing main roads and burning tires. Soon the struggle for water becomes a struggle for dignity and against the “state:” the PA, and the occupation.
The struggle for partial sovereignties and NGO politics of water
Amahl Bishara: I have been spending time in Aida Refugee Camp since the fall of 2003, when I began volunteering at Lajee Center while doing research elsewhere in the West Bank. I was quickly struck by how Palestinians in Aida struggle for local control in the most fundamental ways: They struggle to be able to sleep at night without soldiers entering their homes to arrest their teenagers. They struggle to be able to build homes in cramped spaces. They struggle even to find a safe place to play. All the labor that goes into securing access to water has been part of this struggle, even when it is not named as such.
Moreover, these struggles are not only about the pragmatic fact of survival. Instead, they are often also part of an effort to win meaningful local control over space and elements of daily life—partial sovereignties, if you will. They are often perceived to be linked to the broader Palestinian struggle for liberation, though they are not reducible to this. In this sense, they are similar to other struggles for environmental justice that are also about collective indigenous power or power for other historically oppressed groups. For Palestinians in Aida, liberation is most often seen through a lens of national liberation, entailing an end to Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that has persisted for more than a half century and, for refugees, a return to their pre-1948 villages. One of the questions of this paper is whether, when, and why water comes to be a part of a political struggle for liberation. I think of this struggle in terms of indigenous and anti-colonial scholarship on sovereignty that looks at how indigenous sovereignties have persisted despite colonialism, even if they endure in fragile, temporary, or limited ways (Kauanui, 2008 ; Simpson, 2014 ) and despite many attempts to eliminate indigenous people as individuals and collectives (Wolfe, 2006 ). In many Native North American contexts, the reservation is an important locus of struggle even though it is much less than—or territorially distinct from—the whole of historical tribal lands. In this regard the struggles for partial sovereignties in a small space like Aida resemble these indigenous struggles. This is true even as camps are perceived by many outsiders as spaces in need of humanitarian aid (Feldman, 2018 ) or, by many Israeli authorities, as spaces of threat, rather than as potential political units.
From the perspective of many in Aida, the PA, established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords purportedly as a step toward Palestinian statehood, and UNRWA constitute two additional layers of undemocratic rule. While Israeli authorities and PA officials each claim and deny responsibility as useful to them in that “sleight of hand sovereignty” (Bishara, 2017), UNRWA provides basic services, but often places political restrictions on its services, in part due to its own struggles for funding. As one of our interlocutors commented, UNRWA constitutes “the second occupation.” In Aida struggles for certain kinds of temporary and partial sovereignties—control over space or resources that is recognized as the product of political process—take place against three authorities: Israel, the PA, and UNRWA, even though Israel is clearly the most powerful and repressive of these authorities as the settler colonial sovereign (Shihade, 2012; Wolfe, 2006; Zureik, 1979, 2016).
In addition to the three governing institutions of the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority, and UNRWA, The politics of NGOs are relevant here. First, as we will describe below, WSSS’ pedagogical model for its student participants is that of serving a client; that client is often an NGO. WSSS’ training methods often prepare students to work in and with NGOs. Second, Lajee Center and 1for3.org are small NGOs. Scholars have debated the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in political processes. They are seen to be depoliticizing because they are not responsible to constituencies but rather to distant donors, and because they provide services that are supposed to be provided by the state, advancing neoliberal agendas (Ferguson, 1994). Scholars have also recognized diversity in NGOs, the motivations of the people who work in them, and the political situations in which they work (Tate, 2007).
In the West Bank, NGOs have played a particularly fraught role. A robust civil society was seen to be at the heart of the successes of the first Intifada (1987–1993). Yet, following the establishment of the PA in 1993, the quasi-state institutions of the PA began to provide some services and to make a claim to monopolize the political and civic spheres while repressing opposition (Alazzeh, 2014; Lagerquist, 2004). International aid also flowed into the occupied territories in ways that flattened the vibrancy of the local political and civic sphere, and NGOs became a major source of income and power in Palestinian society (Hanafi and Tabar, 2005). They came to be seen by many as dakakeen, or shops, set up to profit those in charge of them (Allen, 2013; Hammami, 1995).
Despite these important critiques, we should account for the variety of NGOs in this context. It may be possible especially for small NGOs to operate politically—albeit on a small scale—within the parameters of a basically depoliticizing structure (Feldman, 2015). Lajee Center was established in 2000 by a group of volunteers who found political processes under the Oslo Agreements and the PA to be stultifying to political progress. With a history of involvement in the first Intifada, they felt that their most valuable contribution might be to build a new generation of activists with a political culture more conducive to broad-scale change. Still, for several years, much of Lajee’s funding—and its sense of stability and success—came from large international organizations that can play the depoliticizing role described above. Lajee hosted summer camps, fieldtrips, dance lessons, music lessons, library activities, human rights workshops, and media trainings that enriched children’s lives and provided them with a space of critique of authorities as well as a treasured social space. The fact that a community-based organization like this decided to address the water problem (when presented with the opportunity) tells us about the tactical (De Certeau, 1984; Feldman, 2008) quality of political action in situations of constraint. This was an opportunity to do something concrete in their community, and Lajee’s leaders took it, without being committed to water quality testing from the outset.
Within debates about the politics of NGOs, tensions particularly surround environmental organizations. The environmental justice movement in the USA has a history of recognizing colonialism as a crucial part of environmental problems. A declaration of Principles of Environmental Justice made by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on 24–27 October 1991, in Washington, DC, stated, for example, “Environmental Justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms” (First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 1991). However, liberal models for environmental justice that focus on the perspectives of the white middle and upper classes have become dominant (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Arora-Jonsson and Ågren, 2019; Curnow and Helferty, 2018; McLean, 2013). In our case, WSSS has not centered upon the priorities of the white middle and upper classes, addressing aquaponics projects with indigenous communities in the Bahamas and cleaning up polluted river basins in the Boston area. Our collaboration suggests that while critiques of NGOs and their funding structures are apt and important, there are ways for small organizations to stand out from these trends.
The emergence of student practica and faculty research
Amahl Bishara: How did the water quality testing program in Aida Camp emerge? While I was impressed with Everyday Nakba, it did not occur to me to try to address the problem that it articulated—only to try to arrange screenings. Indeed, as an anthropologist, I often assumed my academic job was to analyze and describe rather than to take action. This is for several reasons, including a hierarchy within anthropology that privileges “pure” over applied research and political pressure on anthropologists of Palestine to avoid “politics” (Deeb and Winegar, 2016). I also shied away from this work because of an assumption that water problems were systemic, and so there would be nothing I could do to affect the larger problem of settler colonialism and Israeli domination that led to the fundamental problem of scarcity. The question of how systems change—of the relationship between structure and event—is of course an essential and longstanding one in anthropology.
Unlike Amahl, when Annette Huber-Lee and John Durant, engineers and professors from Tufts, saw Everyday Nakba, they were immediately motivated to think about what they could do to address the problems it described. They begin to envision a student practicum within Tufts’ WSSS program, a graduate certificate program that has been a part of Tufts since 2004. It attracts students in civil and environmental engineering (CEE), urban planning, policy, and nutrition, as well as other fields and disciplines. Students in the program can choose to do a practicum, a project-based learning experience in which teams of students work with real-world clients on the model of consultancies that many graduate students may encounter upon graduation. Rather than addressing the question of water quantity, the WSSS team had suggested water quality testing, having done such testing in previous locations and having a hunch that the storage tanks might have problems. Students trained in the membrane filtration method for fecal coliform enumeration before they left for the West Bank. As the group planned and prepared, Nidal was an informal advisor to the group, as well as an intermediary to Lajee Center’s leaders, due to his deep knowledge of the organization and the context in Aida. Amahl also participated in background and planning sessions. The inclusion of this larger training team reflected awareness by the core engineers that knowledge about the political situation would be crucial to the success of the project.
2
The following spring, in May 2012, six graduate students went with three instructors, including professor of civil and environmental engineering, John Durant, who had never been to Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories, and who had no previous interest in the Palestinian struggle. The team brought with them all of the necessary materials for water testing, including filters, petri dishes, a plastic filtration unit, and a small incubator. John Durant: When I first learned that a WSSS Practicum would be taking place in Aida Refugee Camp in the spring of 2012 and that I was invited to lead the water quality study, I was excited for the challenge. As a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts I had worked with my students for several years on water quality improvement projects in the Bahamas and in rural parts of El Salvador and Ghana. Through these projects, I had come to believe that if my students and I could work with committed local partners and if we were able to garner sufficient resources (to help our partner continue the project after we left), then there was a very high probability for our having a positive and lasting impact. But I did not anticipate how hard it would be to work in Aida Camp.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in my first days in Aida. Narrow streets without trees or open space, litter, walls, guard towers everywhere. And then there was the graffiti, it was on all the walls. But as our tour guide explained, it wasn’t just random graffiti; rather it was a narrative told in symbols, quotations, artistic renderings of life in the camp, and sketches of the faces of prison inmates living and dead. It told a story of displacement, relocation, longing for home, and protest against occupation. And then there was Nakba Day, the anniversary of the catastrophic displacement and relocation events decades earlier. Teenage boys wearing bandanas to cover their faces threw rocks at the guard towers, lit firecrackers and started dumpster fires. The soldiers responded with tear gas. The boys threw more rocks. It went on for several hours. Once the soldiers had had enough, they came out in large numbers and dispersed the boys. It all seemed orchestrated: each side knew just how far to push the other. It was tense and complicated.
So too was the water situation in the camp. We couldn’t get satisfactory answers to even the most basic questions. When does the water get delivered to central tank in the camp? How much gets delivered each time? How much gets pumped from the central tank to the rooftop tanks at each home? At what frequency? Is it equally distributed in the camp? Who decides? Is water quality measured anywhere in the system? Where can the results be found? We either got different answers depending on whom we asked or no answers at all.
The team surmised that the rooftop water storage tanks were a potential source of contamination. This became the foundation for future research. For Lajee Center and for the students, the results linked the quantity problem with a quality one: The storage of the water for long periods of times meant that, as the 2012 Tufts final report read, “The water in these tanks sits for days or weeks in the sun before it is consumed, and the warm and dark conditions are ideal for bacterial growth” (Crump et al., 2012: 44–45). For staff at Lajee Center, linking quantity—a clear result of the occupation—with quality meant that this problem was a legible political problem, even as they knew that any redress would have to come from the PA or, more likely, UNRWA. Still, the problem did establish a challenge regarding assigning responsibility. Israel would likely say that the problem was not theirs because they delivered clean water to the PA following a familiar imagination of microbes as being located in Palestinian areas rather than in Jewish Israeli ones, in the Global South rather than the Global North (Gutkowski, 2020, this issue).
At the end of their short visit, the Tufts delegation held a community meeting at Lajee attended by over 30 community members, including men and women of different generations. The robust attendance and lively discussion were evidence that residents in Aida were prepared to see water as a political issue. They informed residents of the preliminary results and gave basic advice on how to improve the quality of water, e.g. by use of chlorine tablets. Camp residents were animatedly concerned by the results of the preliminary water testing findings. An UNWRA official who attended the meetings insisted he was interested, but that the contamination was not the responsibility of UNRWA. This meeting also marked the first public assertion of Lajee Center’s concern with water issues. Given Lajee’s mission, Lajee’s adoption of the water issue by hosting this meeting marked it as a political one for Aida residents.
Tufts students fundraised for water testing to continue throughout the year—a practical step that impressed Amahl and Nidal. They were also impressed by the decision of WSSS faculty to continue the practicum in Aida. John has been to Aida six more times since that first visit, mostly but not always with Tufts students. Projects and project goals of the practica varied by year. Each practicum project was shaped by the expressed needs of Lajee Center. Indeed, the practicum was presented to students as operationalizing a modified “client–consultant” relationship. In the following years, the practica followed up on the initial work by doing further water quality testing, a health survey, and “powermapping” to determine how authorities and residents of Aida Camp perceived this issue. They also did more fundraising so that the water testing efforts could continue throughout the year and for the establishment of a new “Environment Unit” within Lajee Center that would do science and environmental education and activities (including teaching water quality testing techniques) for junior high school-aged children. Amahl was surprised by how the practicum led to direct support of the community. She was even more surprised when John himself stayed up late working on the final draft of the funding proposal for the Environment Unit. John was surprised that Amahl was surprised. As an engineer, he told Amahl at the time, practical outcomes were critical to his work.
Water quality testing had transformative effects on Lajee Center and Aida Camp in several respects. It called attention to the possibility of water quality problems and led to education campaigns around water and tank cleaning. It heightened residents’ appreciation that water is a political resource. It also transformed Lajee Center into the go-to location when people wanted their water tested. Finally, it raised the profile of science education, helping youth see the connections between science and their everyday lives and between science and political struggle. It also led to the employment of Shatha Alazzeh, a refugee from the neighboring Azza Refugee Camp, hired as the full-time leader of the Environment Unit as she was completing her Bachelor of Science degree. She became a crucial new leader of Lajee, a dynamic teacher, and a role model as a woman scientist. Shatha Alazzeh: Working as a scientist within a community organization like Lajee Center has allowed me to transfer my skills for the benefit of the wider community. I am able to implement research and practical projects that improve the quality of life and everyday reality of people. I have witnessed through my work the importance of community knowledge building and the impact this has on social cohesion. It is not difficult to generate excitement among youth because they are generally hopeful for the future and keen to learn about the environment. Working with youth is a particular motivation for me in my practice: by learning and working together we are creating a new basis that will change Palestinian culture in the long term. there are in these programs models for communal self-determination, mutual support and shared responsibilities designed for liberation now, in the moment, in the tasks of living and eating and caring, as circumscribed as they are by the ongoing Occupation. Young health workers caring for their elders, elders teaching the young how to grow crops, college students caring for their community’s water supply, all these efforts and more, pick up strands from the philosophy of the First Intifada, an effervescent resilience in the face of oppression and a template for the future. They are planting the seeds of a new society. (Murray, 2019) Shatha Alazzeh: The community of Aida refugee camp in Palestine faces constant barriers to food sovereignty. Mechanisms of oppression and occupation force its members to live without this essential right and are deprived of a component of their culture, one that feeds and empowers. Palestinians in Aida lack food sovereignty due to suppressed land access, hazardous superimposed diets, and economic hardships. Becoming food sovereign is important for the well-being of Aida Camp and is among its many priorities in its struggle towards freedom and justice. Steps toward food sovereignty in Aida camp have been taken in recent years. For example, the Lajee Center implemented a project in 2013 to provide rooftop gardens for different members of the community; currently 42 gardens exist in the camp and provide many residents with access to cultural traditions, healthy anti-diabetogenic food, and empowering economic opportunities. But even our lack of access to water impedes further progress in this project. In Aida camp, many residents are unable to build rooftop gardens as they need their rooftop space for water tanks. Food in Aida camp can be accessed, and its residents are largely food secure, but a community can be food secure while it slowly loses its culture and health. To have food by means of a self-governing, eco-conscious movement that places power and health in the hands of a community is to be food sovereign.
Meanwhile, back in Boston …
The documentary Everyday Nakba had other ripple effects as well. When the documentary was accepted into the Boston Palestine Film Festival, Mohammad Al-Azza visited and spoke in public forums. This attracted the attention of a group of activists and philanthropists who were committed to working for justice for Palestinians. Boston-based philanthropists Andrew Kurban and Gina Caligiuri Kurban, founders of 1for3.org, were motivated to turn the attention of their small NGO, which had done charity work regarding water in other parts of the world, to Palestinian refugees. As Gina Caligiuri Kurban said, We have seen many environmentally based films, but Everyday Nakba reached us on a different level. It was filmed, edited, and directed by someone living it. That made a difference to us and ultimately caused us to change our focus from African villages to refugee camps in Palestine. We have not looked back. (Bishara, 2016) Nidal Al-Azraq: It is true that our programs, such as water testing, rooftop gardens, recycling, and health services benefit the community of Aida Camp. But there are three other reasons, I think, why Lajee Center embraced such programs. One, they lead to community organizing, which is very hard to do without an active program. As an NGO, when you ask people to get together without doing something concrete, you are not different from political movements that they don’t trust. It is not enough to tell people that they have a problem with their water. They would say, What are you bringing to the table? But when you work with them for two or three years on testing the water, and show them that there are quality problems, and show them the effect on their and their children’s health, when you talk to them about who is responsible, then they listen and start getting organized. Trust is crucial here. The second reason Lajee embraced these programs is that they create opportunities for the young ones to learn something different as they get together. These gatherings will strengthen relationships for a lifetime. This social solidarity makes it much easier to face challenges as a group. And third, these programs also create jobs. For people who are in struggle there are two important and equal sides. There is the struggle against the injustice and for freedom, and there is the human aspect of the struggle, which is to take care of your community and give them something with respect and dignity. It empowers them and keeps them holding onto values and principles. All what we need is some equality in distributing the water that Israel controls. Instead of stealing our water and giving it to Jewish settlements and leaving almost nothing for us in the summer, Israeli settlements should be removed and we should control our own water. I know that Israel with a full support from the US will keep stealing our water and land, but that doesn’t mean we should keep quiet and you should support these violations of human rights by coming here to collaborate with Israel on water technology. (Murray, 2014)
Multidisciplinary research
Concurrently with the practica, in February 2013, Tufts faculty embarked on a shared research project funded by an internal university grant that supports interdisciplinary work. Entitled “Refugees, Water Scarcity, and Politics: Empowering Community-Based Non-Governmental Organizations to Take Action,” the research involved John and Amahl as well as Robert Russell, an environmental lawyer and senior lecturer in Urban and Environmental Programs and Annette Huber-Lee of CEE. Our short description declared, “We research how community-based non-governmental organizations can effectively act to improve quality and quantity of water supply and analyze possible political implications of such projects.” In both the title and the short description, one can see the interdisciplinary tug between engineers and the lawyer who were more accustomed to applied work and the anthropologist who was more inclined to think politically and abstractly. One can also see the tug between the possibility of addressing water quantity and quality issues.
Our research was catalyzed by the labor and ideas of Stephanie Galaitsi, a graduate student earning a master’s in CEE (with a concentration in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering) who had completed a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and had gone on the first WSSS Palestine Practicum (as it was called). Having completed a thesis related to research in Aida and benefiting from funding from the grant, she led work on a paper reviewing literature on water supply intermittency that was co-authored by the team (Galaitsi et al., 2016). In this paper, we argued that there are important distinctions between kinds of intermittent domestic water delivery: predictable, irregular, and unreliable. As we discussed how to analyze the special characteristics of “unreliable” intermittent water delivery, we all had Aida Camp in mind: a circumstance where “the consumer must make choices [about how to secure water] under uncertainty, requiring greater behavioral, emotional and physical defenses” (Galaitsi et al., 2016: 15). We argued that interdisciplinary approaches—encompassing engineering, government administration, and anthropology—were often necessary to study this problem, because irregular water delivery was usually caused by a mixture of factors relating to the environment, infrastructure, and politics. This conclusion not only mirrored our own disciplinary backgrounds but, we recognized, was in accord with a Latourian approach to science studies (Latour, 1993), as well as with other researchers’ observations that research on the environment and water in particular benefits from an interdisciplinary approach because of the social, health, political, and infrastructural dimensions of water (Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019: 482; Pulido and De Lara, 2018: 77; Tallman, 2019: 313).
Our second research paper (Alazzeh et al., 2019) is the outcome of collaborations with Lajee Center and the Boston-based NGO 1for3.org. It involves water quality research performed for a Master’s thesis by Shatha Alazzeh (MS, Al-Quds University, May 2018), whose degree was largely funded by 1for3. In her research, she used WSSS equipment, supplies, and methods, but she designed and conducted her study. This paper represents the first time data on water quality in Aida has been published as part of this research effort. Analysis of 520 samples from Aida Camp collected between March 2016 and June 2017 found that 40 had coliform bacteria. Moreover, the average residual chlorine was 0.02 mg/L, much less than the WHO recommendation of 0.2 to 0.8 mg/L. Because samples taken from the community tap in Aida exhibited less contamination than samples taken from rooftop tanks, the results suggest that water quality deteriorates as water moves through the network and sits in storage tanks. Moreover, it suggests that higher temperatures and longer gaps between delivery times adversely affect water quality.
As we discussed our conclusions for this paper, some were obvious: more research is needed to determine how quickly quality degrades over time as water is stored in the rooftop tanks. But other conclusions are harder to formulate. Should we even bother to develop recommendations, and if so for whom? We knew that Israeli authorities would not make possible more frequent water deliveries. We could advise UNRWA to test water at points-of-use more frequently, but this, too, seemed unlikely to happen. Our most practical advice was that camp residents should be aware of the possibility of water contamination and to know how to treat it when it is a problem. This is the challenge of community-engaged science where there is no authority willing to act upon the results: despite this practice of popular water quality testing, which developed into MS research on water testing and then into this paper, no authorities are listening to what the people are saying about their water, and so—in a bind that is quite different from the neoliberal one (i.e. retrenchment of state services)—a community must aid (or at least monitor) itself if it is to expect the quality of the water coming out of the tap to improve.
Conclusions
Our research team has seen how interdisciplinary collaboration and a network of activists oriented around but not limited to water concerns can have multifaceted—albeit modest—outcomes, even in fraught political circumstances. John Durant: The amazing thing was that despite the many challenges we encountered from our first days in the camp, we developed a good project. With our community partner, the Lajee Center, we identified a clear need in the community (residential water quality testing and improvement), and we were able to equip, train, and support Lajee Center to develop a program around water testing. Since the program started in 2012, Lajee Center has tested hundreds of water samples from the camp, identified water quality problems, communicated the results to camp residents, and provided point-of-use treatment solutions. Lajee Center developed an organizational unit, ‘The Environment Unit’ and expanded its mission to provide water testing services to other camps, educational programs to high school students about the environment, and rooftop gardens to address food insecurity in the camp. The Environment Unit now supports itself with grants and donor contributions. This is a phenomenal success story, one of resilience and determination, and one that I could not have imagined when I first started working in Aida in 2012. Shatha Alazzeh: The most important next step for the water project specifically is to create a specialized Water Testing Lab in Lajee Center. By doing so, we will be able to expand the current water testing project to be more comprehensive, encompassing various methods of biological, chemical, and physical testing. This will enable the Environment Unit to give full reports about water and report on the water quality index of the water. This will determine the appropriate usage of water in the camp including drinking, irrigation, growing of crops. I also hope to conduct more research into how water quality is affected by water quantity. This can be used as a pressure tool on UNRWA and the Israeli Palestinian Joint Water Committee. Nidal Al-Azraq: If the struggle for water used to be one directed at the Palestinian Authority, this will change soon, and the struggle for water will be directly against the occupation. Israel is moving toward the annexation of the West Bank and the right to water will become the same as the right to food, movement, expression, and freedom. Amahl Bishara: ‘Ethnography’, wrote the anthropologist Jean Rouch, ‘is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks’ (Rouch and Feld,
2003
: 185). This project has involved leaps not only of geography and culture but also between academic and nonacademic practice and among disciplines with different norms and goals. We have benefitted from an openness to working across potential political and intellectual difference. And we have benefitted from a readiness to let things flow: to allow a crisis around water quantity to inspire a water testing project, and to allow this water testing project to evolve into other initiatives. North American indigenous histories remind us of the very long quality of struggles against settler colonialism. More and more anthropologists are committing or recommitting ourselves to decolonization as a serious and transformative process (Allen and Jobson,
2016
; Harrison,
1997
). Doing collaborative work like this may be one path forward as long as we also reflect on its limits. I hope that this project—and this collaboration—is at its early stages.
By making more audible and visible the connections between national politics and environmental justice in Aida, this collaboration opens the possibility of defining the problems of tear gas and noxious water as concerns of environmental justice. The collaboration has helped develop a shared set of skills, concerns, and vocabularies. It has helped to strengthen grassroots networks in support of Palestinians in the Boston area, and to deepen the awareness of environmental concerns among those traditionally concerned with justice for Palestinians. This collaboration has raised awareness around water quality for residents of Aida, and it has led to real energy around environmentalism for youth in Aida Refugee Camp. These are subtle but significant political transformations. It helped raise the profile of a young documentarian’s video, and it helped a Palestinian woman refugee, Shatha Alazzeh, earn her Master’s degree and a publication in a major journal. This, too, is unusual and important. Settler colonialism is insidious and stubborn, but this collaboration oriented around water and environmental justice has helped one refugee camp to open possibilities for re-arranging power and living better in the meantime.
Highlights
Collaborative research projects can be documented in multivocal ethnography that includes voices of multidisciplinary scholars and nonacademic project participants. Small-scale environmental interventions may not address structural concerns but may catalyze other research, educational, and political projects. These can lead to subtle political change and make small improvements to the quality of life for communities in crisis. Constraints on water and the environment are part of Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinian refugees. Media can describe problems and motivate action, especially when activist networks exist to address those problems.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the learning communities in Aida Refugee Camp and in Tufts University of which this article is a product, and we are grateful to Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Irus Braverman, Natalia Gutkowski, Emily McKee, Anne Meneley, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, and the other participants in the research workshop on Environmental Justice in the West Bank at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University of Buffalo for their feedback and engagement with this article. We thank Isabel Rosenbaum and Marshall Hanig for research assistance as this article was being completed. Finally, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Environment and Planning E Nature and Space for their very constructive comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.