Emily Raboteau, writing at Orion, recounts the history and politics of water access in the occupied Palestinian territories:
Hidden Spring.
Susiya has existed since at least 1830, but its Palestinian residents have been locked in a legal battle over land ownership since 1986. That’s when archaeologists unearthed a sixth-century synagogue nearby with Hebrew lettering on its mosaic floor. The Palestinian villagers were evicted, their land expropriated, and the site turned into an Israeli national park run by settlers. Palestinians are prohibited from entering the park—even though its grounds also include the remains of a mosque and the caves that people from Susiya once called home. When Susiyans relocated too close for the comfort of the expanding Israeli settlement (confusingly named Susya, as if to reclaim Susiya), they were again expelled: in the early 1990s, Susiya’s Palestinian villagers were herded into trucks by Israeli soldiers under cover of darkness and deposited fifteen kilometers to the north. Though some families scattered, other stalwarts returned to their land, prompting escalating settler violence…
Ahmad knelt by the family’s water filter and filled a test tube to check for contaminants while chattering good-naturedly about pH balance, microbes, chlorine tablets, and the generally high quality of this water. If all was maintained, he said, the product was as pure as what you would find in the municipalities. “As pure as what they drink in the Jewish settlements?” I asked. I’d heard that the settlers’ untreated wastewater sometimes flushed down from their hilltop septic tanks into the Arab villages, poisoning groundwater and springs.
“Just as pure,” Ahmad said with pride.
I was struck by the mundane way he went about his job, as if it weren’t dangerous. Anything deemed constructionin the unrecognized villages is considered illegal by Israel, including the water tanks provided by Comet-ME. Indeed, seventeen of Comet’s twenty or so minigrids are under threat of demolition, alongside the homes and structures they power. I wondered at the level of risk Ahmad was undertaking to ensure this most basic need…
Ahmad went about checking the water meters to estimate daily use. The water crisis is deepening across the Middle East, but here, in the poorest communities, the problem is most pronounced. Ahmad spoke in terms of liters and cubic meters, throwing out statistics like the scientist that he is. The daily allowance for domestic use by a family of five to ten people is no more than two hundred liters, he explained, though the World Health Organization recommends one hundred liters per day for just one person.
Ahmad’s figures adhere to a stark and troubling scale that measures not just water consumption but relative human worth. In the remote communities of the South Hebron Hills, the average person has access to as little as 20 liters of water a day. That’s far less than the average Palestinian, who consumes 73, which is in turn less than half of the 183 daily liters consumed by the average Israeli. Meanwhile, the Israeli settlements of the West Bank receive almost limitless supplies of water through Mekorot, Israel’s government-owned water company. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in 2012 that Israel’s 450,000 settlers used as much or more water than the total Palestinian population of about 2.3 million.
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The blogger Field Negro (created by an attorney in Philadelphia), has this view of Jeff Flake’s performance art in the Senate:
How we lost our moral authority.
I am trying to remember exactly when conservatism turned to nativism. There was a time, in the not too distant past, when conservatives were people of principles. Regardless of what you thought of their politics, you had to respect them for having a set of core beliefs and sticking to them. They still, for the most part, were people of basic human decency.
There are no longer men and women of principle in positions of power in the republican party. It has been hijacked by the alt-right and white nationalist; people who have no intellectual core or sound beliefs other than white is good and the others are bad…
As Americans we like to talk about American "values", but what are they, really? These American "values". In the age of trump, maybe most Americans aren't as decent and upstanding as we would like to believe. Maybe those "values" that we like to boast about aren't as pure and morally above board as we think they are. Maybe these so called "values" are all just a sham.
Sorry Mr. Flake, we have no moral authority. We gave that up when we elected Donald trump.
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Black Girl Dangerous announces itself as ‘Amplifying the Voices of Queer and Trans People of Color’.
Writing in BGD, Zoe Samudzi examines the meaning of the Women’s March, and distinguishes Unity from Solidarity:
The Women’s March and the Difference Between Unity and Solidarity
On the day after the inauguration, millions of Americans took to the streets in major cities across the country and in the nation’s capital for the flagship Women’s March on Washington. Organized around the five principles of Kingian non-violence and intersectional feminism, the march espoused a desire to “stand together in solidarity with our partners and children for the protection of our rights, our safety, our health, and our families” and in unwavering affirmation of women’s rights as human rights. These are fairly uncontroversial political premises for any person who self-identifies as a feminist. But unfortunately, despite the desires for women to be bonded and united through a common understanding of “sisterhood” and “womanhood,” it was clear that there were disparate understandings in ideology and gendered identity…
In commenting on the problematic aspects of the Women’s March, racialized and trans and disabled and other women were condescended to and chastised, generally by white women. They were met by the same predictable retorts about their “divisiveness,” the same dog-whistle code for “non-compliant” and “uncooperative women.” Ideas about “unity” and “sisterhood” were also employed to shut down critique, as were ideas about “progress” and “efforts.”…
In this march, and in so many other instances, unity is weaponized as a means by which to bludgeon and silence the critiques of multiply marginalized people. Empty rhetorics and heavy emphases placed on shared womanhood, for example, erased the critical voices of trans women who were alienated by womanhood revolving around sex organs.
More often than not, “unity” serves as a powerful silencing tool.
There is a distinct difference between “unity” and “solidarity”: where solidarity recognizes our differing social contexts and positions but still highlights the criticality of working together, “unity” pushes a violent doctrine of sameness. It allows for individuals in positions of relative dominance to set agendas that more marginalized and disenfranchised individuals and communities are dogmatically expected to follow.
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Patricia Valoy is an engineer, radio host and blogger; her eponymous blog is subtitled ‘STEM ACTIVIST | LATINA FEMINIST’.
In 2015, she outlined her vision of Transnational Feminism:
Transnational Feminsim: Why Feminist Activism Needs to Think Globally.
My identity is multi-faceted and intersectional, and I suspect that most of you reading this feel the same way.
But as a foreign-born, woman of color feminist in the United States, it can be hard to find the group within feminism that feels just right for me.
I am a foreign-born Latina feminist who is all about STEM advocacy, so I fit into a lot of categories all at the same time.
The terms intersectional, Latina, Afro-Indigenous, Black, STEM-inist, and women of color all make my heart race with excitement. I feel at home within all those circles — and, simultaneously, foreign.
For this reason, I adopted transnational feminism as an identifier and way of life. Rather than negate my other identities, it complements them…
By working within the structures of mainstream society, liberal feminists aim to gain political and social gains by integrating women into powerful positions, thus assimilating into patriarchal and Eurocentric standards of leadership and equity.
It’s understandable why this is a feminist thought that appeals to white women in developed nations (who don’t have to deal with the intersecting oppressions of colonialism and imperialism), but this sort of feminism does not consider the ways in which women of color are oppressed along racial and class lines.
Furthermore, non-Western women are often painted as oppressed and lacking agency. This is evident in the way in which mainstream media shows veiled women to imply a lack of freedom, meanwhile ignoring that covering the face can be an act of defiance for political representations, such as in the case of the Zapatistas…
While Western feminism overemphasizes commonalities with women across nations, transnational feminism recognizes inequalities across different groups of women, so that in essence, it’s a series of feminisms addressing particular issues and not one uniform movement.
This is a crucial aspect of feminism for transnational women of color because although we all might identify as women, the ways in which global issues affects us is not always the same.
And more importantly, our positions of privilege and/or disenfranchisement can change depending on our geographical location.