Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
And some in dreams assurèd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
— excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)”
![a flooded field, with rows of rotting cauliflower stems and some green plants emerging above the water line a flooded field, with rows of rotting cauliflower stems and some green plants emerging above the water line](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F17616c67-0301-4e9d-9199-ead962a876f1_4032x3024.jpeg)
The river has flooded. All three forks of it have flooded. The farm has flooded. The river ran onto the farm and made a lake behind my house. The river ran onto the farm and made the driveway into a river. The banks overflowed and the fields filled up with its water. The water smelled different and made the air smell different, too. Things washed up and other things washed away. The water is everywhere.
Do not worry: This is normal, an annual occurrence. Everyone around me knows how to prepare for and move through a flood.
This part is not normal: For weeks, we have struggled to get running water on the farm. The water that runs now is not safe to drink. The well seems to be tapped. The pump failed from buildup of sediment. It doesn’t make sense to buy another pump when the well is full of sediment. There’s another well on the farm, full of iron and other things, not good for drinking. The water runs orange and stains clothes and skin like rust.
I realize as we discuss what to do about the situation that I understand almost nothing about wells. Or rivers. Or watersheds, really.
We got one delivery of a tankful of water, from a truck. Now we are pumping rainwater into the tank from giant collection tubs and a cistern. We need enough to flush toilets and wash hands, although, under these circumstances, defecating in cleanish water seems absurd. We also use this water to do dishes, although now we disinfect them afterwards. We all stopped showering and doing laundry on-site. We are doing our best to conserve what we have. The water truck delivery was expensive: $600. High price to pay for water. Small price to pay for life.
I keep forgetting to drink water. The scarcity affects me psychologically, although there is still plenty for ingestion. During a flood, no vehicle can enter or leave the farm, but on regular days all we have to do to get water is drive into town. We fill up giant jugs with city water for drinking, making tea, brushing our teeth. Clean water is accessible. It just isn’t as easy to access, and this makes me feel uneasy in a primal way.
We joke in the farm-dweller group chat that we are preparing for a water-scarce future. I think, This is nothing. I think about the time I was at a camp protesting a proposed lithium mine in Nevada, one of the driest states in the nation. The mine would use more than 4 million gallons of water per day, robbing neighboring ranches and communities and polluting the groundwater that would remain long after the company extracts what it wants and leaves. While I was there, the lithium company was going around the valley offering various things in exchange for water rights. Some of the ranchers sold out; others held out. Some of the indigenous tribal leaders sold out; others protested.
At the camp itself, we had only the water that we carried or was carried to us there. Sometimes I took containers down the mountain to fill at Sawtooth Station, staring across I-95 at the jagged teeth of Santa Rosa Peak and treating myself to a huckleberry hand pie from the store. Back at the mountaintop, I picked up small pieces of lithium clay from the surface soil, marveling at what the earth offers when we do not take it by force.
I gathered desert sage with visiting elders, offering cedar and tobacco and prayers in exchange. Using water, we boiled it into tea and drank it with honey. The aunties brought us food they made on the McDermott reservation, with the water they have down there. To clean the tables and do dishes after meals, my comrade and I used what we had: baking soda and water from small plastic bottles. It was possible, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t shower for more than a week. It was too cold to take my layers off, anyway. By the end of it, all I wanted to do was submerge myself in hot water.
Although I think about the water every morning when I sing to my first drink of the day (mní wičóni – water is life), I am not used to thinking about water as much as I have this summer. It keeps coming up.
A few months ago I went to a talk by an indigenous elder that enraged me. He spoke at length about gender, how everything has a gender, even water, even rain. He said big drops of rain that you can feel land on your body are “male rain.” And the misty fog that envelops us in softness is “female rain.” I grew livid because I wanted to respect his story and yet I felt trapped by it in an old, familiar way that carries an old, familiar rage.
After that, I started naming and gendering all the water around me, for fun. The dew on the leaves in the morning: non-binary water. The water in my water bottle: transmasculine water, can come in any size or shape, can flow swift or slow. The water that pours out of gutters: transcendent water of a specifically feminine rage. The crystalline frost on a winter morning: water of transfemme experience, beautiful and cutting.
Water, water, water. Every shape it takes, still water. Water taking every shape there is. Water existing outside of our projections and constructs. Magnificent, genderless water.
Water in the flesh of melons and cucumbers and persimmons and squash. Water in the cells of the leaves, turning them green in the summer and retreating in the winter. Water in stems like straws and roots like cisterns. Water coming and going, cycling and recycling, becoming snow and then snowmelt, becoming rain and then flood.
Water is life in so many languages: Maji ni maesha (Swahili). Ola i ka wai (Hawaiian). The language of my friend’s face in the emergency room earlier this year, as they pumped saline into her dehydrated body through an intravenous line, and I watched her spirit return to her. The language of plants that suddenly look up at you in gratitude when you soak their roots, spray their leaves. A rose of Jericho submerged in a bowl, spreading itself open after a protracted dryness.
When I don’t drink enough water I get small-minded and weak, reactive. I drop out of the flow of my own life. I get angry and dysregulated and sometimes need a friend to ask me, “When was the last time you had a drink of water?” And always, the water to drink is right there, in a bottle by my side, but I am off in my mind. I have forgotten my own body and its thirsts.
There is a level of thirst where it is impossible to forget.
What happens when you take away the water from an entire people? From an entire land? What happens when you build swimming pools just miles away from villages where no one has enough to bathe in? What kind of world do we live in where it is legal to withhold water from people who need it? What water wants to be free?
Military Order 158: In 1967, the Israeli government bans Palestinians from constructing water installations without the Israeli army’s permission, which the army does not hardly ever grant. It is illegal for Palestinians even to collect rainwater in cisterns. People do it anyway. The army destroys the cisterns. People do it again.
Before this brutal siege, Palestinians had very little water. In some communities in the West Bank, people consumed as little as 20 liters per day: for drinking, cooking, washing, all needs. The minimum recommended by the World Health Organization is 100 liters per person. Right now, Gazans are living on 3 liters per person per day. Meanwhile, Israelis enjoy an average of 247 liters per person per day (or 300, depending on your source). The Israeli water company, Mekorot, has sunk wells and dried up springs by systematically building infrastructure that pulls the water away from Palestinian villages to illegal Israeli settlements. Palestinian farmers and families alike suffer from inadequate water supply.
The first time I learned about boycotts against Israel, I was in graduate school. I had purchased a bottle of wine at the shopkeeper’s recommendation. My friend looked at me in horror as she pointed to the label. It was from the Golan Heights: Syrian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and annexed illegally in 1981. She had worked with UNRWA, the United Nations agency that operates in Palestine. “The people there don’t have enough water,” she said, “and they’re making wine?!”
Turning water into wine, after all, requires more than Jesus’ blessing. It takes a lot of water to make a little bit of wine, and drinking wine dehydrates the body, requiring more water to replenish. In a region lacking sufficient water, while pushing occupied people into thirst, the Israelis make wine.
A small boy in Gaza collects rainwater in cups and offers it to people, smiling. An aid truck delivering bottled water is swarmed by men desperate to get it. This scene was described to me as if people were fighting each other for it, and maybe some of them were. But I saw a young boy standing on the edge of the truck, hurling water bottles toward the back of the crowd, as far as he could throw.
We want there to be enough for everyone; we, the living.
Our farm also needs more water than it used to. To hear my colleagues speak, it used to be possible to irrigate the entire farm off the well, and it was a larger farm in those days, too. Now, to irrigate our crops, we pump water from the river into a pond, then pump it from the pond to a series of standpipes that connect to hoses that connect to sprinklers and to drip tape.
Drip tape is widely lauded as one of Israel’s technological innovations in agriculture. It allows for crops to be irrigated through tiny “drips” of water, sometimes enhanced with fertilizer, that is fed to plants at low pressure through very small holes near their roots. Imagine a tiny, flat hose with little leaks throughout. It is efficient and useful when farming on misunderstood lands, to be populated by people who do not know how to eat or use the plants that the water on those lands is already sufficient to grow.
We, settlers and descendants of settlers, are the same all over the world. We learn from each other how to extract value for our economies from the lands we occupy. Which is not to say that we learn to live on these lands, necessarily, to respect these lands, or to respect their waters. Historically, we destroy, and we “innovate.” It floods; we fight back. Floodgates and levees, sluices and canals.
There is so much about hydrology that I do not yet understand. One thing I do know is that the thing we call “the modern economy,” or sometimes “Western civilization,” is founded on inequality.
To achieve greater wealth for some than for others, resources must be taken from some, in what poet and writer Ross Gay calls “dis-privileging”: taking away from people what is their natural right, what otherwise exists in abundance, leaving, eventually, not-enough for any of us.
Diverting the water — from Palestinian small farms to Israeli swimming pools, from Native Hawaiian residents to golf courses for tourists, from indigenous and settler communities to lithium mining projects — is a form of dis-privileging. It “gains” by taking away. It concentrates and rearranges and poisons the way back, in some cases — as in the Maui fires earlier this year — literally leaving the earth scorched in its wake.
The kind of wealth enjoyed by those at the top of these systems is not synonymous with well-being. It is a chase to a certain end. It is a race to be the one who gets to use up what’s left. It incentivizes broken systems. It burns down trees. It is synonymous with scarcity. It begins with the belief that there is not enough for everyone, and it drives us at full speed into that reality, creating it as it goes.
As a rule, we, settlers and descendants of settlers, do not know how to live sustainably with the ecologies around us. We do not understand ourselves as part of the land, belonging to the land, fed by the land, fully interdependent with the sun and rain and soil and worms and seeds and pollinators and stories and cultures that feed us. We don’t tend to ask questions like a poet asked in a class I took this year: “How much water does the river need?”
We ask about ourselves, and our own needs; when our systems fail, we seek new technologies and capital to prop them up.
As I attend more and more conferences in which white folks close to the land start asking about how the indigenous people managed these resource, I think about the generosity of those who tend to life, who feed everyone — even people they don’t like. We who tend who life believe that even our enemies deserve water. Even the descendants and inheritors of settler violence, such as we are, will, if we choose to turn toward life, find ourselves welcomed by those who survived the horrors our ancestors wrought. It isn’t fair, but it is beautiful.
I think of the land theft and genocide that all our systems were built on, including our food systems, affecting our food itself.
And I think of the work we must do to make right — the work we must all do within ourselves to become willing to make it right.
Since the total blockade of Gaza that Israel imposed in 2007, most of Gaza’s water – 97 percent – has been undrinkable. A single, shallow coastal aquifer (the Gaza Coastal Aquifer, or GCA) has been the primary source of potable water for the entire population of the strip, even as it has swelled to nearly 2 million people. Due largely to overpumping – an effort to get enough water to meet the people’s needs in the immediate term – this aquifer has become increasingly salinated. There has been an intrusion of seawater where groundwater could not be replenished in time. Sewage has also infiltrated the aquifer.
Access to clean water has been a special challenge in Gaza since 2007, when the Israeli blockade made it more difficult for anything to move into or out of the Gaza Strip. Gazans have relied for drinkable water on three pipelines operated by Mekorot, the Israeli state water company, and water was transported locally by truck. (That’s why, in videos from Gaza such as this one, you see so many people carrying water containers – households already had them and relied on them often.) There are three main desalination plants in the strip as well as some smaller-scale operations that run on solar power – neighborhood efforts, essentially, local attempts at survival. Many Gazans spend as much as 33 percent of their income on water.*
Maintaining any clean water also requires sewage treatment. The Israeli government’s blockade of Gaza has made it all but impossible to repair or replace equipment in these facilities, leading to a condition the United Nations calls “de-development.” Through multiple bombardments, the Israeli government has targeted infrastructure in ways that deliberately poison the environment, destroy the soil, and deplete fish populations. In 2008, airstrikes destroyed a sewage treatment plant and released raw sewage into the farmland. What we are witnessing now is merely a swift escalation of what Israel has been doing this entire time.
All these activities – sewage treatment, desalination, trucking – require fuel to operate, which was cut off on October 9, along with the water from Mekorot. The sewage plant in the north of Gaza shut down within the first week of bombardment. Within three days of launching its ground invasion on October 30, the Israeli military surrounded the Gaza City desalination plant in the north, and then set up positions at the sewage treatment plant. Since late November, the IDF has been assembling seawater pumps with the intention to flood the tunnels – which would destroy all the remaining aquifers in Gaza as well as the soil itself.
These are all war crimes, blatant violations of the Geneva Convention. Yet the United States has used its power to block all major international institutions from taking any action to mitigate the destruction of the Gaza Strip, and to punish anyone who dares to try (such as Yemen, which has now been cut off from life-saving food aid as retribution for targeting ships carrying military materiel to Israel). It is a level of inhumanity I am still learning how to witness, even if it requires that I go mad in order to hold it all. Even if it demands that I let the feelings be a flood.
*correction: in the original newsletter I wrote “between 33 and 50 percent.” I can no longer find the reference where I read the 50 percent number, so I am revising it to 33 percent, which came from al-Jazeera’s reporting.
I am using so many words, and yet there are no words to describe what it is like to be alive and bearing witness in this moment. All language is insufficient.
While I have been grappling with how we heal from the past, here, now, is this event that is sending immense pain and loss far out into the future. Many, many generations will suffer. Those Palestinians who survive will suffer and will pass this suffering on to their children without meaning to. The land will suffer, too. And the occupiers will simply keep building, and keep taking, adding more suffering to what already feels unbearable.
In this moment I am confronted by the fact that the buildup to this has been happening my entire life. Discussion of Palestine has always been suppressed, and proponents of its liberation described as radicals, dangerous, even terrorists. I was taught to fear the keffiyeh and to toe the line that even saying the word “Zionism” was anti-Semitic. I went along with it. It seemed like the thing we all had to do.
Rachel Corrie, a girl from my state, was murdered by the Israeli government in Rafah in 2003. I was in college. It was front page news. I barely blinked.
The blockade of Gaza began in 2007, right as I was graduating from my master’s program, where a colleague mentioned the BDS movement to me and I asked a couple quick questions before turning away. I finished the top foreign affairs program in the world knowing almost nothing about what was happening in Palestine.
I recently picked up a National Geographic from 2008 from a box on the street. There’s an extensive story in it about Bethlehem and the occupation, the horrible conditions Palestinians were living in then. Yet in 2008 I knew almost nothing, despite having already made friends with Palestinians from refugee families in North America.
Two years ago I went to a Jewish Voice for Peace event outside a synagogue and was inspired to post something about it on social media for the first time. I got immediately bullied by old colleagues and took it down within hours, frightened into silence, and I did not lean in further to learning.
And now, this. Such an acute pain. We will pay the price for our inactions in the past far, far into the future. This is, perhaps, the hardest thing to see: This moment in the genocide — however swift, shocking, and brutal — was made possible by all the years leading up to it that we were silent.
My only hope is that we meet this moment of aggression with an equal and opposite commitment to un-doing the dis-privileging, de-hydrating, and un-aliving that has been going on this whole time.
Why is this happening? Because we refuse to live under occupation. We refuse to live in total submission. We want freedom.
- Refaat Alareer, spoken October 10, 2023; assassinated December 7, 2023
The issue of water, the right to clean water, the state’s weaponization of access to water, unsustainable uses of water – all of these topics are vast. I can only scratch the surface of them here. But I can point you to what all the water protectors in this country – led by indigenous survivors of the United States’ own genocidal land grab – are working on, trying to make sure we all have the water we need even as the movement’s indigenous leaders struggle with chronic water insecurity in their own communities, a result both of broken treaties and the consequences of settler-economy-driven climate change.
One thing that I think is important to keep in mind: Most things that we haven’t experienced personally don’t feel how they feel when we’re looking at them from outside – because from the outside, they don’t feel real. When something is really happening around you, or to you, or within you, it’s different than anything you might have imagined.
And, strangely, many things are survivable – until they are not. Thirst makes you tired, weak, and emotional. Your body starts to shut down selectively, just as we have on the farm, reducing activities to what absolutely needs to be done. We hold on until something breaks us, and then we are flooded – with emotions, with pain, with crisis, with disease, with more than we can handle.
Do not let this suffering become “normal.”
We keep seeing the situation in Gaza get worse and worse, just as everyone there told us it would. International medical experts tell us that deaths related to the lack of clean water and the spread of disease from dirty water will be exponential compared to the direct murders by bombs and bullets.
I wonder what it will take for people to call a stop to it. How many deaths are enough? How many wounds? What is people’s threshold for calling something a genocide? More than 1 percent of all Gaza’s children have been lost – do people think it needs to be 99 percent before they do something about it?
How bad do things have to get before we are willing to change?
How thirsty do you have to be before you stop to drink?
Everything I ate this season required clean water to make. I am proud of myself for keeping myself fed, with everything that needs my attention as of late. I made a proper Persian feast for a protest pal. I made gnocchi from a fancy French winter squash. I made my sourdough, and now I am making a poached quince tart for someone who is doing me a tremendous favor. We’ll talk about all that another time. For right now, my energy, like water, is being conserved for where it’s needed most.
However, I will ask you for one thing: I did manage to break the glass on our woodstove, which keeps us warm in the winter (now), and I am stressing out about finding the funds to replace it. If you’re not a paying subscriber, maybe now would be a good time to offer some financial support? You can subscribe through this platform, or – just as if not more helpful to me as a writer – support me through Venmo, where my username is @poppythegem. Thank you for your consideration.
And please: stay hydrated.
Some references and multimedia (please forgive my imperfect footnotes)
on what’s happening right now in Gaza with respect to water:
“Risk of Starvation: Worsening shortages of food and water in Gaza,” Al-Jazeera English, 8 December 2023:
“Gazans scramble for drinking water from aid trucks,” Reuters, 21 November 2023: https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW995421112023RP1
“Satellite images show Israeli forces hold ground around Gaza City’s water facilities,” NPR, 10 November 2023:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/11/10/1211567204/satellite-images-israeli-military-hold-ground-around-gaza-water-facilities“Water is running out in Gaza. It will mean more deaths,” Daniel Wolfe, Washington Post, 3 November 2023: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-israel-water-crisis/
“Gaza’s limited water access, mapped,” CNN, 18 October 2023: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/18/middleeast/gaza-water-access-supply-mapped-dg/index.html
history/context/archived publicly accessible articles about this issue:
“Weaponizing water in Palestine,” Al Jazeera, 27 July 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/people-power/2023/7/27/weaponising-water-in-palestine
“A Precious Resource: How Israel refuses water to to control the West Bank,” Bethan McKernan, The Guardian, 17 May 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/17/how-israel-uses-water-to-control-west-bank-palestine
“Parched: Israel’s policy of water deprivation in the West Bank,” B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, May 2023: https://www.btselem.org/publications/202305_parched
“Investigation of the Influence of Excess Pumping on Groundwater Salinity in the Gaza Coastal Aquifer (Palestine) Using Three Predicted Future Scenarios,” Seyam et al, Water, 6 August 2020: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/8/2218
“The Occupation of Water,” Amnesty International, 29 November 2017: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/
on the annexation of the Golan Heights:
“Three Years On, U.S. Still Views Syria’s Golan as Israeli Territory,” Ali Harb, Al Jazeera, 25 May 2002: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/25/three-years-on-us-still-views-syrias-golan-as-israeli-territory
on lithium mining:
“Lithium’s Water Probem,” Scarlett Evans, Mining Technology, 27 January 2021: https://www.mining-technology.com/features/lithiums-water-problem/
Protect Thacker Pass, https://www.protectthackerpass.org/
on water shortages in the Navajo nation:
"Supreme Court rules against Navajo Nation in water rights dispute,” Lawrence Hurley, NBC, 22 June 2023: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-rules-navajo-nation-water-rights-dispute-rcna83584
Navajo Water Project: https://www.navajowaterproject.org/
I also strongly recommend the following books:
A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet (for a page-turning, plot-driven, fiction-is-the-higher-truth confrontation with water, flooding, and climate change)
Inciting Joy, by Ross Gay (for hope & perseverance & instructions from the seed-savers of the past)
A great essay, and a great red. Thank you for writing it! Happy Holidays!