The Jordanian Water Privatisation

Aisha’s soft touch was a little thrill as I helped her off the conference shuttle bus, the exhaust fumes making me squint up at her as the warm light caught her fine features. It was a hot Dead Sea day and I shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar confines of a suit. She glanced at me as her high heels hit tarmac, a flash of white teeth at my discomfiture.
   ‘Come on, let’s get you installed in the press office so I can find Harb and Zahlan.’
   We walked into the King Hussein convention centre, more buses pulling up behind us as conference visitors streamed in from the hotels along the Dead Sea coast and from the public car parks down the road. The keynote speaker, Harb Al Hashemi, Jordanian Minister of Natural Resources by the Grace of God, was also, Aisha told me, going to announce the result of the privatisation. The evaluation committee had reviewed the financial offers of both bidders and made its choice. Harb would reveal all.
Olives, Page 243

The privatisation of Jordan's Water Network in Olives is a fiction, although the critical water shortages Jordan is facing is a very well researched reality. The Israeli 'security wall' does, indeed snake around fertile land and springs, deviating significantly from the '1967 border' by kilometres just to snag a juicy well or spring. In a region where water - the stuff of life - is severely scarce, ensuring a steady supply is existential. Even when that supply comes at the expense of your neighbour or, if you prefer, your 'partner in peace'.

Ariel Sharon did indeed threaten to take Israel to war over the damming of the Litani River and Israel did take control of Lake Tiberias in the 1967 war, securing the massive reservoir. There are underground aquifers leading into Tiberias, a number of earthworks exist today that date back to Roman times, the Qanat Romani of Jordan, mostly concentrated in the North of the country.


But the privatisation is makety-uppity - you can blame it on the fact I was working with the Jordanian Ministry of ICT on a number of privatisation projects at the time I was writing Olives, including the privatisation of Jordan's telecoms sector which stands today as the most competitive in the Middle East -  precisely because of that privatisation programme. And the Ministry of Natural Resources is also, sadly, a fiction.- the water issue belongs fairly and squarely to the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation which is embarking on a number of schemes almost as breathtaking in scope as Daoud Dajani's in Olives - including the controversial Disi project, which will pump water hundreds of kilometers from Wadi Rumm up to Amman.

Reviews

“a fast and mesmerizing read.”
American Bedu

“The following night I picked up the book again and finally put it down at 2am. Rest assured that I need a very good reason to stay up until 2am on a school night, and that night I was so gripped by the book and eager to find out what happened next that the time ran away with me.”
Hellwafashion

“The intensity of Paul and Aisha’s love story is the novel’s defining strength with their intimacy heating up to a feverish pitch as disasters escalate and put them at risk.”
The National

“If you take Tailor of Panama, add a sprinkle of Lawrence of Arabia, introduce rich and memorable characters, a modern concern about water scarcity, and bring up the speed, you will get Olives – A Violent Romance by Alexander McNabb. Reading this book was an absolute delight, with an intriguing ending that still keeps me thinking.”
Hanging Out Globally

“Alexander McNabb, having travelled extensively across the Middle East, has created a hard-hitting novel tackling real-life issues coming out of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Olives: A Violent Romance joins an emerging genre on the conflict which attempts to humanise it, making it accessible to readers from all walks of life. It gives a taste of the realities and challenges facing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel and the diaspora.”
Middle East Monitor

“There is definite tension in this book and I was gripping my iPad near the end as it all came together. Right up to the end I wasn't sure who the "bad guys" are (and, really, both sides have good and bad, which is shown in this novel). I love that it isn't clear who is stalking whom until the very end.”
Helen’s Book Blog

The Mental Thing About Deir Yassin

   I spoke to Aisha but looked at Mariam, a strange triangular conversation. ‘How did they meet?’
   Mariam looked misty-eyed, gazing out of the window as she talked. ‘At a market in Nazareth. The families took a long time to come to terms with the fact they were in love and wouldn’t marry anyone else, Mariam says. My father was born here on the farm, in 1946. She says he cried all the time as a baby but when he was two they were forced to leave the farm and my father fell silent. She worried about him, he was so quiet and still.’
Olives Page 178

Many Palestinian families found themselves on the road in 1948, the year of Israel’s foundation. It’s not a story people like to tell outside the Arab World, the mass migration of some 700,000 people from their homes. Many were farmers, villagers – simple, traditional people who would have barely understood what was happening around them beyond the simple existential threat of men coming to drive them away or kill them.

They were encouraged in this by hearing tales of massacres – just over a month before April 16th, ‘Al Nakba day’ or Israel’s foundation day, depending on which side of the wall you figuratively stand, over a hundred villagers had been massacred by Zionist paramilitaries (or terrorists if you prefer to use the term the British authorities used to describe them. Your terrorist is my paramilitary!). The men from the Irgun and Lehi entered the village and systematically murdered the villagers, throwing hand grenades into houses and lining prisoners up on the heights of the quarry and shooting them to let their bodies fall into the quarry.

It’s an act that always brings the little town of Oradour to my mind, although the scale is different (ten times as many died in Oradour). But then I have always found comparing massacre as a numerical exercise is frighteningly inhumane. Call me squeamish.

Condemned by Jewish authorities, the Deir Yassin massacre undoubtedly struck fear into other Arab communities and is credited with being a pivotal event in the decision of the surrounding Arab countries to attack Israel.

And so the family in Olives took to the road, leaving their farm behind as they sought safety, taking their silent baby with them as they fled the killing and the clearing of land that was to take place and take away so many people’s homes.

The ruins of Deir Yassin were settled and apparently a few houses remain as part of a mental hospital today. An insane irony, perhaps.

The Israeli 'Security Wall', Palestine

‘We’re heading for Qaffin,’ said Aisha as she watched the countryside go by. ‘It’s on the way to Tulkaram.’
   I remembered the names from news broadcasts. Daoud had told me the farm was in the country between two of the biggest flashpoint areas in the whole territories. I wondered why it had never occurred to me to pinpoint where the farm actually was, how close it was to these places. He also told me the Dajani’s land had been cut by the Israeli security wall, although the whole farm was actually on the Arab side of the 1949 and 1967 lines. The wall did that – it snaked around the old delineations of territory to seize little bits of farmland, grab at water or snatch at green areas.
Olives, page 165

There are places where the ‘security wall’ slashes 10km into the West Bank, redefining the 1967 border to, literally, cut off water-rich and cultivable land. It’s the most breathtaking land-grab in modern history, yet has gone largely unremarked in Western media, a stretch of wall and (mostly) fencing over four hundred miles long. Some ten per cent of the West Bank, as defined by the widely accepted 1967 border, has been sequestered by the barrier.

The construction of the wall itself, with its wide ‘no go’ zone, uprooted tens of thousands of olive trees, many of which were hundreds of years old. And frequently it snakes between villages and the farmland that sustains them, forcing the farmers to queue at gates for access to their own land. It never misses the chance to grab at a well or spring in the water-hungry land.

There’s no more anxious time than the harvest, when the olives are ripe. This is when access to their trees matters more than usual. It’s supposed to be a time of celebration, but for many each year the harvest is a time of bitter humiliation and disappointment, of grasping at whatever opportunity presents itself to access their land and snatch their crops back to the other side of the wall.

British graffiti artist Banksy tells a remarkable story about the barrier. He visited the West Bank to paint a number of pictures on the wall, typically humorous and ironic images. He tells the story of an old man (and I recount it from memory, BTW) who approached him while he was working (risking an unpleasant sojourn in an Israeli jail) and said, ‘You’re making the wall beautiful.’
‘Thank you,’ said Banksy.
‘No,’ said the old man, ‘We hate this wall. We don’t want it beautiful. Go home.’

The Balfour Declaration

 I sipped at my little cup of strong coffee. ‘Do you think you can take the water bid?’
   ‘Yes. I know we can. We’re a million miles ahead of the British when it comes to our technical bid and they know it. In fact, it’s something of a worry. The British don’t always play fair in Jordan, you know.’
   Ah, the cunning British. The Arabs have never lost their view of the ‘Breets’ as cunning, Machiavellian strategists. What I found odd was how such a bunch of muckle-headed chinless wonders with their classical educations, convictions of racial superiority and love of brown boys’ pert arses could ever be seen as cunning.
   I said as much to Daoud. ‘Ah,’ he said, smiling a rueful smile. ‘But maybe we have to demonise them. Imagine, if we took your view of these people, the Storrs and Glubbs, Philbys and Lawrences. Imagine how little it would make us, to have been conquered by these creatures. We’d rather build them up to be cunning and forceful. At least it would explain how they could take everything away from us.’
Olives, Page 135

You can tell the British were in Jordan, because of the nice, straight borders. Suits with posh voices, pencils and rulers in fact defined much of the Middle East. I am often amazed at how little rancour I have encountered in my time wandering around the region, even when history rears its conversational head.

One thing I hear quoted a lot is the line that the creation of Israel was down to the British and their Balfour Declaration. Few people who state this are aware of what the Balfour Declaration actually is – seven lines of text rather than some grand treaty that defined Israel.

"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

It’s actually a pretty weasely piece of diplomatic speak as Great Statements go. And it was actually unpopular with the British public of the time. But the Balfour Declaration was part of a prevailing sentiment at the time among the Great Powers that “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was something to be looked upon favourably.

In fact, British policy in Palestine – in the Arab World in general – was a mess. The Sykes Picot treaty, the McMahon-Hussein treaty, the attempts at settlement of the Hashemites around the region and the subsequent Anglo-French declaration all clearly show the British and French as being the dominant powers in the region, jostling for pre-eminence at every turn. They also show the British had no coherent objective or policy for the region. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing, in short…

A collector of books on Middle East history, one of my more prized possessions is ‘Orientations’ by Ronald Storrs. Storrs, a friend of TE Lawrence’s (who used the defining phrase, ‘clever little Lawrence’), was the governor of Mandate Palestine and his views on Zionism were typical of British views of the time, although his view of the Arabs and the cost of Zionism was more advanced than, perhaps, Joe Public's - and certainly more than Balfour's.

Storrs spent much of his time as Governor trying to perform an impossible balancing act. The British prevaricated and 'viewed with favour', trying to maintain the status quo in Palestine, limiting Jewish immigration as much as they could (Lawrence Durrell’s brilliant Alexandria Quartet is centred around the struggle to obtain entry certificates for Jews from Europe to get into Palestine), while trying to cope with increasingly violent frustration from the indigenous population of Palestine as well as being effectively barricaded out of the institutions of state they had created by the Jewish administrators they had appointed.

Zionism is a world movement. Arabism does not exist. Although it is said that a knowledge of Arabic will take you from India to the Atlantic, yet Arab merits, defects, rights and grievances are essentially local in character... The Arab of Palestine therefore feels himself under an overwhelming inferiority in the presentation of his case to the conscience of the world. He is aware that he has not the ability, the organization, least of all the material resources or the audience for effective propaganda... Against the scientifically controlled publicity of the two greater continents he has about as much chance as had the Dervishes before Kitchener’s machine guns at Omdurman.
Ronald Storrs, Orientations (1937)

However, indecision and inaction had their reward. The Arabs became more rebellious as they realised the impossibility of their position. The Zionists, always a strident voice on the world stage, became a violent  force when the Irgun bombed the King David hotel in 1946, an act of terrorism that incidentally killed more people than any subsequent bombing in the entire Arab/Israeli conflict.

The road to 1948 had been embarked upon. By now the British were still indecisive, but powerless. Filling the vacuum, America took centre stage.

But you know what? If Balfour had never declared, nothing would have changed one jot. Nothing.

The Palestinian Problem

   She talked to the table, her voice low. ‘My father was born on a farm in Palestine in 1946, outside a village called Qaffin. It’s the farm we have today. My grandparents left during the troubles in 1948, what we call the Nakba, the disaster. You know this, right? The Nakba?’ I nodded. ‘When the Zionists threw my people from their land and declared Israel a state. They had a saying, you know, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” But it’s a lie.’
Olives, Page 83

This, to me at least, is a key scene in Olives, Aisha’s recounting her family’s history to Paul, who is being a very nosy Brit indeed. She’s obviously fond of him and opening up something very private to him, but Paul can’t help being a journalist and prying, wanting more every time he’s thrown a morsel until he pushes Aisha too far.

The history of the fictional Dajanis in Olives is by no means atypical or far-fetched. It’s grounded in a very bitter reality, the removal of a people from their land in huge numbers: estimates put the dispossessed of Palestine at 700,000.

In 1948, the founding of the State of Israel marked the end of a long-held dream for a group of men who had laboured tirelessly since the late 19th century to found a home for the Jewish people. The Zionists strove not only to press the case for such a home, but also to conflate Jewishness with their campaign, which met with resistance from many Jews trying to get by in an increasingly anti-semitic Europe (Including Russia and Eastern Europe).

1948 saw over 500 Palestinian villages destroyed. Fleeing the violence, hundreds of thousands of families found homes in squalid, teeming refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Many more remained, to be concentrated over the years into the areas we now know as the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians call this event (as Aisha points out in the extract above) ‘Al Nakba’ or the catastrophe. It forms the background to Olives because it’s the background to the story of Aisha’s family in the book.

Thousands of families lived in the camps holding on to their rusty iron doorkeys and title deeds, documents issued to them by the authorities of the British Mandate and doomed not to be recognised as valid by the new state of Israel. Many still hold these documents and hope for ‘the right of return’ – to be able to go back to the houses and farms they owned before they were driven out by stark fear. It is, sadly, a forlorn hope but, as Aisha tells Paul, it is hope for a better future that has kept the Palestinian people alive in diaspora.

   She was trembling. ‘No. Abu Ammar was a unifier. There was no Palestine, no Palestinian people, no Palestinian identity. We lost everything, you see? Arafat brought us the dream that one day we could go back to things we had lost, that one day we could become a nation again. What could my father believe in other than this? We are lucky, at least we still have some of our family land, but only because we are on the border, only because we had an Arab Israeli lawyer on our side. Back then, there was no hope for any Palestinian other than Arafat offered.’

One reviewer called the family history in Olives ‘hackneyed’, which is a valid opinion but one that flies in the face of the many people who have told me they identified with a history similar to their own family’s tales. And these tales are all too rarely told to anyone who’s listening. Part of the reason for Olives was to do just that.

Granted, the reader is occasionally left cringing at the clichéd, melodramatic dialogue, but perhaps that is a reflection of the whole region; the whole conflict as a cliché based on reality. Individuals well-versed in the history and realities of the Middle East probably won't be able to help rolling up their eyes at the hackneyed descriptions when Ayesha explains what happened to her family…
Middle East Monitor

If the book makes just a handful of people stop grazing the headlines and take a deeper look at issues like these, it’ll have been worth the whole journey of writing it and publishing it. So far, it looks as if hundreds have. And, to me, that’s worth putting up with “well-versed individuals” rolling their eyes around the place.

Bethany And Christ's Baptism

   ‘This is Abdullah, he’s a guide here. He works part time for Ibrahim.’
   ‘Wasta.’
   She nodded.
   ‘Wasta.’
   I said hello to Abdullah and we shook hands before he turned and led the way through the buildings and down a stone-flagged pathway. I spotted a city in the foothills across the valley on what must have been the Israeli side of the border.
   ‘What’s that?’
   ‘That’s Jericho. It’s part of Palestine now.’
   Jericho. I remembered it from primary school –  being forced to sing Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat for the school play. Joshua and his army, marching around parping away at trumpets to break down the city walls. I screwed up my eyes against sun’s glare and watched the far-away city walls, the buildings little more than white dots in the shimmering air.
Olives, Page 62

Bethany sits at the head of the Dead Sea, a religious site of enormous importance. This is where John the Baptist performed the ritual of baptism on Jesus.  John is a critical figure in all three of the ‘revealed religions’, Yoḥanan ha-mmaṭbil in Hebrew and Yuhanna al-maʿmadan in Arabic, John has been linked (as, indeed, has Jesus) to the Essenes, an ascetic sect identified strongly with the Dead Sea and, indeed, with Christianity itself. Just around the corner from the Baptism Place is an unprepossessing hummock which is, apparently where the Prophet Elijah ascended to heaven on a chariot. You can't really throw a stone around here without hitting a site of importance to the revealed religions, because this is the heart and homeland of the people of the book.

Bethany has a strange, mysterious feel to it – the paths through the arches of tamarisk eventually lead to the River Jordan itself, which rather disappoints Paul:

   ‘This,’ said Aisha, dramatically, ‘is the River Jordan.’
I’d expected something big and Cecil B. DeMille, but the river was narrow and a dull green, slow-moving and lifeless.

It’s not a bad description. The Jordan has been depleted massively, its waters have receded to a fragment of former glories (accounts of John’s baptism of Jesus have them wading into the river, but the baptism site itself is now well away from the mean little river that slops into the Dead Sea.

Shops in Jordan sell bottles of Holy Water from the Jordan. We have brought these back for friends and relatives Christening babies , who have to a man been terribly impressed. I suspect the water sold in the shops may not be the ‘real thing’, though, because if you put a baby anywhere near water from that gloopy green ghost of a river it’d probably glow in the dark.

Jordan And The Water Wars

   I took notes in shorthand to back up the tape, finishing the sentence before I looked up into Saunders’ blue-eyed, frank stare. ‘What’s the scale of the problem?’ I asked.

   ‘Massive. Jordan has one of the world’s lowest levels of water resources. The country’s supply stands at less than a quarter of the accepted global water poverty level. And a huge amount, something like twenty-five per cent of that water, is currently coming from over-pumping unsustainable resources. Experts are forecasting the water supply will be a potential humanitarian disaster within fifteen years or so. Personally, I think it’ll come sooner.’

   ‘What’s the government doing?’

   Saunders reached behind him and pulled out a thick, spiral bound document. ‘This is the National Water Strategy. It was adopted in the late nineties and outlined any number of approaches to the problem but at the end of the day it didn’t result in concrete action. That’s one of the reasons the Ministry of Natural Resources was formed, to unify the government’s response. And that’s why they’re going into this privatisation process. It’ll likely be the single largest privatisation the country’s ever seen. It’s critical to Jordan’s future.’

   Saunders paused and some journalistic instinct in me sensed the inevitable spiel to come. I wasn’t disappointed. He laid his hands flat on the desk and leaned forwards, brows knit in intense sincerity. ‘And we at Anglo-Jordanian believe we have the solutions Jordan needs.’

Olives, Page 60

Paul’s interview with the manager at the potash extraction works on the Dead Sea, Clive Saunders, is where the water issue starts to become a prominent element of Olives - A Violent Romance. As I pointed out in my last post, water is a very real problem, not only for Jordan but all of the surrounding states – Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and yes, Israel.

The gravest environmental challenge that Jordan faces today is the scarcity of water. Indeed, water is the decisive factor in the population/resources equation.
King Hussein.gov website

It's that equation that's highlighted in Olives, the lack of water resources is actually critical and increasingly so.The Wadi Rumm pipeline will provide much-needed relief for Amman, but Jordan's an agrarian country and its valuable vegetable crops constantly demand irrigation. The massive depletion of the Jordan has meant the level of the Dead Sea has dropped over 150 feet since the 1960s. Jordan is below the water poverty line already - and it's only going to get worse.

The Jordan River, once a major source of water for the kingdom, was diverted after animosity grew between its stakeholders. The dams built by Syria, Israel and Jordan have caused the river to lose 95% of its original flow. This has also been the fate of Jordan’s other significant waterway, the Yarmouk River, which is now reduced to a mere muddy trickle.
It is an oft-repeated adage that the wars of the future will be fought over water – but this is already sad reality in the MENA region.
Bertelsmann Stiftung 'Future Challenges' 

Behind the natural problems of a lack of water resources are the additional problems of fighting off land grabs - the 1967 conflict lost Jordan Lake Tiberias (or the Sea of Galilee, depending on who you're talking to), a major water body that plays a key role in Daoud's water privatisation scheme in Olives. Israel's 'security wall' cuts deeply into the West Bank, scything up to 10% of the land from the '1967 border' defining the West Bank - almost every incursion loops around a water resource.

The conflict made every country do their best to grab as much as they can, and non-cooperation between them is what really affected the area.
Munquth Meyhar
Chairman, Friends Of The Earth Middle East

In the face of the challenge, various NGOs and other bodies have come together to call for 'regional dialogue' and 'regional co-operation', but these well-meaning calls seem to neglect the facts on the ground - the parties around the potential table these people are envisaging have their hands around each others' throats in every way. Co-operation to eke out water resources is hardly an option - everyone's grabbing what they can. And it's far too little. Especially for Jordan.

The report calls for a confidence-building initiative between the heads of water authorities of Israel and Palesinian Authority, with support of political leaders and under observation of representatives of Quartet or major donor countries, to assess the real situation with regards to the state of freshwater resources in the aquifers along with coordinated water management.
The Blue Peace: Rethinking Middle East Water

So what would you do if you could secure the future of your country's water supply with a brilliant scheme that tapped deep-down water resources based on tapping the ancient Roman 'Qanat Romani' aquifers? What if you could solve that problem on your own sovereign territory? Wouldn't you back a scheme like that?

That's what Daoud's bid is based on in Olives. Tapping the deep aquifers to let the water flow, once again, to Jordan.

The Dead Sea and the Water Crisis

   We drove along the coast of the Dead Sea.
   ‘What was all the checkpoint stuff about?’
   ‘Security. That’s Palestine over there across the water. And Israel. So Jordanian security here is tighter than usual.’
   ‘I thought you were at peace with the Israelis.’
   She looked askance at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘Jordan is.’
   We passed a tall, square metal tower overlooking the flat expanse of lifeless water. I gestured toward it and asked,  ‘Lifeguard?’
   ‘Gun position. They’re not usually manned these days, but when they are they turn the guns away to face inland. So does the other side. Peace, you see?’
Olives, Page 57

It wasn’t until the ‘noughties’ the gun positions on the Dead Sea were turned to face symbolically away from Israel. These days there aren’t even guns on the towers, but there are still military checkpoints as you drive down to the Sea, the remarkable expanse of super-saline water four hundred metres below sea level.

The Dead Sea is almost miraculous, a great expanse of water so saline you just float around in it, a meniscus of mineral oil floating on the surface. You really don't want to shave just before going in, I can tell you from bitter experience. The Jordanian side of the sea is home to a cluster of resort hotels, my personal favourite being the Movenpick Dead Sea. Further down the coast from Amman, the road snakes back up the escarpment, giving a view of the extensive moonscape created by the potash extraction operation, at one time Jordan's principle source of income - the country has never been a wealthy one. At the top you'll find the town of Kerak, home to a great crusader castle - and one of many places where TE Lawrence reported spirited gun battles with the Turks.

But the Dead Sea is under threat. The constant draining of the Jordan has reduced the river to a fragment of its former self and so the Dead Sea is literally dying, its levels slowly dropping to the point where you can actually see moorings something like thirty feet up in the cliffs around the current sea. There has been extensive discussion of remediation measures, including the 'Red Dead' project which would see Jordanian/Israeli co-operation to pipe salt water from the Red Sea.

A similarly visionary scheme is actually under way, seeing water pipes laid from Wadi Rumm right up through to Amman, one of the measures being taken to try and address the very real water crisis Jordan faces - the very water crisis that forms the backdrop to Olives, in fact. Jordan is actually the world's fourth most water challenged country.

In Olives, Daoud’s preoccupation with the water shortage is founded squarely in the story of the regional conflicts born out of 1948 – the Levant (Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Israel, although the term ‘the Levant usually refers to the Arab countries of the Western Mediterranean) is desperately short of water. Israel’s annexation of the Sea of Galilee (known as Lake Tiberius on the Arab side) in the 1967 war (the ‘six day war’) ensured a major source of precious water for Israel – fed by rivers and aquifers from surrounding Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Part of the background to Pauls’ dilemma in Olives is that the book's Daoud Dajani is a wealthy Arab businessman with major business interests and connections across the region who is mounting a bid for the forthcoming privatisation of the Jordanian water network. Daoud’s consortium is being opposed by a British-led consortium which is focusing its bid on conservation and efficient distribution. Daoud’s bid is based on a brilliant and dangerous scheme – to tap the deep seasonal aquifers feeding Lake Tiberius, bringing more water to Jordan at Israel’s expense. Worse, by depleting the fresh water supply into Tiberius, he will ensure the remaining water is more saline – saltier and therefore less suitable for agriculture and drinking water.

Daoud’s bid obviously cannot be tolerated by the Israelis and unites both Israeli and British interests. The question Paul has to resolve is whether Daoud is a businessman acting within the law and meeting unlawful state-sponsored opposition to his brilliant scheme to benefit Jordan or whether he is a fanatic hell-bent on flinging the region into war.

“There can be no peace without resolving water problems and vice versa... it is water that will decide the future of the Occupied Territories and, what is more, whether there is peace or war. If the crisis is not resolved, the result will be a greater probability of conflict between Jordan and Israel, which would certainly involve other Arab countries.”
Jacques Sironneau, quoted in the NATO 2002 Report, ‘Water Resources in the Mediterranean. 

The battle to secure supplies of ‘the universal solvent’ in the Eastern Mediterranean is insoluble. There are too many people living off the land, distribution networks are often creaky and wasteful and the struggle to gain control of resources is constant.

The research on the water crisis that forms the backdrop to Olives is solid – there is, indeed, a major humanitarian crisis brewing in the area and Israel has indeed annexed a large number of water sources by constructing its security wall to encompass them, carving strategic tracts of land from the ‘1967 border’. Each twist and turn of the wall is a bargaining chip at best, a fait accompli at worst. Carving farms in half (as, indeed, the Dajani’s farm in Qaffin has been carved), the wall makes the most of the scant water resources in the West Bank. The source of Lake Tiberius’ wealth (or the Sea of Galilee) is, as outlined in Olives, a mixture of rivers flowing down from Syria and Lebanon and aquifers that rise up into the bed of the lake. According to NATO, 90% of the West Bank’s water is used by Israel and the distribution of water in the area is ‘unfair’ and ‘restrictive’.

Al Nakba - 'The Catastrophe'

    We talked about England and Iraq, about Jordan and the punishing Royal travel schedule and, of course, about the peace.
    It was like a mantra, everywhere I went. Eventually all conversations turned to it—the peace, the peace, the peace. The new deal the Americans had finally brokered between a reluctant, right-wing Israeli government and the tired, broken down remnants of the Palestinian administration had at least brought the hope this would, against all the odds, be the one peace. The deal to lead to the long-awaited ‘two-state solution,’ the first hope since the disastrous collapse of the jury-rigged Heath Robinson compromise of Oslo.
    The conversation turned to Palestine in the past, to al nakba, ‘the catastrophe’, the formation of Israel in 1948 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. When I asked Ibrahim whether he had ever gone back there, his bushy eyebrows shot up in astonishment.
Olives - Page 43

The story of Olives takes place in Jordan during ‘the new peace deal’, which could have been years ago or could be years in the future. There’s always a peace deal, you see. And in over sixty years, they’ve all come to nothing.

In 1948, the founding of the State of Israel marked the end of a long-held dream for a group of men who had laboured tirelessly since the late 19th century to found a home for the Jewish people. The Zionists strove not only to press the case for such a home, but also to conflate Jewishness with their campaign, which met with resistance from many Jews trying to get by in an increasingly anti-semitic Europe (Including Russia and Eastern Europe).

Using slogans like ‘A land without a people, for a people without a land’, they pressed their case that Palestine’s natural resources were being squandered, that the land was capable of bearing fruit if only it were managed by people who would be willing to work, to bring modern methods to bear and to settle the empty, open spaces of Palestine. The problem with this was, of course, that there was already a people on that land – the Arabic-speaking Palestinian Arabs: Muslims, Christians and Jews who had been living there throughout the Ottoman Empire.

1948 saw some 700,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes and forced out of the country, over 500 villages were destroyed. Fleeing the violence, these families found homes in squalid, teeming refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands remained in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians call this event ‘Al Nakba’ or the catastrophe. It forms the background to Olives because it’s the background to the story of Aisha's (fictitious, Jordan!) family, the Dajanis.

Aisha slowly twisted her lighter between her thumb and forefinger. ‘My father met my mother in the camps. He was just another urchin in the streets there, but he was smart and started selling fruit on a street corner, grew it into a business by employing other kids so that eventually he could open a shop of sorts in the camp made of cinder blocks. He was a good businessman and soon opened a proper store in Amman. He opened more of them. He started to trade with the Syrians and the Iraqis before he left the Amman business in Ibrahim’s hands and went to the Gulf in the ’70s, to Kuwait, with my mother. The Gulf had oil and needed food, steel, concrete, cars. He did deals with family traders in the Gulf, gained a name for being able to get things nobody else could get, ship things nobody else could ship. Ibrahim found the supplies, my father sold them. My parents moved back here after I was born.’

‘And he met Arafat in Kuwait.’

Aisha’s eyes widened and she took a pull on her cigarette, staring at me, the lighter twisting in her hand, the shaking tip of the cigarette glowing momentarily as she inhaled. ‘Yes, he met Arafat in Kuwait. Through Kaddoumi. And he supplied Arafat. My father believed in Arafat. His family had lost everything, including my grandfather. My father believed that we had to try and fight to return to our country, to our land.’

‘But Arafat was a terrorist.’

She was trembling. ‘No. Abu Ammar was a unifier. There was no Palestine, no Palestinian people, no Palestinian identity. We lost everything, you see? Arafat brought us the dream that one day we could go back to things we had lost, that one day we could become a nation again. What could my father believe in other than this? We are lucky, at least we still have some of our family land, but only because we are on the border, only because we had an Arab Israeli lawyer on our side. Back then, there was no hope for any Palestinian other than Arafat.’

I was watchfully silent. Aisha gestured with a wide sweep of her hand. ‘My people lost everything they had, living in camps with rusty keys and English title deeds that meant nothing. The world stood by and let it happen. Who else offered any hope to the Palestinians except Arafat and the people around him? Who else was helping us?’

Aisha ground her cigarette viciously into the ashtray. ‘My father supported Arafat in the early days, but he turned away from them after the problems in Jordan. He stopped believing in Arafat’s way. Both he and Ibrahim became closer to King Hussein, then the King threw the PLO out of Jordan. We stayed here.’
Olives, Page 83

In Aisha’s case, the family were lucky. With an entrepreneurial father (and yes, with links to the PLO in Kuwait), now the Dajanis live in the wealthy Abdoun area of Amman and collectively help to maintain the farm in Qaffin, in the West Bank, where Aisha’s grandmother still lives. The farm stayed in the family’s hands because one of Aisha’s grandparents stayed in the new state of Israel and so became an Arab Israeli. A smart lawyer, he managed to keep the farm in the family’s hands (many weren’t so lucky) but even so, the olive groves have been split by the ‘security wall’ built by Israel to isolate Palestine and, it has to be said, to sequester thousands of acres of land and enormous swathes of the region’s scant water resources.

That wall, which cuts something like 10% of the West Bank beyond the 1967 border, is thought to be where Israel will place its border in negotiations.