Liquidity: Water and Investment in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

In this article, I illustrate two ways in which Zionist settlers appropriated water in Mandate Palestine. The first way was through the imposition of a new kind of property regime, one that measured and defined water rights in terms of volume. This differed from customary Palestinian practice, which distributed water in time-based shares. I argue that volume-based measures made water more easily bought and sold and, by extension, more like a commodity. The second method of appropriation I detail is the granting of concessions to generate hydroelectricity to the Palestine Electric Corporation. These concessions gave the company control over three of Palestine’s major rivers, which it then turned into an object of investment for foreign shareholders. As a result, water use cannot be understood separately from electricity during the Mandate. While these two processes might appear unrelated, I argue that they were both legalized methods of exclusion that, when taken together, reveal a larger process of gradual, albeit incomplete, dispossession of water resources. While Zionist settler colonialism legitimated itself by claiming to efficiently use natural resources, such as water, in actuality, it sustained itself by imposing exclusive property rights.