RadioActive: On Water - Liquidation
Meira Asher (IL/IRE 2024)
57 min
RadioActive - on Water is a six episode podcast series, exploring the interactions between transmission, sound, activism and water. Each episode is created by a different artist/group of artists who engage with water politics and the politics of listening through the medium of radio. ‘Liquidation’ by Meira Asher interrogates the politically engineered water crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Jordan Valley where Israel deliberately and strategically deprives Palestinian shepherd communities of access to water.
There is currently a structural water crisis in the Palestinian Occupied Jordan Valley. Not a climate or geographical water crisis, a deliberate socially and politically engineered crisis. Israel, since it invaded the West Bank in 1967, controls every public aspect of civilian life in the Jordan Valley. Israel administers two populations, the Israeli settlers and the indigenous Palestinian residents. Israel deliberately and strategically deprives Palestinian farming communities of access to fresh, clean and reliable water supplies, water that is needed for crops and herds, as well as for the Palestinian farmers and herders.
This can mean either not permitting them to be connected to municipal water supplies, despite the Israeli settlers having such access. It also entails not permitting Palestinian people to sink new wells on their own land, and blocking their access to existing wells and springs, either by fencing off the water source or destroying pipes bringing the water to the herders and farmers. The end result is frequently that either the farmers have to pay extortionate prices to purchase water from the Palestinian authority, or if they cannot afford this option they are forced to abandon their land and way of life.
Featuring the water truck driver, co-activists Natasha and Nitsan, shepherds community of Khalet Makhul, shepherd ‘W’, shepherds community of Hirbet Samra and Aref Daragmah.
Producer - Meira Asher
Translation from Arabic: Laila Abd El-Razaq
Introductory text: Liam Evans
Series - Co-curated by Stephen Shiell & Meira Asher, produced by Meira Asher. Episodes by Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White), Lisa Blackmore and Leonel Vásquez, RE-PEAT collective, Margarida Mendes, Carlos Monleon and Nathaniel Mann, and Meira Asher
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