With 1,300 Palestinians (a third of whom are children) and only 13 Israelis killed in Gaza, the disproportion is appalling, but we need to understand the history behind this conflict. One has to go back to March 1948 when a group of Zionist leaders and young military Jewish officers met in Tel Aviv to finalise a plan, which became known as Plan D, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

This defined the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country by methods that included large-scale intimidation, laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres, setting fire to homes, properties and goods, expulsion, demolition and finally planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. 

Plan D became the blueprint for the Government policy of the new state of Israel, and by the end of 1948 'more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants.' For many years we were all led to believe that the Palestinians had left of their own accord, but recent research has shown that this explanation was false.   (This information is  from Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2006).
 
In 1965 I was living in east Jerusalem and working with a firm of British consulting engineers under a UK  aid programme.  When the Israelis took over west Jerusalem in 1948 they also took over the then modern water supply system which supplied the whole of the city and cut off the supplies for east Jerusalem which, for 17 years, was forced to resort to old, inadequate, abandoned sources. Our task was to look for new ground water supplies for east Jerusalem and the Arab towns on the West Bank.

In the course of our investigations we found that in addition to annexing the Jerusalem water supplies the Israelis had managed to adjust the boundary prescribed by the UN Special Committee, running north-south along the Judean ridge, so as to include most of the good spring sources on their side. We were able to find an alternative ground water source for the West Bank, but soon after the 1967 Six Day War enabled Israel to occupy all of the West Bank and annex east Jerusalem, thus controlling all the water supplies.
 
Ever since the Six Day War Israel has had almost total control over the Jordan River. It has also exploited the underground water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, pumping out 450 million cubic metres every year and leaving only 150 million for the Palestinians. So, while the average Palestinian household is permitted to use about 60 litres of water per person each day, residents of Israel use 350 litres per person per day, or almost six times as much.
 
There is unlikely to be peace in this region without justice in the restoration of conquered land, the opportunity for refugees to return to that land, a fair sharing of the scarce water resources and the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian state.  One hopes that the new US administration will be able to bring its goodwill to bear on these problems.
 
Peter Stern