
Argentine senator and former Interior Minister Eduardo "Wado" de Pedro led a 2022 delegation to Israel, praising its "consensus" model, then signed multiple agreements with Mekorot — Israel's state water company accused of enforcing water apartheid on Palestinians.
Eduardo De Pedro's 2022 Israel visit and subsequent pacts with Mekorot, which routinely cuts Palestinian water by up to 50% to prioritize illegal settlements, normalizes Israel's hydric domination over occupied lands and sustains apartheid by exporting discriminatory "expertise."
POLITICS
Eduardo "Wado" de Pedro, an Argentine lawyer and politician serving as a senator for the Justicialist Party since December 2023, previously held the position of Minister of the Interior from 2019 to 2023 under President Alberto Fernández. D
uring his tenure, de Pedro spearheaded bilateral cooperation with Israel focused on water management, a sector inextricably linked to Israel's occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.
In April 2022, he led a high-level delegation — including ministers of Agriculture and Science, as well as governors from ten Argentine provinces — to Israel for a scientific-technological mission explicitly centered on "intelligent water management."
There, de Pedro visited key Mekorot facilities, such as the Eshkol filtration plant in the Lower Galilee, which processes 1.7 million cubic meters of water daily using advanced technology sourced from occupied Palestinian aquifers.
He met with Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, and Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar, framing the trip as a blueprint for Argentina's future: "We are thinking about the water problem in Argentina... studying models from Israel," de Pedro stated during the visit, announcing plans for a federal "masterplan" to centralize water governance inspired by Israel's approach.
This enthusiasm directly precipitated a series of agreements between Argentine provinces and Mekorot, Israel's state-owned national water company, which has been repeatedly denounced by human rights organizations for perpetuating water apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT).
Mekorot, established in 1937 to supply Zionist settlements, controls 99% of Palestinian water resources under military orders since 1967, extracting from the Mountain Aquifer and Jordan River while denying Palestinians equitable access.
Amnesty International has documented how Mekorot pipelines run mere meters from Palestinian communities in Area C — comprising 60% of the West Bank — yet authorities refuse infrastructure permits, leaving families without running water despite the proximity. In the Jordan Valley, Mekorot's deep wells (up to 900 meters) have dried up Palestinian springs and farms, forcing residents to purchase stolen water back at inflated prices — up to ten times the cost for Israelis — while settlers consume 81 times more per capita.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) identifies this as part of Israel's broader crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, where water deprivation ensures Jewish Israeli domination and Palestinian subordination.
B'Tselem reports that since 1995, despite a 75% growth in Palestinian population, extraction quotas remain static, compelling the Palestinian Authority to buy from Mekorot at premium rates, with only 36% of West Bank Palestinians receiving daily running water — 82.4 liters per capita versus Israel's 247.
In Gaza, Mekorot's post-October 2023 cuts reduced supply by 78%, contributing to extermination acts amid the ongoing genocide, where conservative estimates confirm over 40,000-78,000 Palestinian deaths, though obstruction, journalist killings, and infrastructure destruction indicate the true toll exceeds hundreds of thousands.
De Pedro's role in these pacts exemplifies complicity in laundering Mekorot's colonial model. Following the April 2022 visit, the first agreement was signed in September 2022 for San Juan and Mendoza provinces to develop "Master Plans for Water Conservation and Management" with Mekorot's technical assistance.
By October 2022, Catamarca, La Rioja, and Río Negro joined, followed by Catamarca, Formosa, La Rioja, Río Negro, and Santa Cruz in February 2023 — bringing the total to ten provinces.
De Pedro personally headed the February 2023 signing ceremony in Buenos Aires, alongside Public Works Minister Gabriel Katopodis and attended by Israeli Ambassador Eyal Sela and Mekorot President Yitzhak Aharonovich.
He lauded the deals as "steps toward the future of production, work, and life for Argentines," explicitly citing Israel's water handling as exemplary: "Israel generated consensuses among all political, economic, and social actors to resolve inflation... The second problem was administering scarce water."
In May 2022, he hosted Mekorot's international coordinator, Argentine-Israeli Diego Berger, at the Casa Rosada to advance a "masterplan for intelligent water management," emphasizing Argentina's "arid geography" and the need for "rational use" amid climate change — echoing Mekorot's rhetoric without addressing its origins in Palestinian dispossession.
These actions normalize Israel's hydric apartheid by exporting Mekorot's "expertise" — gained through resource theft and collective punishment — to Global South contexts, including Argentina, where indigenous and rural communities face similar extraction pressures.
Palestinian NGOs like Al-Haq and the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON), argue such partnerships sustain Israel's illegal occupation by providing economic legitimacy, violating Palestinians' right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over natural resources under international law.
In Argentina, unions and rights groups have protested the opacity of these deals, noting the lack of community consultation and risks of privatizing public water, as seen in prior failed attempts under Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli.
De Pedro's silence on Mekorot's OPT abuses — despite global campaigns that led Brazil's Bahia state to terminate a 2016 agreement and Argentina to scrap a $170 million facility — further entrenches this erasure, prioritizing bilateral ties over decolonial solidarity with Palestinians enduring 57 years of apartheid, Nakba legacies, and genocidal bombardment.
infobae.com
🔒elsaltodiario.com
🔒laizquierdadiario.com
🔒argentina.gob.ar
🔒agenciatierraviva.com.ar
🔒Dehumanization of Palestinians:
The systematic erasure of Palestinian history and culture is a well-documented effort that has been ongoing since the early 1900s. This erasure has taken many forms, including the destruction of physical records and infrastructure, the suppression of Palestinian voices and narratives, the appropriation of Palestinian cultural heritage and most visibly, the dehumanization of the Palestinian populace.
From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, Palestinian records, literature, and cultural heritage faced deliberate and concerted efforts to obliterate their existence and narrative. This deliberate "archival silencing" has made reconstructing this period in Palestinian history incredibly challenging, yet the truths that remain paint a horrifying picture of the deliberate erasure and destruction of an entire population and its culture.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been a deliberate policy, perpetuated through military operations, discriminatory laws, Israeli education and a pervasive culture that fosters prejudice. Dehumanising rhetoric, portraying Palestinians as "roaches" and "rats," lays the foundation for atrocities by stripping away their humanity in the eyes of the oppressor.
Widespread media narratives also project institutional biases ranging from depicting Palestinians solely as militants or desperate victims and erasing their normal daily life to embedding language biases around land, protests and resistance tactics. These patterns collectively indicate how public discourse within segments of Israeli society systematically dehumanize Palestinians while entrenching prejudices against them.
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
Tell us why Wado de Pedro should be removed by emailing us at [email protected]