Aletho News

German sponsorship of Zionist settlements exposed

By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | September 5, 2026

Exploiting academic institutions as a cover, between 2017 – 2021 the German government surreptitiously funnelled millions into a highly discriminatory project facilitating expansion of Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank. Under its auspices, public money and knowledge production were committed to an inherently unlawful, immoral enterprise in flagrant breach of Berlin’s international legal obligations, and domestic restrictions on academic research efforts. The unknown scandal is just one component of how, in plain sight, Germany covertly assists Zionist settlement expansion, and Palestine’s total erasure.

These are the shocking findings of a collaborative investigation by a cluster of German student Palestine solidarity organisations, including Not In Our Name, and Academic Opposition. Their report is a groundbreaking effort, critically examining German state-sponsored water research in conjunction with Zionist entity institutions. It’s a silent conspiracy vast in scope, involving multiple state and quasi-state entities in Berlin and Tel Aviv financing academic research in seemingly innocuous fields, which directly abets Zionist ethnic cleansing and land seizure in the West Bank and beyond.

The investigation focuses on a single project to emerge from the dark alliance between German and Israeli academia, known as MedWater. For four years, Berlin funded a consortium coordinated by the Technical University of Berlin, alongside Göttingen and Würzburg universities, to the tune of €1,818,348. Their successfully fulfilled objective was to develop a tool modelling the impact of adding or removing water wells. That feature, defined in direct conjunction with “Israel’s” water authorities, was then transferred to Tel Aviv’s national water company.

Specifically, the tool identifies ideal areas for construction of new wells, in a territory where Palestinian water sources are systematically demolished, and Palestinians are refused permits to drill new ones. Known as the Western Mountain Aquifer, it’s the largest and most productive groundwater body shared between “Israel” and the occupied West Bank. Palestinians were completely absent from working sessions convened in Al-Quds [Jerusalem] related to MedWater, and there is no apparent way in which Palestinians will, or even can, benefit from the effort in any way.

This is despite the consortium explicitly stating in submissions to German state ministries their tool sought to advance the UN’s sixth Sustainable Development Goal: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.” The completed MedWater system was unveiled in October 2020, at a Berlin conference. Its public demonstration included calculating the impact of adding four new wells to the West Bank’s Al-Khalil [Hebron] Governorate. Only Zionist settlers could realise that vision on-the-ground, of which the consortium was well-aware.

Even more damningly, at the project’s end the tool was contracted to “Israel’s” national water company Mekorot, which manages wells in Zionist settlements throughout the West Bank. By contrast, the Palestinian Water Authority, officially named as a MedWater partner, was not provided a subcontract and is not publicly listed among its beneficiaries today. Unreported at the time, and tacitly concealed from view ever since, it’s just one way Germany has been unaccountably supporting a genocidal Zionist enterprise begun back in 1967.

‘Near Impossible’

In its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled unambiguously that all states are obliged “to distinguish, in their dealings with Israel, between Israeli territory and the territory occupied since 1967, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation.” A decade earlier, Berlin seemingly enshrined a codified commitment to this principle in its dealings with Zionist entity academic institutions. Under the so-called Territorial Clause, Germany won’t fund, and Tel Aviv won’t solicit, research projects outside the entity’s pre-1967 borders.

However, when asked how Mekorot’s MedWater contract was remotely compatible with the Clause, Berlin’s ministry of research argued its terms merely limit where research partners may be headquartered. As Mekorot is based in Tel Aviv, there was in fact no legal, regulatory or ethical impediment to the project’s German government funding, despite the company’s well-documented criminal conduct in the West Bank since 1982, when Zionist Occupation Forces handed management of all local water infrastructure it controlled in the territory to Mekorot.

The Territorial Clause is evidently replete with gaping loopholes, which we can assume have been resultantly exploited to provide arm’s length German state sponsorship to completely illegal Zionist settlement expansion all along. Strikingly, this ambiguity is in itself in contravention of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion. The Court specifically honed in on the Zionist entity’s life-threatening restriction of Palestinian water access within the Occupied Territories, as inconsistent with Tel Aviv’s obligations under international law. This may explain why MedWater, while formally undisguised, remained effectively secret.

To get to the bottom of the project, investigators drew on an enormous, disparate corpus of information. This included MedWater reports filed with Germany’s Education and Research Ministry – some not intended for public view, and released in redacted form – presentation materials from numerous project conferences throughout its development, since-memoryholed websites, and peer-reviewed publications by German and Israeli participants. No mainstream outlet has hitherto reported not merely on MedWater, but any illegal German state investment in academic research projects expediting settlement expansion.

An initiative to better manage water resources anywhere in the world may seem benign. But MedWater was born in a context of methodical, longstanding Zionist denial of Palestinian access to water, and a segregationist legal apparatus explicitly assisting Jewish settlement, particularly in regard to vital natural resources like water. In August 1967, two months after the West Bank’s occupation began, Zionist Occupation Forces issued Military Order 92, seizing total control of water resources in territory they illegally controlled.

Three months later, Military Order 158 further prohibited Palestinians throughout the West Bank from constructing new water installations and/or associated infrastructure, without first obtaining a permit from the ZOF. Amnesty International judges such permissions “near impossible to obtain.” Deliberately intended to deprive Palestinians of water, Zionists are not subject to equivalent constraints. Meanwhile, Mekorot has over the past four-and-a-half decades deliberately sabotaged Palestinian wells while tapping occupied West Bank springs to supply the entity, and illegal settlers, with water.

This in itself produces an apartheid in daily water consumption. Zionists, including settlers, use an average of 247 litres of water a day per person – three times that of Palestinians in the West Bank, at 82.4 litres. Palestinian water consumption collapses to just 26 litres per capita on average daily, in communities unconnected to the water grid. Such consumption is comparable to active disaster zones. Mekorot also routinely shuts off supply to Palestinian communities when reserves run low, such as during summer.

‘European DNA’

The Zionist strategy is gruesomely simple – neutralise Palestinian control over the West Bank’s water resources and progressively diminish their access, creating an environment in which the territory is literally uninhabitable and they’re forced to leave. Research jointly published by the UN and Germany’s federal institute for geosciences and natural resources indicates 212 million cubic metres of water flows from the West Bank to Israel annually. The report explicitly records how since 1967, Palestinians “have not been authorised to drill a single well” locally.

All along, discriminatory laws and ratcheting settler land grabs have increasingly deprived Palestinians of access to other basic fundamentals of existence too. An ever-expanding network of ZOF checkpoints and roadblocks, combined with prejudicial and arbitrary restrictions on movement, vandalism and demolition of farming machinery, greenhouses, and roads, and savage Occupation Force and settler violence makes it progressively dangerous, if not impossible, for farmers to tend crops or rear livestock. Palestine’s agricultural industry is all but decimated, with Zionists literally harvesting the pestilential spoils.

That these genocidal machinations have endured untrammelled for so many decades is a testament to the impunity with which “Israel” is permitted to act by its international partners – Germany being a particularly perverse example. Proudly, it is the only country to make public remembrance of its criminal past the cornerstone of its collective national identity. But Berlin’s much-vaunted “memory culture” has only ever atoned for historic sins by encouraging and undergirding comparable contemporary crimes, as long as they’re committed by the Zionist entity.

WaterMed is a minor fragment within a much wider, silent framework of German state-supported repression and erasure of Palestinians, sustained via unadvertised academic partnerships and joint research efforts with Zionist entity-based institutions. A new initiative, Academic Complicity, exposes how dozens of German universities have over many years conducted projects large and small, one way or another justifying and aiding never ending settlement expansion. One might hope this triggers accountability and consequences for Berlin, given its domestic and international legal obligations.

However, the bonds between Germany and the Zionist entity are so deep and cohering, it transcends trivial considerations of law. In October 2025, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo made a number of highly revealing disclosures on how his personal and professional experience has convinced him “Germans are committed to Israel.” After all, “our DNA is much closer to the European DNA than the American one,” as “most of the Jews who settled in Israel came from Europe…not North America”:

“European history is part of our identity in terms of family connections, culture, even politics. Europe’s borders resulting from wars were constantly shifting, and Europeans wandered throughout the continent, settling in one place before moving on to the next. In that sense, and in terms of depth, discourse, and history, this is all very familiar to us, and is something that manifests itself in every interaction I have with German partners.”

September 5, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Germany, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism