BASEMA M. BASHIR

Where Water Meets Dignity

I was born in a land where water is never just water. In Palestine, it carries memory, politics, and resistance. I learned early that our relationship with the earth mirrors our relationship with one another, both can be cultivated with care or destroyed through control.

For more than thirty years I have worked in the water and environment sector, in villages and cities, in refugee camps and ministries. I chose engineering not for its precision, but for its promise: to restore balance where imbalance was forced. 

My path has been a long dialogue between science and struggle, between what the land needs and what justice demands.

Working in WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), taught me that water scarcity in Palestine is not a technical failure. It is a symptom of deeper injustice. Wells are sealed, aquifer drained, and rivers diverted, not by drought, but by design. And yet, communities continue to adapt, women continue to lead, and dignity continues to flow where pipes do not.

In recent years, my work has evolved into reflection. I created Resilient Tides, a space to write, document, and connect the threads between water, climate, and human rights. It became my way of reclaiming narrative: to say that resilience is not a slogan, but a lived practice shaped by endurance and care.

And then Gaza began to burn. The genocide unfolding there has no parallel in modern history, a deliberate assault not only on people, but on the very systems that sustain life. I have spent decades studying water systems, but nothing prepared me for this: wells bombed, desalination plants destroyed, sewage flowing through streets, and families forced to drink contaminated water to survive.

Every professional instinct in me screams that this is not a natural disaster, it is an engineered one. To destroy a people’s access to water is to destroy their future. To watch it happen in real time, while the world debates language, is to understand how fragile our collective humanity has become.

Still, I believe in the quiet power of persistence. The same persistence that keeps Palestinian women rebuilding homes, replanting trees, and teaching children to dream beneath drones. The same persistence that has guided my career to build systems that protect both people and planet, even in the face of collapse.

My journey has never been about achievement in the conventional sense. It has been about coherence, living in a way that honors the land that raised me, the communities that shaped me, and the values that refuse to die, even under occupation.

I have seen what happens when water is weaponized. But I have also seen how care becomes resistance. Each cistern repaired, each spring restored, each voice raised, they remind me that ecological balance and human dignity are not separate causes. They are the same.

Resilience, to me, is not endurance for its own sake. It is the choice to keep building meaning in a world determined to erase it.

And so I continue, one story, one community, one drop at a time, to remind the world that water, like justice, must always find a way.

Visit Basema's LinkedIn profile @: https://www.linkedin.com/in/basemabashir/