This written thesis investigates the cultural and political meanings behind water tanks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It explores the centrality of a discourse around water—”making the desert bloom”—to the Zionist project, and the importance of struggles over access to water supplies in the period after 1948. The water tanks that are a ubiquitous feature of the built environment in Palestine emerge as both a symbol of occupation and as a physical key to deciphering its logic and tactics. Water tanks have become slow, violent tools that generate and expose deep problems in the urban landscape of the occupied territories. At the same time, they symbolize the possibilities of resistance in the most basic elements of everyday life in Palestine.