Economic expansion and global warming risk the Promised Land becoming an increasingly polluted land.
"Abba,” my three-and-a-half-year-old son scolded me recently. “Switch off the lights in the other rooms, because wasting electricity makes the planet hotter. We must look after our own country first — I learned that in gan (kindergarten) today.”
Little Idan is not the only concerned Israeli. The country is waking up to the reality that six decades of demographic and economic expansion have turned much of the Holy Land into an overcrowded concrete jungle with polluted air, contaminated soil and impure, diminishing water sources.
“We’re seeing a paradigm shift in Israeli thinking,” says MK Rabbi Michael Melchior, who jointly heads the Knesset’s Environmental Lobby.
“Mortar-and-cement Zionism was about building as much as possible as soon as possible, but during this process we forget the need to leave open spaces for the next generation. Suddenly, you wake up one day and realise that our tiny, cramped country is polluted.”
The country faces a gamut of environmental challenges, notes Tzipi Iser Itzik, executive director of Israel’s most influential environmental NGO, Adam Teva v’Din (the Israel Union for Environmental Defence, or IUED). “We have critical problems in every area: chemicals in the air around Haifa Port and Ramat Hovav, hundreds of plots so contaminated that homes cannot be built on them, the polluted coastal aquifer on which most of the population depends for drinking water…”
Modelled on the US’s National Resource Defence Council (NRBC), the non-profit IUED employs some 30 lawyers and technical experts who offer pro-bono legal assistance to grassroots organisations, fight individual cases in court, and help draft legislation.
In recent years, environmental concerns have climbed the ladder of national priorities, although security considerations still usually override other arguments, notes Iser Itzik. “As long as defence takes priority, it’s difficult to raise environmental issues.”
Environmental awareness in Israel lags a decade behind most European countries. But a surge in media coverage this past year reflects an attitude swing percolating through public consciousness.
Only five years ago, Israel’s parliament did not have an organised environmental lobby. “More than 40 MKs have joined the lobby in the present parliament,” says Rabbi Melchior. “We have taken up public issues, pushed through legislation and are having an influence on decision-making. But the environment is still not a national priority — the Environmental Protection Ministry’s budget is a very bad joke. Much of the legislation’s effectiveness is hampered by a lack of funds for enforcement.”
Israel’s Green Party — which has never been elected to the Knesset — garnered four seats in a recent Yediot Ahronot public-opinion poll (conducted by leading Israeli pollster Mina Zemach). “This reflects a growing public realisation that the environment is a life-or-death issue,” says party leader Pe’er Visner.
“Cancer rates in Israel are the highest in the world, because of pollution produced by industry. Factories cause more deaths than all the wars, and the threat is increasing. We have no clean rivers left to swim in, but industrial effluent and sewage continue to flow into Israel’s streams. Our youth go to the army for three years, then come back to find that someone has stolen their beach. We’re not leaving anything of our beloved land of Israel for the next generation,” Visner complains.
Already coalition members in Tel Aviv and Haifa city councils, the Green Party will field candidates for dozens of municipalities and regional councils in November’s local elections.
“We want to create a national network of environmentalists who can work in their local communities,” explains Visner. “That way, we will have greater leverage once we become a Knesset faction.”
Not only granola-eating tree-huggers, Israel’s burgeoning green movement draws on all sectors of the diverse population, notes Rabbi Melchior. “There are Charedi, religious, secular, Arab, left-wing and right-wing environmentalists. Israel has always been a country where people love nature. It’s part of the national ethos.”
A sign that the environmental movement has come of age was the January decision by one of the country’s largest polluters, the Shafdan sewage treatment facility near Rishon LeZion, to convert Greater Tel Aviv’s sewage sludge into organic fertilizer instead of incinerating or continuing to release it into the Mediterranean Sea.
Following years of preventable pollution, the Shafdan opted to reduce emissions, benefit agriculture and preserve open spaces over the cheaper, environmentally detrimental options. The turnaround followed years of pressure from the IUED and other environmental groups, who acted through the courts to impose a re-evaluation of sludge-treatment methods.
The Shafdan decision was indicative of shift in official thinking, says Iser Itzik. “We’re starting to see a change in attitudes. There’s more public discussion, government ministries are changing their stances, and the economic sector has altered its lexicon — but there’s a long way to go.”
The environmentalists’ next major challenge is cleaning up Ramat Hovav, the country’s main hazardous-waste-treatment site in the Negev. Ramat Hovav houses 17 chemical companies — more than half the chemical companies in Israel — and produces at least nine major air pollutants, several of which are classified as poisons. In August 2007, an explosion involving hazardous materials at the Makhteshim factory in Ramat Hovav released noxious fumes into the surrounding air, forcing the nearby highway to Beersheba to be closed for several hours.
The IDF plans to build a 4,000-acre complex, housing over 11,000 personnel, close to Ramat Hovav, which will centralise military training in one area and replace the veteran Tzrifin base. This has raised fears that the “Training Camp City’s” proximity to the toxic waste dump will endanger soldiers’ health.
In early March, Israel’s Supreme Court instructed the government to carry out an environmental-risk survey of Ramat Hovav before building the complex.
“This is a great opportunity to clean up one of Israel’s biggest environmental disasters,” says Iser Itzik, who welcomes the base as a lever for pressuring Ramat Hovav’s management.
Meanwhile, the environmentalists are fighting a rearguard action against real-estate developers, with mixed results. Green bodies have banded together in a campaign, preparing policy proposals for conservation and sustainable development for areas including the Jerusalem Hills and Judean Plain, the Negev and coastal sand areas.
But still the bulldozers rumble as almost every city, town and village continues to expand alongside Israel’s robust economy. Galloping development threatens to encroach on the few remaining untouched locales.
Joab Igra, the owner, builder and architect of the opulent Herod’s Palace hotel in Eilat, is planning a four-hotel complex on 75 acres of the Timna valley in the Arava desert. Residents of this sparsely populated region knew nothing about the project until draughtsmen appeared on the site in December. A last-minute campaign to preserve the desert serenity of one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places in Israel looks destined to failure.
In a similar case, construction work began in early February on a 350-apartment holiday resort on a small, secluded bay surrounded by the Palmahim Beach National Park, halfway between Tel Aviv and Ashdod. Again, local residents who were unaware of the plans launched a kneejerk campaign to stop the construction. Yet despite a permanent protest camp at the site, a two-metre-high metal fence now demarcates one of Israel’s last untouched Mediterranean beaches. The resort is scheduled to open in September 2009, on a site where coyotes, foxes, gazelles and crabs roamed only 20 years ago.
Israel’s beaches are becoming more crowded every year. With only 12 miles overseen by lifeguards, each citizen now has a meagre one inch of coast at his disposal (compared with 12 inches per person in 1948).
Two-thirds of the country’s population lives in the highly urbanised central region, within 10 miles of the 117.5-mile Mediterranean coastline — of which some 40 miles are occupied by military, port or other installations.
Only 15 per cent of Israel’s sandy beach land remains from when the state was created 60 years ago, mainly due to rampant development. Not all the dozens of seafront residential and commercial developments built along the coast during the 1990s were legal.
Less than half the amount of sand along the coastal plain at the turn of the previous century remains. The shifting sands of Israel’s coastal plain are part of a band extending from the Nile in Egypt to Tyre (Lebanon) in the north, carried by northward currents, but the construction of marinas has arrested the northward movement.
In recent years, green organisations have secured several important court decisions safeguarding beaches — notably the Coastline Protection Law (November 2004), which bans new construction within 300 meters of the coastline, but is not properly enforced. Israeli environmentalists are worried about the country they will leave their grandchildren’s generation.
“The state behaves likes an ostrich with its head in the ground,” says Green Party leader Visner, who is calling for a radical change in policy to what he calls sustainable Zionism. “It’s time to rethink our relationship with this land,” he says.