Red, Green, and Blue

When our own elections are over, it’s difficult to remember that in other countries big decisions are still being made. Israel gets to make more of those decisions than most countries although it may often seem that nothing changes there. The Knesset is elected for a four year term, but only one in the last eight Knessets has actually completed a full term. Elections are held much more often. Electoral apathy in Israel is high, and environmental issues are never at the forefront of the debate.

Israel’s Environmental Problems

Much has been done to solve air pollution, especially around Haifa which had four times the allowable level of sulphur dioxide (SO2) in the 1980s and now has only a couple of occasions a year when SO2 levels rise to unsafe levels. But in Jerusalem air pollution is projected to reach the same levels as Mexico’s City’s highly polluted atmosphere by 2010.

In 2004, four Australian athletes died after a bridge over the Yarkon river collapsed. The river water was so toxic that one of the four died of ingesting it, rather than dying of injuries, according to his autopsy. In September, the search for a murdered four-year-old was halted because it was feared that the Yarkon’s waters could actually harm the scuba divers searching for the girl’s body.

Israel also has unusual wildlife protection problems because it has strict hunting laws and its neighbours generally have none. This means that while gazelles and ibex have been almost hunted to extinction in surrounding states, they have reached nuisance levels inside Israel, threatening its agriculture. And over two-thirds of Europe’s migratory birds pause in Israel on their journeys, and pelicans and starlings, in particular, damage aquaculture and field crops.

There have been issues with pesticides inside Israel which until late 2001 allowed the use of several pesticides banned in most western countries. This meant that any export crops that were returned for having too high residues of banned substances where immediately placed on the domestic food market. While many highly toxic pesticides are now banned, there have been cases of non-food pesticides, such as those licensed only for use on cotton, turning up on foodstuffs. Up to 10% of domestically sold fruit and vegetables may have excessive pesticide levels.

Most shockingly of all, 95% of Israel’s solid waste is still buried in landfill or burnt. There are virtually no recycling schemes and the runoff from huge rubbish dumps is contributing to the contamination of aquifers and rivers, meaning that Israel’s already limited freshwater resource is being destroyed.

Water May Make War in Israel

It sounds like the worst nightmare for any politician, but when most serve for less than their four year term, the determination to deal with such complex issues is low. And where conflict and outright war mean that political and military concerns dominate debate, the environment barely gets a look in at election time. But we may all find ourselves dealing with Israel’s pollution problems sooner than we think – weapons rich but water poor countries could be the flashpoint for major conflicts in the next decade, and Israel is poised to discover that it’s too late to ignore the environment, because it doesn’t go away if you do.

River Yarkon photograph courtesy of Imolcho at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

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