THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING

Perhaps the greatest environmental setback of the period came in the form of “emergency legislation” passed by the Knesset in July 1990 that essen-tially eviscerated Israel's planning and building system. The Soviet Union, in its final days, at long last opened its gates, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants flocked to Israel.^[49] The Israeli government, fearing an acute housing shortage, decided to streamline the planning process for residen-tial units. Benignly titled the “Planning and Building Procedures Law (Temporary Measures),”^[50] the law created ad hoc committees known by their Hebrew acronym, the Valalim.^[51] These were to replace temporarily the more ponderous regional and local committees.^[52]

Dominated by government development interests such as the Ministry of Housing and the Israel Lands Administration, the Valalim committees were quantitatively and qualitatively overzealous in their work. For instance, the government set an objective of forty-five thousand approved housing units for Jewish year 5751 (1990–1991). As speculators cashed in on the real estate sweepstakes, the Valalim committees obliged, by approving 380,000 units.^[53] Technically the emergency committees were supposed to review only those housing plans containing two hundred or more units. In practice, plans ranging from small developments to entire urban, commer-cial, and transportation infrastructures sped through the committees. Environmental considerations, impact statements, and common sense were conspicuously absent. Until then, the public usually had enjoyed two months to review development proposals and file objections to problem-atic plans. Under the emergency system, it was limited to twenty days—an impossibly short period to put together a compelling case against a development scheme. A study showed that official review of complex de-velopment plans generally took less than a week.^[54]

The legacy of environmental mistakes remains traumatic to environ-mentalists. From 1990 until 1993, when housing starts doubled,^[55] all the Ministry of the Environment could do was to catalog them. To name but a few, homes sprang up adjacent to railroad tracks and air strips with no consideration of the noise; neighborhoods were built without sewage systems; and sensitive scenic areas were scarred by the hasty projects. No less important, the law made a mockery of a planning system that for years had been considered a linchpin of environmental policy. It was a free-for-all, and government bureaucracies that had long been stifled by annoying planning procedures were among the most exploitive entre-preneurs.

The law was designed to be a temporary stopgap arrangement, with its provisions in force for only two years. When it expired, a glut of approved housing plans existed. The emergency committees were very popular, however, among developers, inside and outside the government. The Ministry of the Environment staff dutifully tried to mitigate the most egregious plans, submitted reports detailing dozens of abuses, and openly called for the law's natural discontinuation. The Knesset Interior and Environment Committee nodded sympathetically and then proceeded to extend the law's life on four separate occasions.^[56]

Faced with the impossible position of having Ministerial responsibility without Ministerial power, Marinov become increasingly truculent. Two decades of fighting for environmental causes with inadequate authority left him with a long list of enemies. They all seemed to surface for a brutal ex-pose in the newspaper Chadashot, which painted a harsh picture of his ruthless management style. However, for Marinov there was some comfort in international recognition: In 1991 after several unsuccessful attempts, he was elected to the Directorate of the Mediterranean Action Plan in Cairo.^[57] This was particularly gratifying—since declaring Zionism to be racism in 1974, the United Nations had excluded Israelis from any position of real re-sponsibility in an affiliated institution. And of course, there was the global high in June 1992 associated with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when Marinov and his deputy, Amram Pruginin, sat in for Prime Minister Shamir, who chose to stay home and campaign for the July elections.

But without a Minister, the Environmental Ministry became a throw-back to the days of the Environmental Protection Service. It was mostly the same faces, and they still lacked the power to implement policies that might reduce pollution from pesticides, cars, or industrial waste pipes. In addition, the Ministry seemed incapable of articulating a Green vision that would excite the public. Issues such as public transport, solar energy, eco-nomic incentives, eco-labeling, urban aesthetics, and biodiversity were outside the Ministry's operational and conceptual universe.