10. Israel, Arabs, and
the Environment
In his last year as a civil engineering student at the Technion in 1978, Basel Ghattas happened to do his final project on the environment. Beyond this, he harbored no discernible Green inclinations. After he graduated, he went home to his village of Rami, where he worked as a construction engineer. On the side he dabbled in local politics. He was upset that, as in the vast majority of Israeli Arab communities, there had never been a central sys-tem for disposing sewage in Rami. Yet, unlike most Israeli municipal lead-ers, politicians in Rami actually wanted to change the situation. For them, collecting the wastes was not enough. They wanted proper treatment at the end of the city's pipe.[1] Ghattas adopted the project as a synthesis of his professional and political interests.
Since 1968 the Rami Local Council had been trying to jump over the long line of bureaucratic hurdles imposed by Israeli law. Things appeared to get off to a quick start. In 1970 the Northern Regional Sewage Committee approved the conceptual master plan that the village had com-missioned. It included settling and flocculation technologies at a sewage treatment facility whose purified waters would eventually irrigate olive trees. Yet it was not until 1976 that the Northern Region Planning Committee actually submitted the plan for public scrutiny and objections. In 1977 the National Sewage Project, operating out of the Ministry of Interior, agreed to offer Rami a matching loan for 50 percent of the work. It took two years, but in April 1979 the Rami Local Council provided the guarantee for its half of the funds and was ready to start work. But by then a highway had been approved that swallowed up much of the land desig-nated for the treatment ponds. A smaller site was found, but it required more intensive aeration technologies.[2]
Then, seemingly out of the blue, the Ministry of Health withdrew its support. In October 1979 it announced that it needed to explore the possi-bility of connecting the village's sewage with the new treatment facility located in the nearby Jewish town of Karmiel. This was ten years after Rami had made the first of many payments to consulting engineers for a sewage collection and discharge master plan. Yet its approved proposal for a local treatment facility was put on hold.
For six more years, debates ensued over the exact path Rami's pipes should take on their way to Karmiel. The agricultural village of Moshav Shazur was situated along the way, and it was not happy with the recom-mended route. So the path of the pipes was modified.[3] Meanwhile, Ghattas and the village mayor, Elias Kasis, pushed ahead. In 1982 they began col-lecting taxes from Rami's residents and laid twelve kilometers of pipe to collect and deliver the sewage to the central treatment plant. Then, in September 1985, Karmiel had a change of heart.[4] The consulting engineers now told the town that the plant did not have adequate capacity to receive Rami's wastes, even though it would constitute less than 5 percent of the total sewage reaching the treatment plant. So in March 1987 the Regional Sewage Committee decided to go back to Rami's original 1971 plan. The treatment plant went on line more than twenty years after the blueprints were first designed.[5]
By the time the project was complete, Ghattas had already finished a doctorate in environmental engineering and probably knew more about the bureaucratic and technical challenges associated with sewage treat-ment for Israel's Arab population than anyone else in the country. He was approached by a health delivery organization, the Galilee Society (the Arab National Society for Health Research and Services), to manage a new project. This was a revolving fund to help Arab municipalities move through the crucial first planning stage on the circuitous road of sewage treatment initiatives.[6] Ghattas's activities helped twenty-six Arab villages prepare master plans and confirmed his experience in Rami: It was easier for Jewish settlements to get a sewage system up and running than it was for Arab villages.
Today, as Director of the Galilee Society, Ghattas remains an unusually good-natured man, his demeanor always amiable. But he is dead serious when assessing blame for the top environmental health problem in Israel's Arab sector:
I have never seen a case where an Arab village didn't find a way to collect money for its wastes. They may have gone into debt, but in the end they installed the pipes and built the necessary infrastructure. The
Israel's Arab population constitutes 17 percent of the country's popula-tion. In many ways its environmental experience runs parallel to that of the Jewish majority. The standard of living for Israeli Arabs has improved enormously over the years as reflected in basic environmental indicators: Drinking water has gotten better; air quality has gotten worse; the advent of plastics has created an ugly litter problem. The economy is no longer agrarian; agriculture has become only a marginal factor in an increasingly urbanized consumer culture. Also, any Israeli mayor can sympathize with Rami's bureaucratic nightmare and the headaches of meeting the environ-mental expectations that the central government has. Yet, in the ecological realm, Israeli Arabs have a story that is different from that of the Jewish majority.
The hundred-year conflict between Zionism and the Arabs of the Middle East has profoundly influenced the Jewish environmental reality. If nothing else, it has left the national budget focused on defense rather than domestic needs. The pervasive tensions spawned by the Arab-Israeli conflict unquestionably affected the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens. Their environmental experience has not been spared the fallout. When the direct and indirect effects of minority status on the physical conditions in the Israeli Arab environment are considered, the picture that emerges sug-gests that the environment has paid a price for the troubled relations be-tween Arabs and the State of Israel. The relations between mainstream Israeli environmental institutions and Israel's Arab population confirms a prejudice premeditated or unintentional. At the same time, ecology may provide a basis for reconciliation.
MINORITY STATUS
The 1948 war, known by Palestinians as al-Nakba (the disaster), left a dis-oriented and fragmented Israeli Arab population. The Palestinian Arabs' fifty-year battle against Zionism had been resolved—only it had ended in total loss, irreversibly transforming their landscape. Fewer than ten thou-sand Arabs remained in Jaffa, Haifa, and Ramla-Lod, cities that before the War had collectively been home to over 175,000 people.[8] Three hundred and fifty villages vanished entirely.[9] Only the city of Nazareth had grown, from 15,540 to 16,800, as a result of the absorption of internal refugees. The 150,000 Arabs who remained reluctantly assumed Israeli citizenship. When they began to pick up the pieces, in the 1950s, Israeli Arabs made up
Zionism's attitude toward the Arabs of Palestine is the subject of con-siderable academic scholarship and debate. While the earliest Zionist “thinkers” did not consider too deeply the role that Arabs would play in their Jewish State, most adopted Herzl's optimistic line that things would “work out” amicably.[11] When Arab Palestinians became increasingly in-transigent in their rejection of any accommodation, Zionists responded by becoming more militant themselves. The Holocaust only heightened the Yishuv's sense of moral entitlement. After 1949, once this fifty-year con-flict was resolved so favorably—from the Jewish perspective—Israel's leaders were sincere in wanting to better the conditions of Arab citizens. There is no commandment that appears in the Bible more often than the injunction to treat equitably the non-Jewish residents (as well as the or-phans and widows) “who sojourn among you.”[12] This traditional precept, coupled with the general aspiration to be a liberal democracy, constituted the national ideal for the new State of Israel.
At the same time, the first half century of independence was marred by continuous enmity and intermittent violence with Palestinians and Arab nations. The country could not help but view its own Arab citizens as a se-curity threat. The expression “Respect him and suspect him” was almost an official adage. To neutralize the danger posed by a potential fifth col-umn, a strict policy of military rule was initially imposed on Arab com-munities and eased only over a period of many years. To consolidate Jewish control geographically, many Arab citizens were barred from re-turning to their original homes. Under the 1950 Absentee Property Act, they were paid compensation that fell far short of the land's actual value. As much as two million dunams, a full 40 percent of private Arab land re-sources, were confiscated during this period.[13] Today Arabs make up al-most a fifth of Israel's population but own only 3.4 percent of the land.[14]
Loss of land was the deathblow to an already beleaguered fellah econ-omy that already could not compete with the highly mechanized Jewish agricultural sector. By the 1990s, only 8 percent of Israeli Arabs made a liv-ing in agriculture.[15] Despite the painful transition, the Israeli Arab com-munity proved resilient.
In retrospect, it was the 1967 Six-Day War that served as the economic watershed for Israel's Arab citizens. The war came in the wake of the can-cellation of military rule in 1966, which freed Israeli Arabs to pursue en-trepreneurial ventures. With the new territorial acquisitions, West Bank and Gaza residents replaced Israel's Arabs in many unskilled manual tasks,
A strong commitment to education and a pragmatic approach to their circumstances strengthened the community. Because of their prolific birthrate (which for many years averaged 3.7 percent growth per year) Israeli Arabs have more than kept pace with Jewish immigration. Non-Jewish Israelis presently number over one million. Some academics like to analyze the “quiescence” of Israel's Arab minority,[17] and Palestinian na-tionalists seek perfidious, conspiratorial explanations. But most Jewish Israelis welcome their “cousins'” natural integration and genuinely appre-ciate Arab loyalty, in particular during times of strife. The extent of the Arab population's commitment to the country is reflected in polls show-ing that despite a long laundry list of complaints, only 7.5 percent of Israeli Arabs are interested in moving to a Palestinian State; only 13.5 percent wish to see Israel disappear.[18] During the 1992 elections, a time when eth-nic and national origins increasingly influenced Jewish voter affiliation, more Arabs voted for Jewish parties than for Arab ones.[19] The situation during the subsequent decade, admittedly, has beecome more polarized.
Yet because of the salience of the surrounding hostilities, Israel's Arab cit-izens will never be a conventional minority group. For the foreseeable fu-ture, they will have to wrestle with a dual affiliation that, on occasion, leads to profound contradictions and conflicts.[20] When these emotions meet ob-jective economic disadvantage, perceived discrimination, and the simmering conflict with the Palestinian nation, they can be manifested in the sort of vi-olent riots in Arab towns and cities that stunned Israeli society in October 1990.
At the same time, it remains practically impossible to generalize intelli-gently about such a diverse collection of religions, ideologies, lifestyles, and interests. Certainly, Israeli Arabs who work in the environmental field show none of the meek or embittered spirits that are sometimes used to deride this remarkable community. They most closely fit Dan Rabinowitz's description of the sophisticated modern Arab Israeli professional:
Their nonassimilating nature is perceived as permanent, acculturation notwithstanding. While consistently acquiring more of the values and the symbols of Jewish Israel and incessantly attempting to gain more
THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Technically, Israeli Arabs are full-fledged citizens. As an ethnic and reli-gious minority in a Jewish State, however, their status in fact falls short of equality. The various legal manifestations of the preferential treatment for Jewish Israelis have been catalogued elsewhere.[22] Inequality is not always due to direct government discrimination, however. The very existence of a privately funded Jewish Agency, which plays a key role in a variety of so-cial spheres, guarantees unequal results. The Agency has a natural prefer-ence for Jewish clients. While there is legitimate debate over the validity of any given social policy, even the most passionate Zionist patriot would agree that Israeli Arabs do not enjoy all the privileges of the Jewish ma-jority. But does this double standard also extend to the environmental realm?
The answer goes to the definition of what is known as “environmental justice.”[23] The question is not whether Israeli Arabs suffer from noise, water pollution, and air pollution: By virtue of the fact that they live in Israel, they do. The salient question is: To what extent does this population suffer greater exposures or impaired access to natural resources as a result of its minority status? For example, there is little doubt that when Israel sited Beer Sheva's most-polluting chemical industries, as well as the na-tion's only hazardous-waste facility, at Ramat Hovav, it did so because it felt that there was nobody there. The scattered Bedouin who camped “across the street” from the hazardous-waste facility were in no position to object. This unfortunate juxtaposition has produced a disproportion-ately heavy environmental burden for this population and one that falls squarely in the realm of environmental justice (the Bedouin eventually used the exposures as a legal basis for demanding alternative lands[24]). Ramat Hovav represents a case so extreme as to make it almost anom-alous. And indeed, there is no shortage of Jewish horror stories involving unreasonable pockets of environmental risk.
Is there systematic environmental injustice towards Israel's Arab resi-dents? If so, identifying it is a particularly vexing conundrum. Just five of many possible caveats reflect the complexity of the issue. First of all, the baseline environmental situation in 1948 was fundamentally asymmetri-cal. Indoor plumbing and other basic sanitary services were unknown in most Arab villages. The disparities have been reduced dramatically. For instance,
Meir's patronizing tone as well as the implication that the government was doing taxpaying citizens a favor may be annoying to some. Nonetheless, during a period when the young country faced economic hardships and profound security risks, remarkable progress was made. As a result, water consumption in Arab villages tended to rise twice as fast as population growth.[26] The question remains: Was it enough?
The second caveat involves cultural factors that might explain environ-mental differences—results attributable to community autonomy rather than injustice. Arab Israelis often have different ideas from those of their Jewish counterparts about how to build houses, plant gardens, establish parks, educate, issue licenses, and so forth. Pig farms, not surprisingly, are not a problem in the Jewish sector, but some Christian Arabs own them, and they are a considerable nuisance for many Arab Israelis.[27] In a related matter, having left most of their large pre-1948 population centers, Israeli Arab residents tended to concentrate in small and mid-sized villages.[28] As in any rural sector, objectively there is a different environmental reality—for better or for worse. Such issues lie outside the realm of environmental justice.
The third caveat concerns an inherent tension, heightened by the Arab-Israeli geographic reality, between traditional culture and modern eco-nomic activities. The “blue lines” drawn into the local municipal master plans, constraining the expansion of Arab (and Jewish) settlement, exacer-bated land shortages within the villages. Fathers traditionally divided their land holdings among their sons. As family size grew and land holdings re-mained frozen, the size of the subdivision shrank. This led to two envi-ronmental dynamics: a shortage of public areas (for example, Israeli Arab schools were frequently built far outside the villages, for lack of available sites) and a tendency to concentrate individual agricultural (and later in-dustrial) activity in increasingly urban family plots. Keeping livestock out-side the safe confines of the village is often seen as imprudent. In a related phenomenon, in the Bedouin town of Rahat, there is a high percentage of
A fourth confounding factor is occasional discrimination within Israel's Arab sector itself. For example, members of the Bedouin neighborhood in Shfaram—an Arab city—point to a pattern of harassment that includes a predatory zoning policy imposed on them by the city government. They claim that the policy is motivated by the local Arab leaders' resentment of Bedouin fealty and military service to the State of Israel.[30]
Finally, economic disadvantage does not always lead to environmental disadvantage. Ironically, the lack of heavy industries in the Arab sector (which might be associated with economic inequality) may also mean that environmental exposures to hazardous chemicals is higher among Jewish Israelis. While Israeli Arabs may justifiably resent a per capita car owner-ship that is only 35 percent of the general population's, certainly it bene-fits air quality in their communities.[31]
The most basic public health data do not support environmental dis-crimination. Arab cancer rates in Israel between 1960 and 1995, for exam-ple, were substantially lower, among both men and women, than those for the parallel Jewish cohorts.[32] Ministry of Health expert Gary Ginsburg confirms that Arab life expectancies are slightly lower than Jewish life ex-pectancies, but this is due to a higher infant mortality rate as a result of poorer socioeconomic conditions rather than exposure to environmental hazards. Indeed, his calculations suggest that in terms of preventable mor-tality, Sephardic Jews are actually slightly worse off than Israeli Arabs. The closest thing to a pollution-related cancer cluster that his epidemiological evaluation uncovered involved elevated lung cancer rates near the Nesher cement plant in Ramla and near an asbestos factory in Akko, coincidentally two of Israel's four “mixed” Arab/Jewish cities.[33] Nonetheless, there are statistics that suggest that discrimination is manifested in specific envi-ronmental media.
The most blatant indicators are in natural resource allocation. Arab farmers, who cultivated over 10 percent of Israel's crop area in 1974–1975, received only 2 percent of the water allocated to agriculture.[34] There has been some improvement; however, by 1996 Jewish per capita use of water was still 120 cubic meters per person per year compared with 42 cubic me-ters among Israeli Arabs.[35] It is no coincidence that the Jewish Agency owns one-third of Mekorot, Israel's waterworks. Likewise, no Arabs have ever held senior positions in Israel's Water Commission.
Dr. Fayad Sheabar, an MIT-trained public-interest environmental scien-tist, ranks the top five environmental problems in the Arab sector:
An unhealthy drinking water supply
Insufficient basic sewage infrastructure and practically no advanced treatment
Small industries in urban areas, producing air and noise pollution
Proximity of quarries to Arab villages
Pesticide abuse
Because of a general paucity of data and empirical research on the sub-ject, such assessments are somewhat impressionistic and less than defini-tive. Nonetheless, with the exception of pesticide exposures, the severity of the environmental insult to Arab communities appears ostensibly worse for each case than in the Jewish sector. The implication is that there is an ethnic or “environmental justice” association. For instance, bacterial con-tamination of drinking water is more common in the Arab sector because of the continued presence of septic tanks and the frequently leaky sewage collection systems. Health directives to citizens instructing them to boil their drinking water, especially during the summer months, are far more common in the Israeli Arab sector than in Jewish cities.
Many small cottage industries emerged in the basements, garages, or backyards of Arab cities and villages as a reflection of an industrious but capital-poor population.[36] A number of these enterprises operate without a proper business license. Although most are small, the collective environ-mental impact of metal and aluminum works, cleaners, and carpenters can be considerable. Establishment of distinct industrial areas seems to be an obvious solution—except that there have been cases where the cure is worse than the disease. For instance, the city of Shfaram created an indus-trial area inside the city limits. As a result, concrete plants were located four meters from the windows of private homes, producing dust concen-trations ten times the legal limit.[37] It is little wonder that the exposed neighbors suffered from chronic respiratory illnesses.
Such dynamics are by no means unique to Israel's Arab sector. For ex-ample, during the 1990s, Israel's agricultural moshav settlements began to suffer from an influx of illegal factories and a similar intermingling of in-dustrial and residential uses.[38] The problem in the Jewish sector, however, warranted a high-level commission, investigation, and Cabinet-approved recommendations.[39]
There are less tangible factors used to support Israeli Arab claims of environmental injustice. These include nonquantifiable areas where Arab
THE SEWAGE GAP
If there is one environmental medium in which Israeli Arabs have an ob-jective basis for claiming disadvantaged status, it is sewage. The numbers are indisputable. Israel's State Comptroller was not telling the Arab com-munity anything new when she reported with some dismay in 1996 that 80 percent of Arab villages had untreated sewage that was not contained by pipes, flowing in the streets or in open spaces.[41] Until the late 1990s, it was possible literally to cross the two-lane highway separating the high-tech industrial zone of Karmiel and to find fecal wastes flowing through the streets of Der el-Asad—a fully recognized town. The stench of sewage flowing in the streets is increasingly rare today, but end-of-the-pipe solu-tions are still nowhere in sight. The problem is most acute among the many residents of Arab settlements who are classified by Israel's planning authorities as “illegal squatters.” The residents of these “unrecognized set-tlements” find themselves in limbo. On the one hand, like all Israeli citi-zens, they pay taxes. At the same time they are not entitled to basic municipal services, including sanitation.
Ironically, it was success in achieving relative “equality” in the area of water delivery that set the stage for the failure in sewage disposal. Quite simply, after they piped the water in, Israeli planners did not have time to worry about where the resulting wastes would go. As a result, the vast ma-jority of Israeli Arabs, who live in recognized cities, face a discouraging sewage profile. A 1997 survey conducted by the Galilee Society of Municipalities in the “triangle” of Arab settlement found that 75 percent of the communities relied on cesspools and pits as an “end-of-the-house” solution. Cesspools may have been a reasonable solution when there was no running water supply, but once every home had flush toilets and faucets, the quantities of wastes became excessive.[42] Dr. Ghattas for years has challenged the conventional wisdom among Israeli sewage planners that insists on technology-intensive centralized treatment, which is both expensive and inappropriate to the physical reality of the Arab villages.[43]
Inasmuch as it is decentralized, cesspool maintenance is irregular, and often the impervious pits fill up and spill over into the streets. Even worse, sometimes the cesspools work, and absorb the sewage. Then waste streams can percolate toward the groundwater or even the unfortunately located and cracked drinking-water pipe. Emptying these waste pits takes place with little oversight and constitutes a major source of stream and ground-water contamination.[44] Moreover, sometimes the ecological damage can be worse when there is central collection. Um el-Faham, the largest Arab city in Israel, with a population of forty thousand, still discharges some 40 per-cent of its wastes directly into the closest stream.[45] A 1995 Galilee Society survey found that the majority of Arab communities collected their wastes in a network of pipes.[46] (This was a vast improvement from 1988, when only eight of seventy-five recognized Arab villages had reasonable sewage systems in place.[47]) But 60 percent of the cities had no treatment facilities.[48]
Part of the problem can be attributed to an underlying asymmetry in agri-cultural development. Until 1997, not a single Arab village was using its own effluents after treatment.[49] When kibbutzim were located nearby, they were only too happy to utilize the wastes.[50] As a result, sewage solutions came rel-atively early to villages like Daburia, Yafia, Kfar Yasif, and Abu Snan.[51] One reason that the Arab city of Sakhnin could finally build the first advanced treatment/reuse plant in the Arab sector was the absence of a nearby kibbutz. Its 150,000-cubic-meter facility went on-line in 1996, and the treated efflu-ents were pumped to Arab olive trees.[52] Yet for the vast majority of villages that could expect no agricultural dividend, advanced treatment and waste-water reuse were admittedly less of a priority than domestic sanitation.
The question of financing remains the most hotly disputed area of con-troversy. Conventional wisdom among Israel's Jewish population is that Arab municipalities are unwilling to charge municipal property taxes and sewage surtaxes at the same rate as in the Jewish sector. Some justify the disparity because of the Arab sector's lower economic resource base. But many Israelis cannot see the problem rationally and in its totality. Frequently their vision has been blocked by the palatial villas found in many Arab communities. Such Arab homes appear much larger and more impressive than urban Jewish apartments, and their relative prosperity was resented. The sewage gap was attributed, therefore, to an Arab civic culture that presumably was happy to spend money on individual homes but was
The position is disingenuous for two reasons. First of all, it ignores the systematic discrimination built into the allocations of Jewish nongovern-mental development agencies in Israel. During Israel's first thirty years, world Jewry contributed some five billion dollars to the country, 65 per-cent of which came from American Jews (this does not include compensa-tion payments paid by the German government to Nazi victims). Israeli Arabs derived little direct benefit from these funds, which paid for a con-siderable portion of the infrastructure as well as the agricultural develop-ment in the Jewish sector.[53]
Moreover, practically no Jewish city fully bankrolled its own sewage in-frastructure. The National Sewage Project and later the National Sewage Administration combined Ministry of Interior funding with low-interest loans to establish waste treatment facilities. While the law in theory au-thorized local government to tax its residents, in practice most of the money for activated-sludge and other treatment technologies came from the country's general fund. Israel's Arab communities, which started in a disadvantaged position, deserved the same level of funding.
Arabs suffered most of the resulting public health burden in the form of periodic outbreaks of hepatitis, typhoid, and dysentery.[54] Khatam K'naneh, who in 1988 served as the Ministry of Health's Deputy Regional Physician for the north of Israel, described the current situation:
Even today, infants die from infectious disease associated with water and environmental hygiene. From an epidemiological perspective, the significance of these isolated instances of death is that they represent the tip of the iceberg that can be seen. For every death caused by intestinal infection, there are far more hospitalizations, and for each hospitalization, there is a far greater number of illnesses in the community for the same reason, even though many are not reported. Statistically, every Arab in Israel is sick twice a year as a result of his water supply and sanitation. In a 1984 survey of Galilee villages, every child under the age of three years was sick five times a year from these diseases.[55]
K'naneh pointed out that even though the death rate among Arab children from sanitation-related disease was eleven times higher than in the Jewish sector and hospitalizations were three times higher, the pol-lution did not leave the Jewish settlements unscathed. There have been several instances of partially or completely untreated wastes from Arab towns contaminating drinking-water sources that service Jewish communities.[56]
Israeli Arab environmental disadvantage reflects badly on Israeli soci-ety as a whole. It especially represents a failure for Israel's environmental movement. During most of the country's history, relations between Israeli Arabs and Israel's mainstream environmental institutions were best char-acterized by relative degrees of alienation. Recent improvements are a function of change in the orientation of a few of the Jewish organizations coupled with a growing cadre of Israeli Arabs willing and professionally inclined to become active in mainstream Israeli pursuits. Each relationship has its own historic antecedents and controversies, illuminating a different aspect of the Arab Israeli complaint. Yet collectively they show how diffi-cult it is to separate the broader national conflict between Jews and Arabs from Israel's ecological experience.
JEWISH TREES
The Jewish National Fund constitutes the oldest and, in the long run, per-haps the most problematic environmental institution for Israel's Arabs. The inherent tension of a particularistic Jewish player endowed with govern-ment functions in a purportedly democratic nation has yet to be resolved. Most Israeli Arabs see the JNF as the perpetrator of systematic exploitation and discrimination against Israel's Arab community and a tool for hege-mony in the occupied territories.[57] Although the JNF has a large number of Arab employees, they are limited to positions of manual labor and do not participate in policy making. Fifty years after land acquisition from Arab effendis ceased to be the primary JNF priority, the organization's ongoing concern about Jewish domination of land resources continues to engender animosity.[58]
Many Jewish Israelis agree that forests serve a role that goes far beyond ecology and recreation. For Arabs, the trees are often perceived as a not-so-subtle ploy to constrain the expansion of their villages. Planting is interpreted in a strictly nationalistic light—a declaration of Jewish sover-eignty. The JNF's controversial involvement in West Bank afforestation ef-forts and land acquisition initiatives in East Jerusalem served to reinforce those who see the JNF in a purely political rather than ecological context. Israeli Arabs resent the quasigovernmental status accorded JNF lands and see its discriminatory policies as a festering sore on the face of Israel's democracy. These are lands owned by Jews, for the Jews—and are off lim-its to many of Israel's citizens.[59] A small, less-than-flattering literature has sprung up in which a few historians and sociologists consider the political implications of the JNF's work.[60]
There is an ugly ecological side to the political acrimony. Israel's trees have paid a price for Arab disenfranchisement. Even before the 1980s, when the Intifada marked JNF forests as a priority target for Palestinian violence, politically motivated arson was a constant threat to the country's wood-lands, in particular during the dry summer months. Forest fires in Israel are political events that dominate headlines.[61] Indeed, many Israeli Arabs per-ceive arson in the JNF forests as a legitimate form of political expression. An ambush by JNF foresters uncovered an underground network from the Galilee village of Jilabun in 1998. The gang went so far as to print up an elaborate forest-burning battle plan, complete with maps, timetables, and a breakdown of responsibilities.[62] The most famous literary work that takes place in a JNF forest is A. B. Yehoshua's 1968 novel Opposite the Forest,in which a Jewish graduate student working as a watchman exhibits growing empathy for the destroyed Arab village over which the forest is planted. Ultimately, he does nothing to prevent its immolation by an arsonist.
In the world of nonfiction, however, Israeli foresters were never sympa-thetic. They were resolute and resourceful. Along with the fire lines separat-ing the trees into modular compartments, the network of watchtowers established in 1958 has probably proven to be the JNF's most effective response. The forty towers and two hundred vehicles (see Figure 29) used today by the forestry department provide sufficiently early detection to re-duce the impact of fires enormously.[63] The arson that blazed throughout the second half of the 1980s, however, changed the dimensions of the problem. In 1976 there were 320 events per year in JNF forests; by 1987 the number tripled to a thousand. Although the source of most fires remains unsolved, at least 25 percent of the conflagrations have been determined to be politically motivated. The actual proportion may exceed 60 percent.[64]
The JNF was quick to respond, beefing up its monitoring capacity to meet the challenge. Despite the dramatic rise in the number of fires, the damage to forests was halved by the end of the 1980s.[65] Today, a remark-able 32 percent of the five hundred annual events are extinguished with only one to five dunams damaged. Almost half of the fires were nipped in the bud completely, with only one dunam of woodland affected. Still, roughly 10 percent of the fires are categorized as forest crown blazes, in-volving total loss.[66]
Like soldiers fighting against guerrilla warriors, the JNF foresters are limited to offering tactical holding measures. The Israeli public continues to donate generously in highly publicized campaigns to replace burned forest segments.[67] A strategic solution may be linked to a larger, geopolit-ical reconciliation. Even when a more peaceful climate in the region takes
Most Israeli Arabs would never openly support the acts of arson, but they identify with the motives. The JNF is perceived as an organization that is out to grab every square centimeter of land that Arabs are willing to relinquish. The level of alienation runs high. “The Arab community derived no benefit from these forests,” complains one Israeli Arab conser-vation leader. “The very least they could have done was call the forests by the names of the places they took the land from. Even the JNF can't say that Arabs don't like to go to parks. So why isn't there an Um el-Faham Forest or a Wadi Rabba Forest? That way there might be a chance that Arabs could feel attached to these places.”[68] The JNF has begun to explore what a new relationship with Israel's Arab community might look like through some community consultation exercises in and around the re-gion of Sakhnin sponsored by the JNF Community and Forestry Department.[69] But these efforts remain embryonic in character. Until the JNF's agenda is environmental rather than political, such differences may be irreconcilable.
THE SPNI'S ARAB UNIT
The one environmental institution that has managed to penetrate the Israeli Arab sector broadly is the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. Two thousand Arab teachers participate in advanced training with the SPNI each year (this constitutes roughly one-fifth of all teachers in the Arab community). There are SPNI branches in such Arab cities as Nazareth and Sakhnin.[70] A professional tour guiding course is taught for Arabs in Arabic. More than fifteen thousand Arab youth typically come out for SPNI's annual rally in the field.[71] Yet even this ostensible success story reveals some of the built-in tensions that contribute to the sense of alienation by Israeli Arab environmentalists.
SPNI's Arab unit was born of a unique partnership between Mahmoud Gazawi and Yossi Leshem. In 1975, after working as a teacher in the south-ern Bedouin town of Tel Sheva, Gazawi approached the SPNI, seeking work. Azariah Alon, then serving as SPNI General Secretary, was not in-terested in hiring an Arab. Leshem recalls:
Azariah figured that it wouldn't work out. SPNI teaches more than a love for nature, but also a connection to the country. He couldn't
Armed with only nominal funding and Yossi Leshem's blessing, Gazawi returned to his village, Kalansawa, as a teacher. On the side, he began an SPNI unit. Quickly it blossomed into a massive success. He initially fo-cused on teacher training because he lacked the resources to work directly with youth. After a few years he had reached most of the interested teach-ers, and Gazawi decided to appeal directly to pupils. In 1980 a major hik-ing/educational event for Arab students was planned. When five thousand kids turned up, Gazawi knew he was on to something. Each year the meet-ing is held in a different place, with the numbers rising steadily.
The SPNI Arab unit clings to a relatively narrow mission, and it stays “on-message.” Its focus is nature, and its orientation is education. The unit puts out pamphlets and books, leads hikes, and runs school groups. It does not attempt to address the urban environmental issues that may be most relevant to Israeli Arabs' day-to-day existence. It also steers clear of themes that have any national overtones. The unit keeps its geographical mandate restricted. The border between Israeli Arabs and their Palestinian cousins in the territories is never crossed. Gazawi explains,“Anything con-nected with water and soil resources there is catastrophic. We don't deal with it. It's just too big, even for us.”
A solid man with graying hair, Gazawi attributes his passion for nature preservation to his upbringing.
I was raised in a rural landscape. My work is especially important to me because of the changes taking place in Arab villages. The natural landscape is disappearing. The children and the general public seem to be moving totally in the direction of Western consumer culture. In the past there was a familiarity with the outdoors. It was part of the lifestyle of the fellah. The entire village identified with the fields, and they would go out to work early in the morning. Today, just try to get people to sleep outdoors! The alienation is drastic. To cook over a fire used to be the greatest pleasure and really a daily event in our childhood. Now young people tell me: “Why cook coffee over the fire when we can use gas?” We used to eat food from the fields. Now we eat Sunfrost.[73]
Gazawi is surprisingly frank about the organizational bias that seems almost as persistent today as it was twenty-five years ago when he first encountered
As a member of the governing board of the SPNI, he is very open about this disenchantment and no longer worries about the impression he makes. There is no shortage of Jewish board members who agree with him. He does see steady progress, though slow. Certainly, his many years of promotional work have paid off. When a survey was con-ducted among residents of Um el-Faham, it was found that 73 percent of the city's Arabs perceived the SPNI as Israel's leading environmental institution.
THE NATURE RESERVES AUTHORITY
One of the reasons that the SPNI Arab unit has not tried to assume a more aggressive watchdog role is to distance itself from Israel's Nature Reserves Authority (now the Nature and National Parks Authority).[74] One would imagine that Israeli Arabs would have an easy time identifying with such an ostensibly apolitical government agency. But quite the opposite is true. It is hard to grasp the depth of the hostility harbored among Israeli Arabs for the Authority. There may be a variety of reasons, but ultimately two historic areas of conflict with the Authority poison relations to this day: the tension over the Mount Meron reserve and the village of Beit Ja'an, and the activities of the Green Patrol.
Mount Meron was for many years Israel's largest nature reserve and remains the best-preserved natural woodlands in Israel if not the entire re-gion. The unique combination of high altitude, abundant precipitation (nine hundred millimeters per year, including regular winter snows), and historic isolation produces an ecological climax situation.[75]
Druze have been living in the vicinity of the reserve for eight hundred years, mostly in and around the village of Beit Ja'an (see Figure 30).[76] Most Israelis hear of Beit Ja'an only on the evening news, when the village is sin-gled out as the home of yet another fallen Druze soldier. No settlement in Israel, not even among the kibbutzim, has lost as many of its young men, proportionally, as Beit Ja'an—over fifty casualties in a village of 8500 residents. Environmentalists, however, know it as the most troublesome sin-gle point of friction between Israel's nature reserves and a civilian population.
The conflict is as old as the Nature Reserve system itself. When the Minister of the Interior gave General Avram Yoffe the megasanctuary he asked for, it included private tracts, tended by small farmers from the village. Many of these lands had been owned by Beit Ja'an residents for generations. The Druze landowners were not offered alternative plots for which they might trade their own lands that suffered the misfortune of ecological uniqueness. Rather, they were allowed to keep them—subject to the dra-conian limitations deemed necessary for preservation. To be sure, these in-volved a relatively small section of Beit Ja'an lands located in the most “sensitive” sections of the reserve. Agricultural cultivation was not prohib-ited altogether, but heavy, earth-disturbing mechanical equipment was banned. Forced to till their families' age-old plots with donkeys rather than modern equipment, many farmers found the policy degrading.[77] The real bone of contention was limitations on road construction in the area, which hampered the farmers' access to their fields. The problem was never solved to the satisfaction of the local residents, and so it flared up time and again.
The events of the 1987 round were typical. In standard Israeli partisan fashion, Druze leaders pressured then Minister of Agriculture Arik Nehamkin to cancel all limitations on the lands inside the reserve and order the Nature Reserves Authority to desist in its inspection duties. With elec-tions in the air and the Druze vote hanging in the balance, he acquiesced. The SPNI called the agreement illegal, and the Supreme Court concurred. But the Druze were not happy with the verdict, and the SPNI never suc-ceeded in establishing a real dialogue with them about the full dimensions of their complaint.[78] The sides were back in court once again a decade later.
Beit Ja'an certainly had other problems, but it would be wrong to dismiss the Druze view about the Meron Reserve as simply cynical tactics. It did not expect special treatment, but a village that had contributed so significantly to Israel's security justifiably counted on sensitivity to the needs of its citizens. Beit Ja'an's residents felt that the Nature Reserve was suffocating them. The Nature Reserves Authority was tuned in to the complaints of the residents and tried to present the reserve as an economic resource with the potential for ecotourism. To help with the problem of unemployment and to give the village a stake in the reserve, the Authority hired a large number of Druze veterans to work as NRA rangers. Because of the sincerity of their efforts at accommodation, NRA leaders remain bewildered when their anti-Arab rep-utation is raised. Lands for the Meron nature reserve, after all, really were se-lected according to strict ecological criteria.[79] Yet although they understand that conflicting interests must learn to coexist, Arab environmentalists per-ceived the NRA's limitations as overzealous and paternalistic.
Things came to a head in the summer of 1997, when the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel renewed a Supreme Court petition to enjoin road expansion by the residents. Beit Ja'an residents received the news of the Court's agreement with outrage, staging a violent demonstration in Jerusalem in which twenty-five people were hurt.[80] Beit Ja'an's mayor told the Court that he could not promise that his constituents would abide by the ruling. He explained to the press, “Only in the covenant of death do they remember us. What about the covenant of life?”[81] In the face of such a violent confrontation, the Nature Reserves Authority, under the prag-matic leadership of its new director, Aaron Vardi, forged a compromise.
Under the March 11, 1998, agreement, the SPNI agreed to cancel its Supreme Court action, and the Authority agreed to allow the route from Beit Ja'an to Chorpish to be redesignated as an agricultural road with the asphalting of certain steep sections. Landowners would be allowed to utilize heavy mechanical equipment in their agricultural work, and limitations on tree cutting and planting on private tracts would be removed.[82] Beit Ja'an agreed to forgo future claims and even agreed to launch a nature preserva-tion education and public awareness campaign among its residents.
Local leaders in Beit Ja'an were satisfied with the agreement, asserting that hiking and love of nature are key elements in Druze heritage: “We are a law-abiding people as long as the law is fair and serves the public inter-est. But we couldn't accept a policy in which plants were deemed to be more important than people,” explained Asad Dabur, the deputy head of the Local Council.[83] But scientists in the Authority did not share this ro-mantic perception of traditional stewardship practices. Former chief scien-tist Aviva Rabinovich argued that aerial photographs of Beit Ja'an from the Mandate period are devoid of tree cover. All had been cut down except for a few groves that were deemed holy.[84] “Preservation was never an integral part of their culture,” she claims.
This condescension is not lost on Israeli Arabs, who interpret preserva-tion policies as driven by chauvinism rather than ecology. While Beit Ja'an residents may temporarily be satisfied with their agreement, decades of enmity are not easily erased.
THE GREEN PATROL
The bad feelings in Beit Ja'an pale alongside the legacy of hostility spawned by the NRA's Green Patrol in its dealings with Israel's Bedouin community. Here, the quest for nature preservation came into direct con-flict with indigenous culture and claims to land ownership. A cursory
When the Roman Byzantine government in the Holy Land collapsed in the seventh century, Palestine's deserts—or badia in Arabic—became the domain of the Bedouin.[85] They were divided into seven tribes or confeder-ations of tribes, spread across the southern half of what is now Israel, all of Jordan, and the Sinai. The Turks had a post office in Gaza until 1900 when it moved to Beer Sheva. For the most part, however, until 1948 the Bedouin of the Negev were on their own and wandered freely.
Each tribe was related to a common ancestor. Within a tribe, any mem-ber could use the pasture and water sources of his territory. But rival tribes were absolutely excluded, except in the case of agreement or alliance. Even without the trappings of modern maps and surveying, borders were clearly demarcated, and whoever wanted to pass through a Bedouin tribe's lands needed permission. Unlike some of the tribes east of the Arava, who only migrated, the Negev Bedouin would cultivate, especially during years of plentiful rain.[86] For extended periods, however, the land could be dor-mant.[87] To the Bedouin, this in no way meant that they had relinquished their claim. The calls by the Turks and later the British on the Bedouin to register these lands were largely ignored. Bedouin perceived it as merely a ruse for collecting taxes.[88]
All this changed when Israel assumed control of the Negev desert in 1949. The new nation had the jeeps and the national will to penetrate this inhospitable arid region. The Bedouin understood that the rules of the game had changed.[89] Of the fifty-three thousand Bedouin that the British registered as living in this area, all but 12,500 moved on.[90] They scattered to the West Bank, to Gaza, and mostly to Sinai and Jordan. Initially the Bedouin, like all Israeli Arabs, were considered to be a security threat. Israel set a policy of concentrating the Bedouin in the area east of Beer Sheva on some thousand square kilometers of land. After the 1948 War, the Bedouin district was declared a “closed area,” and until the policy was canceled in 1966, Bedouin were not allowed to leave or take their flocks to other parts of the Negev without special permission. Ben-Gurion, of course, perceived the Negev as largely unsettled and as the ultimate land reserves for Jewish immigrants, who would continue to come.
After Israel conquered the West Bank and Sinai in 1967, connections be-tween members of Bedouin tribes were renewed, and there were extensive migrations towards the Negev. In the aftermath of the cancellation of mili-tary restrictions, Israeli Bedouin began to wander throughout the country, reaching as far north as Rehovoth and as far south as Eilat. There were problems
The Yom Kippur War and the subsequent peace negotiations with Egypt set in motion a process where the bulk of Israel's military training shifted from the Sinai desert to the Negev. There was increasing pressure to settle the Bedouin, whose numbers had grown dramatically.[91] This was hardly a new concept in the area. The Turks founded modern Beer Sheva in 1900 in an effort to settle the area's Bedouin (see Figure 31).
The Israeli government decided to establish seven cities in the northern Negev in which Bedouin tribes could live. The first of these, Tel Sheva, be-came residential in 1967. The conditions and the incentives offered to settle, by Israeli standards of the time, were attractive.[92] The Bedouin, of course, re-sisted.[93] Many were indignant at what they perceived as a violation of their rights and dignity. Others were less political but simply did not like the town or want to live in the proximity of rival tribes. Only about 40 percent of the Bedouin initially agreed to move into the new cities.[94] The homes provided for the Bedouin were by no means inferior by Israeli standards, and the towns were relatively spacious when compared to similar Bedouin villages created in Jordan.[95] Nonetheless, the cities' infrastructure and social services were perceived as inferior to that offered Jewish development towns.[96]
It was at this time, in 1977, that the Nature Reserves Authority estab-lished the “Green Patrol.” The initiative brought together the four major territorial players in Israel: the Land Authority, the JNF, the Nature Reserves Authority, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Zvi Uzan, the Minister of Agriculture, was the most militant advocate for countering Bedouin proliferation, and he lobbied for a common initiative to address the issue. When a Bedouin herd passed through his Moshav farming set-tlement, defiling the local cemetery, he was sufficiently indignant to get a Green Patrol approved.[97] Technically the Patrol was established to protect the government-owned open spaces from a variety of illegal squatters. But clearly they were most alarmed by the Bedouin in the Negev, whose pop-ulation had tripled during Israel's first thirty years.
NRA director Avram Yoffe “volunteered” the services of Alon Galili, a veteran ranger, and gave him three subordinate rangers and a jeep. Galili, who had recently become director of the southern region in the NRA, was unenthusiastic about leaving his new job. But General Yoffe had given an order, and Galili stayed at the helm for twelve years.[98] Although the Green Patrol is invariably associated with government efforts to expedite Bedouin settlement in the new urban centers, Galili claims that there were
The Green Patrol well understood that there were two sides to the issue. Many Bedouin had never bothered to register their lands when it had been possible during the Mandate and later were prevented from doing so by military orders. When the orders were lifted in 1966, they rushed out to stake claim on as much land as possible. Joint committees were created to deal with the problems of farmers (represented by Ministry of Agriculture personnel) and with the Bedouin (represented by a sheikh or a tribal leader). But it was not an effective format for dispute resolution. The Green Patrol was authorized to negotiate only with regard to the timing of the evacuation rather than the land rights themselves.
When discussion failed, the Green Patrol enforced the law—with an emphasis on force. Relying on the notion that “if you show them you are strong once, then the Bedouin will give you respect in the future,” Galili nurtured the Patrol's tough image.[100] Indeed, Galili was frustrated with the police, who brought with them operating procedures he found too timid for the rules of the game required to confront the Bedouin in the field. When Arik Sharon became Minister of Agriculture in 1977, he iden-tified with the Patrol's mission and expanded its ranks.
Systematically the Green Patrol began to remove Bedouin from State lands. Thirty armed inspectors would typically come to enforce an evacu-ation. It was not a pretty scene. The press reports were generally sympa-thetic toward the illegal squatters.[101]
Galili claims that no one was ever bodily removed without first at-tempting to resolve the matter amicably. The first three workers at the Patrol were all fluent in Arabic, and there was a disproportionately large percentage of Druze rangers. Non-Arabic speakers were sent to Arabic lan-guage courses. But frequently dialogue was fruitless, and there was a standoff. At this point the Patrol resorted to a variety of tactics to make its point. There was undoubtedly some exaggeration about the Green Patrol's brutality, and Galili is quick to point out that while there may have been a thousand complaints to the press, only twenty-three were filed with the police, and all of those were investigated and dismissed. Bedouin tell a completely different story.
Farkhan Shlebe might be the “model modern Bedouin” that Israel would like to put on display for the world. He runs a highly successful tourist operation and, like most energetic entrepreneurs, always seems to be on one of his three phone lines, the fax, or the computer. His Hebrew is
Rumor had it that if you wanted to join the Green Patrol, Alon Galili would punch you in the chest. If you cried out, you weren't tough enough to make it. They would attach a jeep to a tent and just drive off. They would poke holes in our jerry cans so that we'd run out of water. Imagine how a man felt when he returned from the army to find his tent destroyed and his wife beaten. They shot our dogs even when they knew there weren't any rabies involved. They never bothered to ask if the dog might have been vaccinated against rabies, and they certainly could have. Maybe the collar had just fallen off? As a boy I remember I would see one of their jeeps in the distance and then would pull down the tent, hoping they wouldn't be able to see us. The very sight of their jeeps filled us with fear. I had a puppy and I would lie on it inside the tent just praying they wouldn't shoot my puppy.[102]
Green Patrol brutality and associated intimidation tactics have become almost a new chapter in local Bedouin folklore. The fact that many of the Bedouin were active in the military service did not sway the Green Patrol. Some Bedouin tried to use their connection with the military to attain per-mission to graze on certain closed military zones. But the Green Patrol was not inclined to allow such concessions. Beyond demoralization, for many families the policy was financially disastrous. They lost their most basic means of production. Any trespassing livestock was subject to immediate confiscation, and frequently Bedouin had to sell their animals at a fraction of the market price to opportunistic meat suppliers, mostly from the West Bank and Gaza.[103]
Although the conflict was over different values and cultures, much of the controversy centered around Alon Galili. Galili added fuel to the fire when he shot two thieves who were breaking into a local grocery store while he was on civil guard duty at his home at Sdeh Boqer. They turned out to be Bedouin. Galili warned them to stop, shot in self-defense, aimed for and hit them below the knees, and drove to the hospital the one who did not escape. But the incident was a cause célèbre for his many critics. The NRA management refused to abandon Galili as a scapegoat. Dan Perry, for example, believes that Galili's image is unfounded, caused by Bedouin exaggeration. The Green Patrol's strategy always emphasized re-spect (the Galili shooting incident he attributes to “bad luck”).[104]
But it was lack of respect that seemed most to enrage the Bedouin, who place a premium on individual dignity. They point to Jordan as an example
Ultimately, it is not the Green Patrol's tactics but its mission that re-mains contested. Many environmental leaders are unapologetic about framing the issue in nationalistic as well as ecological terms. “The Green Patrol performed an enormous mitzvah, a good deed,” declares scientist Aviva Rabinovich. “The war over land is painful and difficult, and it always will be. We are fighting here. (There should be no illusions in this regard.) It's a battle for this land and our survival.”[106] Rabinovich claims that the aerial photographs from 1917 to 1948 that she used as an expert witness in NRA court hearings clearly showed that the Bedouin never laid any real claim on most of the Negev.
Ecologically, Rabinovich sees the conflict as part of the general dynamics surrounding overpopulation in developing countries. “Before the creation of the State, Bedouin would have one or two children. Most of their children died. Now, they have ten or twenty children per family. There are those who cry about the loss of their culture. Well, that's the price of having twenty children instead of two. With antibiotics we changed their world. And I un-derstand that a Bedouin may want to live like his grandfather did and enjoy the nomad's life. But the land simply can't sustain that population level of nomads. If you want to have twenty children, then live in a city.”[107]
Israel's Bedouin do not deny the impact of overgrazing on the desert, but they believe that the division of land is grossly inequitable. They have ac-commodated the best that they can, switching from goats to sheep (which cause less erosion). They also have become better at utilizing the legal sys-tem to fight for their rights and at arguing ecologically. Dozens of cases were filed by Bedouin contesting expulsions; at the very least, the suits pro-vided considerable delays. There is a ten-year average span from the time of filing until the final ruling.[108] One case dragged on for nineteen years.[109]
When removed from the charged nationalistic context, the debate over the actual impact of grazing herds on semiarid lands is a fascinating eco-logical issue. Goats, particularly aggressive in foraging, have traditionally been identified as agents of erosion and enemies of plant and tree rejuve-nation. Indeed, no sooner had the British caught their breath and taken control of the Mandate after World War I than they issued an Ordinance prohibiting the grazing of goats on protected forestland in Palestine.[110]
Yet today many ecologists argue that the disturbance to the land caused by moderate doses of grazing may actually increase soil productivity. Because undisturbed soil is crusted by salinity and microphytic organisms (algae and lichens), seeds cannot take hold and germinate. In addition, the grazing animals leave behind droppings that provide an important source of nutrients. Grazing may also be beneficial for biodiversity, because it lim-its competitive exclusion. Dominant species that would otherwise over-whelm weaker ones are kept in check by the grazing animals.[111] The variety of plant types in the Mediterranean areas of Israel is four times higher than in regions with a similar climate in California. This can be ex-plained by the regimen of human disturbance in the former region dur-ing the past thousands of years. Among these disturbances, the grazing of domestic animals may have an important place.[112]
With the major expulsions complete, an uneasy equilibrium in the po-litical realm between the parties has also set in. NRA personnel try to co-ordinate grazing schedules for the forty thousand Bedouin who now live in Israel's deserts, primarily the northern Negev. The Bedouin tribes were allocated eight hundred thousand dunams for grazing. Although the quota allotted is one hundred twenty thousand goats, the actual number toler-ated is closer to two hundred thousand. Between February and May the flocks are moved toward the western Negev. Then they drift eastward in summer.[113] The NRA monitors the movement and hurries the stragglers along. But Israeli Arabs hardly see it as a benevolent public servant.
The younger generation of Bedouin is increasingly comfortable with city life,[114] and more than three quarters of the population have settled.[115] Although scores of Bedouin still live in tents, very few truly nomadic Bedouin remain in Israel today. As Bedouin acclimated to their new lifestyle, attention gradually began to focus on social services and employ-ment. There is much to improve.
For all the official lip service, as well as bona fide efforts, the Bedouin remain one of the poorest segments of Israeli society. Ironically, poverty and pervasive unemployment are reflected in sustainable environmental indicators. For example, Rahat, the largest Bedouin town in the Negev, has a car “motorization” rate only one-fifth of Tel Aviv's while produc-ing thirty times less garbage per capita.[116] On the other hand, although the birthrate has begun to show signs of a slight decline, an average Bedouin family still has more than ten children.[117] As a result, the Israeli government recently agreed to expand the number of Bedouin cities from seven to fourteen, with a corresponding effort to upgrade condi-tions in them.
For a while it seemed as if the worst tensions were over. Then in August 1998, the newspapers reported that a NRA ranger shot and killed Suliman Abu-Jlidar.[118] Subsequent investigations revealed that the gunman was not an NRA ranger at all but a traveling companion of the victim, and criminal charges were dropped. Still, the incident reopened all the old scars and dashed any illusions of reconciliation. The Green Patrol may have won its war for desert lands, but in so doing, it lost the sympathies of Israel's Bedouin and Arab communities for the foreseeable future.
To offer a complete picture, it is important to mention that the Nature and National Parks Authority has begun to make a token effort to reach out to Israeli Arabs. In 1997, Giselle Hazzan, a vivacious and thoughtful Technion graduate, was given the job of organizing an educational initiative, based out of the Ein Afek reserve, that would target Israeli Arabs. Ein Afek is one of the last remaining pockets of wetlands in Israel, and it is surrounded to the east by Arab villages. Focusing on the younger generation, Hazzan's program brings roughly 25,000 school children from 50 Arab communities each year.[119] There they enjoy a stimulating dose of ecological wisdom, conserva-tion biology, and the lumbering water buffalo that used to be so prevalent throughout the landscape. Any educational and managerial criteria would deem the Arab educational program a huge success. Yet it is still most con-spicuously defined by its modest scope and the fact that Hazzan's remarkable achievements have been attained within the contraints of a half-time position.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT THE MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT
There was perhaps no clearer case of institutional neglect and discrimi-nation against Israel's Arab minority than the central government's investment in local environmental protection. While a few dozen Jewish municipalities and “Unions of Cities” enjoyed funding to support local environmental workers, before the 1990s, Arab communities, which needed help the most, were somehow overlooked.
When he took over as Minister of the Environment in 1992, Yossi Sarid brought his passion for social justice to the position, making the Arab sector a priority. Calling the present dynamic “a disgrace and a certificate of poverty for previous governments of Israel and for Israeli society in general,” he pre-scribed a policy of affirmative action. Sarid called for establishing a dispro-portionately high percentage of local units among Israel's Arab sector to com-pensate for what he perceived to be systematic, historical discrimination.[120]
Sarid was as good as his word. He charged Dror Amir, a veteran Ministry administrator in the international realm, with the task, and nine environmental
Arab environmentalists appreciated the new units that fostered educa-tion and generated more fastidious licensing procedures and new advo-cates for the issue within the system.[123] The success of each unit, however, was largely dependent on the degree of cooperation with the affiliated mayors, and here responsiveness is by no means uniform.[124] Much de-pended on the capabilities and resourcefulness of the unit director. Tarabiah, for example, succeeded in expanding his unit into a regional “union of cities.” Yet, even though institutionally Arab municipalities have begun to catch up, it will take much longer for the environmental gap to close in the field. Solving pollution problems takes money, and Israeli Arabs have less to work with than their fellow Jewish countrymen. The units hover in perennial danger of closing due to the lack of matching mu-nicipal funding. In the meantime, however, Israel's Arab sector no longer lacks local agencies for addressing its many environmental woes.
OCCUPIED AND POLLUTED
Israeli Arabs maintained a distinct separation in their political and cultural identities from their cousins in the West Bank and especially in the Gaza Strip, but they were certainly familiar and empathetic with their ecological plight. If anything, environmental conditions there were so much worse than those inside of Israel that they offered a moderating sense of proportion. For the most part, Israel's small circle of Arab environmental activists did not be-come involved in ecological problems over the Green Line. There was too much work to do at home and, although Arab citizens of Israel were aware of Palestinian complaints, the problems were deemed insurmountable.
Regardless of one's view about the aftermath of the 1967 War, few would view Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a glorious chapter in the country's environmental history. The adverse geopolitical circumstances tended to dominate the ecological reality on the ground. Many commentators are content to file the entire matter under the gen-eral heading of neocolonialism.[125] Yet, the unfolding of events had little to do with a premeditated exploitation of West Bank and Gazan resources. Rather it was an unintended consequence of the tragic diplomatic stale-mate. The unnatural status of a military occupation, which was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, did not help.
Owing to Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan's powers of persuasion and the absence of feasible alternatives, Palestinian political and clan leaders in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 were inclined to respond favorably to his appeal: “We don't ask that you love us; we ask only that you care for your own people and work with us in restoring normalcy.” This was achieved by maintaining the status quo—legally, culturally, and economically—for the one million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel chose not to annex the territories, whose residents formally kept their passports and their Jordanian and Egyptian national affiliations. For the first years of occupa-tion, agriculture continued to be the central pillar of the local economy, and the West Bank farmers' traditional markets in Jordan were maintained (two days after the end of the Six-Day War, bridges over the Jordan River opened, and the flow of produce and people continued unencumbered).[126]
Initially the Palestinian standard of living improved dramatically under Israeli rule. Spurred by Israeli training and buoyed by Israeli markets, within five years, West Bank agricultural production increased by 100 per-cent, and per capita income was up 80 percent.[127] Even though they re-ceived the lowest wages in Israel, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers brought home salaries that were lucrative relative to pay in Jordan and Egypt. In the Gaza Strip, 98 percent employment was reported in 1973.[128] The Israeli administration also built piped water systems for hundreds of villages and initially allowed the drilling of some forty new deep wells. It even imported water from Israel's National Water Carrier to expand water supplies for Palestinian cities, leading to initial increases in per capita water usage in the West Bank.[129]
Yet as the occupation stretched on, the population swelled, and requests for new well and irrigation permits from the civil and military authorities were rarely granted. Water became a security issue. The amount of irri-gated land in the West Bank remained static.[130] The Israeli civil adminis-tration did little to change previous Jordanian and Egyptian policies that
Most West Bank and Gaza homes were not connected to a sewage system in 1967. As the Palestinian economy stagnated, the sanitary infrastructure was the first thing to go, creating an exaggerated parallel to the situation in the Israeli Arab sector. The few sewage systems that were installed discharged the collected wastes without any treatment at all.[132] With water in short sup-ply, many Palestinian farmers chose to use sewage as an irrigation source, health risks notwithstanding. Severe contamination became widespread,[133] and associated illnesses reached epidemic levels. In 1994 scientist Karen Assaf reported that waterborne diseases, in particular diarrheal illness, were second only to respiratory diseases in causing mortality and morbidity among chil-dren, who make up over 50 percent of the Palestinian population.[134]
As Jewish settlement expanded across the territories, the political as well as the environmental atmosphere soured. Although the settlers usu-ally installed reasonable sanitary facilities, they brought with them the polluting habits of Israeli industry. The government supported an envi-ronmental protection unit to service the Jewish settlements in Samaria, run by a conscientious former NRA ranger, Yizhak Meir. Like most of the local environmental offices, however, its influence was limited. For instance, in the West Bank's largest industrial park, Barkan, fifteen of the ninety factories required sophisticated treatment of wastes. But a study in the 1990s showed that in practice, effluents streamed through a disabled treatment facility, polluting Wadi Rabba and the surrounding ground-water.[135] But it was not only the chemical contamination that bothered the Palestinians; they perceived the rectangular Jewish architecture as alien, another form of pollution on their landscape.[136]
International law prohibited the imposition of Israeli environmental legal norms on the local Arab population. This produced an extreme man-ifestation of the underlying paradox of environmental versus political rights. In contrast to political rights, which rely on a fundamentally pas-sive government posture, the realization of environmental rights requires active government intervention. In the occupied territories, Israel's role was reversed. For the most part, Palestinians wanted to see the Israeli au-thorities as little as possible. Yet the environment, for some, was an excep-tion, and Israel was resented for not imposing pollution standards.[137] Once the Intifada mushroomed into a full-fledged revolt in the 1980s, however, it was difficult to think about environmental oversight or progress. Still,
After the 1977 elections, the Likud government began expanding Jewish settlement exponentially, and the resource gap became an embar-rassment. Twenty years later, Palestinian hydrologists claimed that 37 per-cent of the West Bank's Arab population still had no water piped to their homes. Ad hoc solutions such as rainwater collection, delivery by trucks, or rural wells presented their own health problems.[139] Even if their con-sumption was only half that of Californians (with a similar climate),[140] the 280 liters of water that Israelis used each day was four times higher than that allocated to Palestinians in the territories. During the summer months many West Bank cities experienced acute water shortages.
The image of “thirsty” Palestinian children, many of whom were with-out running water, staring resentfully across a valley at swimming pools in a neighboring Jewish town, was a powerful weapon in the ongoing propaganda war.[141] Meir Ben Meir, Israel's crusty two-time Water Commissioner, stressed Palestinian responsibility for such crises, citing the 40 percent loss of water to leaky pipes in cities such as Hebron. But many Israelis were embarrassed by such a callous technocratic response in the face of human privation.[142] Israel invariably responded to specific short-ages on a humanitarian level by temporarily upping allocations.[143] The Israeli government, however, did little to assuage the Palestinian sense of injustice and resentment at the inequitable allocation of resources.
Comparisons to the quality of life inside Westernized Israel may have been inappropriate. But the state of the environment in the Gaza Strip was deplorable in absolute as well as relative terms. The wells that serviced the Strip in the southern tip of the Coastal Aquifer already suffered from alarmingly high salinity rates in 1967, because of chronic overpumping and saltwater intrusion during the years of Egyptian rule.[144] (Israeli stud-ies suggested that the sustainable yield was 70 million cubic meters per year, but actual pumping exceeded 120![145]). But the squalid situation grew worse as the population doubled. With open sewage ponds festering in the center of refugee camps, dangerous nitrate levels rising in drinking water, withering aquifers, and ubiquitous litter, conditions became unbearable.[146]
Following the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, the Middle East peace talks included special working groups for the environment and for water. The discussions produced a tentative optimism among observers that Green issues would offer a win-win basis for rapprochement. Yet progress with the Palestinians was slow. Figures collected by Meron Benvenisti documenting the enormous asymmetry between the parties explain why:
Much of the tension in negotiations centered around control of the Mountain Aquifer. Hydrologically, the aquifer includes three distinct units that offer the sole source of water for Palestinians on the West Bank and supply one-third of Israel's drinking water.[148] Together the subaquifers can produce a safe annual yield of roughly 630 million cubic meters of water. The problem was that as much as 90 percent of this recharge water origi-nates as rainfall in the West Bank. The largest and highest-quality sub-aquifer (Yarkon-Taninim) then flows in a westerly direction, where it is most easily tapped in wells that spread throughout the central region of Israel.[149] By 1967, Israeli hydrologists knew that most of the aquifer's po-tential had already been tapped. Additional wells threatened to lead to massive salination, because of the aquifer's karstic limestone/dolomite ge-ological composition. To the consternation of Palestinians, Israeli authori-ties drilled additional wells after 1967. These wells, however, added only 50 million to 65 million cubic meters per year, and most were located in the unexploited, saline eastern subaquifer.[150]
Israel claimed historical rights to wells in its territories under one the-ory of international law, while the Palestinians claimed riparian rights to the water under another.[151] Indeed, the Palestinian negotiators even de-manded financial compensation for the years past when Israel utilized the groundwater. Yet most Israelis did not believe they should be expected to make any payment for resources they had won in a war started by past Arab aggression.[152]
The conflict provided material for countless academic gatherings and ar-ticles, as well as joint (and sometimes conflicting) reports.[153] The basic prem-ise was easy to agree on: The hydrological interdependence between Israelis and Palestinians made “divorce” impossible.[154] A joint management strategy seemed inevitable. Yet academics had little influence on the zero-sum-game dynamic that characterized official rhetoric about water allocation.
Unwilling to embark on a drastic curtailment of Israeli agriculture,[155] Israelis argued that efforts had to focus on “expanding the pie,” not just di-viding it up. As things stood, water resources were already inadequate and would only become more scarce. Palestinians, whose baseline water qual-ity and quantity were so much poorer than those of the Israelis, rolled
At the same time, even those Israelis inclined to make concessions were worried that Palestinian control could lead to massive contamination. After Israel left the Gaza Strip to Palestinian control in 1994, there was a rash of unauthorized well drillings. These further exacerbated not only water contamination there but also Israeli concerns about Palestinian commitment to sustainable water management.[158] When Palestinians con-tinued to blame deterioration of the Gaza aquifer—which is either a closed system[159] or only marginally connected to Israel's groundwater[160]—on external Israeli activities, it seemed especially disingenuous.
In the original 1994 Cairo accord that granted autonomy to Jericho and the Gaza Strip, negotiators had basically dodged the water issue.[161] So the 1995 “Oslo B” Interim Agreement surprised skeptics on both sides by tak-ing meaningful steps toward compromise:[162]
Israel recognized Palestinian water rights in the West Bank (al-though postponed defining them until negotiations over its perma-nent status). In the meantime Israel acknowledged future Palestinian needs to be 70 million to 80 million cubic meters annually and im-mediately made available an additional 28.6 million cubic meters each year for domestic use.
Palestinians recognized the need to develop additional water re-sources for various uses as part of an ultimate solution.
A Joint Water Committee, composed of Israeli and Palestinian rep-resentatives, was formed to coordinate management of water and sewage resources on the West Bank. In addition, joint supervision and enforcement teams were set up to monitor, supervise, enforce, and rectify problems arising from unauthorized drillings and con-nections as well as inappropriate water use.[163]
This spirit of optimism quickly diminished in 1996. As the peace process stalled, implementing the water agreement was not a priority for the new Netanyahu administration or Yasir Arafat's Palestinian National Authority. The joint committees ceased meeting, oversight was termi-nated, and the two sides began to exchange charges of intentional pollu-tion and environmental mismanagement. Palestinian environmental negotiators became increasingly disenchanted when they faced one indignity after another as they made efforts to meet with Israeli coun-terparts or even cross from the West Bank into Gaza.[164] In December
Consequently, several Israeli proposals for joint projects were often ig-nored, deemed a marginal concern in the larger debate over territorial con-cession. For example, Israel's Ministry of the Environment was especially disappointed when an opportunity to receive funding from Germany for a West Bank sewage project fell through because the use-or-lose money went unutilized due to lack of Palestinian interest.[165] The only binational cooperation appeared to be between pirate smugglers of illegal toxic waste for dumping in the West Bank.[166]
Palestinian leaders were left with their daunting list of ecological prob-lems and insufficient international aid to address them. Under the circum-stances, it was still easiest to fall back on blaming Israel for ecological delinquency. For instance, in a 1998 summer symposium, Dr. Imad Sa'ad, a senior Palestinian official, blamed Israel for lack of infrastructure, the major obstacle to Palestinian environmental protection (of 648 Palestinian villages, 153 were still without drinking-water networks[167]).
Even when the broader political barriers are removed, a shared sense of priorities is likely to remain elusive. As the Israeli economy flourished, the Palestinian economic profile retreated.[168] For the foreseeable future, Palestine will be a developing country. With their children's health in real danger due to poor drinking-water quality, to Palestinians, many Israeli environmental concerns, such as radon concentrations in schools,[169] cellular phone antennas, or endangered-species repatriation, seem downright frivolous. When per capita GNP dropped 35 percent following the Oslo accords in 1993, Palestinian resources were more limited than ever.[170] If Western nations have a difficult time reaching a common environmental denominator with Third World countries, it is hard to imagine that Israelis and Palestinians, with all their additional political baggage, will find it easy to do so.
A DWINDLING INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL ETHOS
Because of the generally lower socioeconomic position of Arabs relative to Jews in Israel, it might seem objectively harder to enlist the public in environmental concerns. Yet the organic connection to the land, a most cru-cial part of Israeli Arab ideology, is a conviction to which environmentalists can appeal. There is certainly a strong religious foundation for environ-mentalism among the country's Muslims.
Islamic theology has been described by scholars as having almost an ecocentric perspective. The Koran contains a steady naturalist motif throughout, and the book is filled with ecologically relevant parables.[171] For instance, the prophet Solomon is moved by the warning of an ant to its fellows to get out of Solomon's way lest they be crushed.[172] It is inter-esting to note that, although Sharia is typically translated into English as “Islamic law,” the word literally means “source of water.” True to its hy-drological etymology, the Sharia considers groundwater a public good that cannot be individually appropriated.[173]
It is not surprising, therefore, that a devout connection to local land and landscape is a highly romanticized part of traditional Palestinian identity and a common theme of exposition for poets and politicians.[174] Yet the connection has been intellectualized as a result of the ongoing trauma of exile and indignity. The environmental ethic of Arab communities in Palestine prior to its politicization was a nonintellectual intuitive impulse—or what has been called “premodern environmentalism.”[175]
It is therefore ironic that Israeli Arabs have so quickly come to resemble the Jewish majority in the distinctly nonspiritual nature of their connection to nature and the natural world. The attachment to the land, instinctive in a society of fellaheen, is hard to find among the younger generation. Arab environmentalists are remarkably uni-form in their assessment of the present situation: They believe that the problem can be traced to the appropriation of lands and the mass depar-ture from agriculture.
The SPNI's Gazawi lays the blame for this alienation squarely at the feet of the Israeli government's preferential policies: “Arabs' movement to find work in the city was part of a policy. Water was withheld and given to the kibbutzim, and the rainfall was not enough. If we had gotten more water, we might have stayed more agrarian and connected to the land.”[176] Whether or not his political diagnosis is correct, pointing the blame will not turn back the clock. Nor will it restore the sense of harmony born of a world that had fewer distractions and thus greater familiarity with nature and the land.
The changes go beyond the occupational profile or recreational prefer-ences of Arab society, informing countless areas in its landscape. Arab ar-chitecture is still distinct from that found in Jewish settlements. Palestinian villages swelled after the initial displacement of 1948 was re-inforced by an astonishing birthrate. As they turned into small cities, the villages lost much of their original, pastoral flavor. With memories of an
This ideological drift was manifested in the ubiquitous trash found along the streets of many Arab settlements. “Until twenty years ago, you couldn't find much garbage,” bemoans Ghattas. “There were hardly even any tractors to collect trash. Thirty years ago everything got used several times, even plastic bags. Whatever was left would be burned once a week. Today everything is thrown into the trash, and it is hard to get people to go back to the ways of grandmother and mother.”[178] The same phenome-non is even more pronounced among Bedouin citizens, even though in-digenous Bedouin culture offered a profound statement about simplicity, reuse, and material self-discipline.[179]
Some see historical continuity in the phenomenon. From the time of the draconian implementation of Ottoman land laws, “miri,” or government-owned territories, were perceived by Palestinians as off-limits; the relationship was primarily one of alienation and disregard. The ubiquitous litter in public areas presumably constitutes a modern manifestation of this attitude.[180]
Even if the events of 1948 had gone differently, it is unlikely that the bucolic fellah existence would have lasted forever. Ultimately the nostalgic tune of Arab environmental leaders sounds very much like the sad refrain one hears old-time Israeli environmentalists repeat—mourning a lost so-ciety where communalism, a nonmaterialistic mission, and “the land” were the highest ideals.
The challenge ultimately is to salvage the most wholesome and nour-ishing aspects of traditional rural culture and transform them into a sustainable modern form. Integration of the olive harvest into the present calendars of Arab communities constitutes one such example. Even though most families no longer depend on the olive crop, schools are on vacation in November and October for the harvest. As families flock to relatives or small family plots to pick, an economic necessity was trans-formed into a celebration of the ancient covenant with the trees.[181]
The resonance of the SPNI message and the increasing number of Israeli Arabs who join the hordes of weekend hikers and picnickers (especially around springs and streams) suggest that if environmental passion is not always evident, it is certainly dormant there.[182] A 1996 review of environ-mental activity in Israel cited a variety of Arab community organizations—daycare centers, sports facilities, libraries, and after-school educational programs—that have begun to focus on environmental issues and projects.[183]
A JOINT ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA
Conventional wisdom holds that environmental cooperation offers one of the best vehicles for building bridges between Arabs and Jews. Slogans put forward by both sides, such as “pollution knows no borders” and “our common environment,” offer an optimistic prognosis for cooperation. The notion is that if environment truly drives the discussion, agreement can be reached. Even if they frequently make for better rhetoric than actual coali-tions, such slogans offer an important first step for rapprochement. It also suggests that after all the historical settling of scores, among Israeli Arabs, self-reliance and pragmatism may be the more powerful impulse.
This has proven to be so in a few cases involving public-interest advo-cacy. Joint ventures between the Galilee Society and Adam Teva V'din—the Tel Aviv-based environmental advocacy group—were driven by the fact that both groups found themselves involved in the same case. One represented Arab communities and the other Jewish. So cooperation is a practical matter of expedience.
In one case that stretched throughout the 1990s, Adam Teva V'din ar-gued on behalf of residents of the Galilee village of K'lil. It opposed ap-proval of an industrial zone that threatened the integrity of the adjacent Kabri springs, one of the country's cleanest sources of drinking water. The development would also have impinged on the neighboring town of Sheikh Danun, which turned to the Galilee Society for help. A combina-tion of lobbying, appeals to planning committees, and Supreme Court actions stymied the project.
In another case, consulting scientists at the Galilee Society considered the effect that a planned glass factory at the new Zipori industrial zone would have on the air quality in neighboring villages. Their analysis showed future violations of sulfur dioxide standards, but the insult was not only environmental. The industrial area had been given as a gift to the Jewish municipality of Natsaret Elit, located a few kilometers away, whose industrial-park space had become limited. Neighboring Arab (and Jewish) villages would be the first to feel the effect of the pollution but would not enjoy the associated property tax benefits. The organization filed suit. Lack of an appropriate impact statement and of “Best Available Technology” led to a parallel Supreme Court action by Adam Teva V'din.[184] The Court merged the two petitions, but the two organizations had already engaged the factory's Director General in talks about techni-cal solutions. In the ensuing negotiations, the factory committed itself to
Joining with an Arab organization to sue against Jewish development posed no dilemma for Adam Teva V'din. After all, the Galilee Society's en-vironmental credentials and capabilities were above reproach. The Society had never hesitated to challenge Arab interests when they threatened the environment. For instance, the Society sued the town of Baka al-Biyah in the Supreme Court when the town left an entire neighborhood uncon-nected to the sewage grid. The Society later came to the brink of legal action against the city of Nazareth for opening a large slaughterhouse adjacent to a residential neighborhood.[186]
In the aftermath of the unrest and rioting that led to the shooting death of thirteen Arab citizens in October 2000, Life and Environment, the um-brella group for Israel's Green organizations, convened a meeting at the Arab town of Tira. The goal was to explore the role the environmental movement might have in bridging the social gaps and mutual alienation that had swelled between Jewish and Arab Israelis. Representatives from over twenty organizations launched a new initiative:“Room for Everyone.” Its express purpose was to identify specific sites of shared environmental challenges that could bring together Arab and Jewish NGOs in a common campaign.[187] Its first major initiative was a joint week-long bike ride for Arab and Jewish cyclists along a route that highlighted common environ-mental hazards.
Yet it is simplistic to assume that this level of cooperation is always pos-sible. Technical questions such as water quality criteria or the combination of particulate and flue gas controls are not divisive. Other ecological issues, on the other hand, are not free of politics. Environmental priorities reflect community values and by definition will diverge.
An example of an obstacle to forging a shared environmental agenda is the issue of open spaces. For Jewish environmentalists, preventing land-intensive development constitutes the highest ecological imperative of the day. All efforts are made to tighten zoning restrictions and contain suburban sprawl. But Israel's Arab community sees such prescriptions in the context of their own history of harassment and subjugation. They certainly have not forgotten to whom much of the land used to belong.[188] Indeed, this issue may be the single greatest catalyst for community solidarity. In 1975, the Rakah Arab-dominated Communist Party created a National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands. The committee declared March 30 to be Land
While Israeli Arabs identify with the general aspiration to preserve the landscape for future generations, they feel that they have done more than their share in the area of forfeiting land resources. This is why the cam-paign against the Trans-Israel Highway resonated so strongly with Arab communities whose land holdings were lost to the asphalt, who forged their first real environmental alliance with Israel's Green organizations.[190]
Zoning, therefore, looms as a perennial source of tension. After the 1948 war, Arab villages swelled because of the influx of internal refugees. Today 20 percent of Israeli Arabs trace their lineage to those families that could not return to their homes after the 1948 war and flocked to other towns.[191] At the same time, peripheral lands around the villages were frequently na-tionalized. With the high birthrate and a rising standard of living, land shortages became chronic. Arab municipalities wishing to have their mu-nicipal boundaries expanded find themselves in a constant struggle with Jewish-dominated planning authorities. Attempts to enforce zoning regula-tions and destroy illegal construction by Arabs have become highly charged political propositions. New Jewish settlements dotting the Galilee hillsides literally and figuratively cast a dark shadow.
Israeli Arabs see their cities' congestion in terms of the ongoing battle for sovereignty and a pattern of discrimination. This is exacerbated by a cultural conflict. Planners argue that given Israel's territorial constraints, Arab con-struction needs to become more efficient and move to the more vertical high-rise structures found in Jewish settlements. Such a change runs counter to the architectural tradition and tastes of the Arab population. And, as it happens, most Arab villages are already densely populated.[192]
Here again, the key to protecting open spaces in the countryside is im-proving the quality of life in the city. Although residents of high-density Arab housing projects dislike the crowdedness in their apartments, one survey suggests that they have a higher satisfaction with health and com-munity services than do residents in traditional neighborhoods. These and other environmental amenities were singled out as the principal advantage of their apartment lifestyles.[193]
Finally, no issue exacerbates mutual suspicions more than overpopula-tion. “Judaizing the Galilee” is not just a long-held Zionist axiom; it is the source of many ecologically ill-advised development projects. Not surprisingly,
Repeated allusions by Palestinian political leaders to the high Arab birthrate as their secret weapon only make things worse. Indeed, it is not just rhetoric. In 1996, an average Jewish family had 2.6 children; Muslim families had 4.6.[195] The present dynamic constitutes a classic “prisoner's dilemma.” Ideally, both Arab and Jewish environmentalists should join to-gether in a call for policies to promote zero population growth in all sec-tors of Israeli society. But this would amount to heresy. For Jews, the ingathering of the Jewish exiles remains the raison d'être of the State. For Arabs, population growth holds the key to greater political influence and autonomy. Yet if demography continues to be a legitimate weapon in the battle for sovereignty between Arabs and Jews, both sectors, and the envi-ronment they profess to love, will be the losers.