Pollution in a Promised Land "ss1.03"

ENVIRONMENTAL DISBELIEF AND DENIAL

Sasha and her fellow athletes' pain, as well as at least three of the four Maccabiah fatalities, were caused by pollution. “How did the Yarkon River come to be so polluted?” and “What is being done to stop it?” are questions that barely seemed to interest the victims or the concerned public. Indeed, initially even environmentalists were confused about what actually happened. When activists from the environmental group

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GreenAction organized a small protest about Yarkon water quality days after the accident, those who noticed saw it as insensitive opportunism. Early news reports in Israel implied that the victims suffered from trauma due to the fall.

As Dror Avisar, hydrologist at the activist organization Adam Teva V'din (the Israel Union for Environmental Defense), acknowledged in an interview a month after the disaster: “Even we who are constantly dealing with Israel's severe water pollution were surprised by the deaths in the Yarkon. No one anticipated that a person that falls into the water would die from it.”^[17]

Part of the confusion can be attributed to the Israeli government's en-vironmental agencies, who were eager to avoid blame when the public was clamoring to find a scapegoat. The Ministry of the Environment was slow to acknowledge the environmental aspect of the tragedy. First, it denied the toxic exposures; later, its director general, Nehama Ronen, thought it in-appropriate to capitalize on human misery. Months after the tragedy, Ronen maintained a highly defensive position: “Look, the Yarkon has been a place that people want to run from for over thirty years. The second that people came looking for someone to blame, suddenly, we at the Ministry of the Environment are the guilty party.”^[18] Even in informal settings, David Pargament, director of the Yarkon River Authority, still takes this line: “You have to remember that ultimately the Maccabiah incident was a mechanical disaster. A bridge collapsed. It's not like Love Canal. The peo-ple had no business reaching the water there.”^[19]

Eventually, pollution's role as a causa sine qua non in the Maccabiah deaths could not be denied. On August 18, 1997, an “Intermediate Report” submitted by the Water and Streams Division of the Ministry of the Environment reported a veritable cocktail of chemicals around the area of the bridge. The results were based on six separate analytical tests per-formed in Israeli laboratories and at the Global Geochemistry Laboratories in California. Although fecal bacteria appeared low in the river, Pseudomonas bacteria were found in high concentrations of ten per hun-dred milliliters. (Pseudomonas were isolated in the phlegm of Warren Zeins, the fourth victim of the incident.) Oils, heavy metals, petroleum hy-drocarbons, and siloxane were all found in the samples.^[20]

There was much quibbling over the proximate causes of death. Yoel Margalit, director of the Center for Biological Control at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, went on record blaming the MLO. Nehama Ronen responded that this just served to frighten the public, and threatened legal ac-tion.^[21] The absence of a single “smoking gun” among the chemicals revealed

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in laboratory results has led most scientists to assign some role to the river's sludge: The collapse of the bridge temporarily disturbed the greasy mud cre-ated by years of suspended solids settling onto the river floor. This virulent anaerobic cocktail was temporarily stirred up and led to the toxic exposures.^[22]

With the submission of the intermediate report, headlines began to ap-pear attributing the death of the athletes to the contamination in the Yarkon. Uri Minglegreen, the chief scientist at the Ministry, described to reporters the synergistic effect caused by the mixing of a variety of haz-ardous chemicals.^[23] “These pollutants are sufficiently toxic and there's no need to look for any additional mystery substances,” he explained.