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.