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INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION

Despite the country's sentimental attachment to agriculture, it was indus-try that quickly came to serve as the backbone of Israel's thriving economy. For the first ten years of the State, factories enjoyed carte blanche when it came to the environment. Eventually, however, the pollution became too offensive to ignore. With the Water Commission's blessing, in 1971 new draconian antipollution provisions to the Water Law were enacted.[169]

Under the amended section, the definition of water pollution was broader than comparable definitions in other environmental laws passed at the same time, such as the U.S. Clean Water Act. The amendments gave the Water Commissioner almost dictatorial powers to defend water re-sources.[170] The Commissioner is authorized to institute a system of envi-ronmental permits, force polluters to clean up environmental damage, and even order without warning the cessation of water supply to a pollution source. The trouble was that this formidable environmental arsenal was never really used. Industry's insouciance was therefore not surprising.

Despite Kantor's convenient recollections of his “standing up to indus-try,” general government obsequiousness to, or even collusion with, in-dustrial interests has been glaringly apparent to this day. Water Commissioners made only token efforts to hold industry's feet to the fire. Between 1974 and 1976 the Commissioner issued twenty-eight orders against polluters, requiring the upgrading of effluent quality. Compliance was extremely spotty.[171]

There were many reasons for the poor record in this realm. Many in-dustries were government-owned and enjoyed functional immunity. The lack of an enforcement team at the Commission that could effectively measure pollution levels did not help either. Frequently, monitoring re-sults were fabricated in reports, with no government follow-up. For in-stance, as late as 1994, Dr. Mouna Noufi, an analytical chemist working for the public-interest environmental group Adam Teva V'din, measured the actual discharges into the Kishon River from various outfalls of Haifa-area petrochemical plants. The facilities were still operating under the lenient requirements of a 1979 generic permit from the Water Commissioner. Noufi's laboratory results proved all outfalls to be in violation of the ef-fluent standards, with one factory discharging wastes with concentrations a thousand times above the permissible level.[172]


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Even without this chemical analysis, biology offered a damning indict-ment. Dead fish and the sickeningly sweet stench of chemicals in rivers and on beaches could hardly be ignored. When former frogmen from Israel's elite commando unit “Shayetet 13” began to develop cancer, they began to blame their military training during the 1970s and 1980s in and around the Kishon River. A Commission of Inquiry, headed by former Chief Justice Meir Shemgar, was formed in 2000 to consider claims of the Navy's negligence. When Shemgar's commission confirmed the sick vet-erans' complaint, the Navy temporarily took the unprecedented step of suspending all military diving until it could sample water quality in all training areas, as recommended by the report. The story provided another rare, full-front-page sensational environmental headline that passed from public consciousness as quickly as it had entered.[173]

When the Water Commissioner did move to address a particular facet of the pollution problem, implementation was feeble. Industry did not seem to take his rules seriously. The ban on hard detergents that the Minister of Agriculture promulgated in 1974 is illustrative. In the mid-1960s the United States and England banned laundry detergents that were less than 80 percent biodegradable. In these “hard” detergents, conven-tional sodium (as in soap) was replaced with organic sulfur, because its sol-ubility was not limited by the level of water acidity. When rinsed into a body of water, however, the resulting suds interfere with aerobic processes and lead to fish kills. The Water Regulations (Prohibition of Hard Detergents), promulgated in 1974, forbade the import or manufacture of hard detergents without a permit from the Water Commissioner.[174] Over two years later, a study showed that most laundry detergents in use were still categorized as hard, in flagrant violation of the regulations.[175]

As Israel came to assume a position of world leadership in the area of wastewater reuse, industrial noncompliance became particularly problem-atic. As mentioned, some negative hydrological impacts from sewage re-cycling are inevitable, because effluent waters are much saltier than fresh-water and tend to exacerbate groundwater salination. Contamination by industrial toxins, however, is avoidable. Most domestic sewage systems re-ceived wastes from the city's industrial zones as well as from residential homes. When pretreatment at the factories was poor, conventional sewage purification facilities could not remove the toxic contaminants, such as heavy metals and organic solvents. As farmers watered their fields with treated sewage, they had no idea that they were systematically spreading industrial chemicals across the soil. With the exception of chromium, con-centrations of heavy metals generally remain low in Israel's sewage.


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Nonetheless, 5 to 10 percent increases in cadmium at the plow level have been measured.[176]

As early as 1974, Tahal hydrologists were predicting contamination of the Coastal Aquifer by toxic chemicals and metals in sewage effluents re-claimed for irrigation. The models suggested that the northern part of the aquifer would be contaminated by the year 2000.[177] It did not take that long. In the late 1980s, research conducted by Dr. Leah Muszkot indicated that industrial chemicals had already reached rural wells.[178]

Muszkot was an unlikely ecosleuth. An analytical chemist working out of the Volcani Institute, her research took place within the agricultural es-tablishment, funded and supported by the Ministry of Agriculture. Muszkot was careful not to sensationalize the results of her research at conferences or with the press.[179] She was unwilling to show environmen-tal organizations maps indicating the precise location of well sites. But she did publish the results of samples taken from wells at thirty-meter depths in areas with twenty years of wastewater irrigation.

Her mass spectrometer identified a veritable toxic cocktail of chemi-cals.[180] Israel did not even have drinking-water standards for chemicals that she reported on, such as benzene and toluene and the many organic compounds used in the plastics industry. For years it had been easy to discount concerns about industrial contamination as doomsday exagger-ations and hide behind the pervasive uncertainty in the hydrology mod-els. The presence of industrial, carcinogenic chemicals in groundwater underlying nonindustrial regions such as the Sharon suggest that not only Navy commandos will pay the price for pervasive environmental casualness among Israeli manufacturers and those whose job it was to monitor them.


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