Preferred Citation: Tal, Alon. Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel. Berkeley, Calif:  University of California Press,  c2002 2002. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6199q5jt/


 
A Ministry of the Environment Comes of Age

AN ENVIRONMENTAL YEAR

Yisrael Peleg never had any pretenses about his capabilities. He was not an environmental expert. Nor was he a charismatic figurehead—there were plenty of both at his Ministry. Peleg, however, did have some understanding about communications. In September 1992, soon


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after Ora Namir's appointment, he pushed her to have the coming Jewish calendar year declared as the Year of the Environment. Every year the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies picks a national topic for general promotion and public edification. Some subjects are more ex-citing than others (the Year of Democracy was a bit flat; the Year of Jerusalem, during its 3000th birthday, somewhat more flashy). With Peleg working eighteen hours a day as producer, and Sarid playing the starring role, Israel's Year of the Environment burst onto the public consciousness.

In a typical Peleg touch, it began on September 6, 1993, with a symbolic visit by Sarid and Ezer Weitzman, Israel's President, to the Hiriyah garbage dump with cameras conveying everything but the stench into Israel's living rooms.[81] Even Prime Minister Rabin was compelled to speak at the ceremony that evening at the President's house, pledging govern-ment commitment to solving environmental problems.[82]

Sarid's paean to environmental harmony transfixed the audience there:

I see myself going into our national children's bedroom. They all sleep safely, our children, breathing easy; a good smell wafts in the air, for the atmosphere is intoxicatingly clear, the heavens are clean, the stars are out, and there is silence all around. It is possible to hear the waters churning in their channels, all the purified streams flow to the sea, and the sea is no longer dirty.[83]

When Prime Minister Rabin got up for his perfunctory address, he rolled his eyes and muttered that “Yossi was a hard act to follow.”

Peleg brought in marketing concepts that were foreign to the applied scientists at the Ministry. For instance he insisted on using “focus groups” to consider possible logos to accompany the year, choosing a globe with a heart on it and the slogan “To the Environment with Love.” Peleg tried to make environmental jargon more appealing, getting Israel's Academy for the Hebrew Language to adopt his new euphemism matminot (literally, places of digging) for “garbage dumps” in place of an older term that was an acronym for “sites for waste disposal.”

The year was packed with environmental events: concerts for the en-vironment; environmental film festivals; twenty-five specially produced educational television programs; the new ecologo on all government mail; an environmental curriculum for every grade level; soldiers march-ing in the name of environmental awareness;[84] a campaign to draft 250,000 volunteer litter-inspecting “cleanliness trustees” (the 100,000 who ultimately signed up were impressive enough); and the annual Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony featuring unsung environmental


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heroes.[85] The Ministry of the Environment was the hottest bu-reaucracy in town.

The country got an intense dose of ecology and seemed interested. Yet environmentalists are paid to worry. When they were not being over-whelmed by invitations to give lecture appearances, long-time activists in-variably turned to each other and asked: “But what will happen next year—when the environmental fad passes?”[86]


A Ministry of the Environment Comes of Age
 

Preferred Citation: Tal, Alon. Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel. Berkeley, Calif:  University of California Press,  c2002 2002. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6199q5jt/