Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (review)

It is a daunting task to write the environmental history of any country. The environmental field is a large and highly fragmented aggregation of disciplines and issues. Its overall analysis requires a broad and diverse knowledge. Most environmental experts specialize in a limited number of subjects and are often poorly informed about most others.

That Alon Tal has succeeded in drawing a very readable overview of Israel's environmental history thus already expresses his merit. He sketches in broad lines the history of major organizations such as the Jewish National Fund, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, and the Nature Reserves Authority, as well as that of the Environmental Protection Service, the Ministry of the Environment and the main environmentalist groups. He devotes attention inter alia to problems of water availability, reforestation, the use of open spaces, pollution, and waste disposal.

Tal relates major Israeli environmental battles such as the one of the mid 1980s against the planned Voice of America transmitter in the Arava desert and the one against the Trans-Israel Highway originating in the 1990s. He explains well how the major Russian immigration in the 1990s, which was of great importance for Israel's development, led to environmental setbacks. He also devotes a chapter to Israel, Arabs, and the environment.

Tal pays due respect as well to the pioneers of environmental consciousness in Israeli society. The best known among them are former parliamentarian Josef Tamir and the first director of the Ministry of the Environment, Uri Marinov.

The author is the founder of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and also chairman of an umbrella group of Israeli environmental organizations. Tal was the founding director in the 1990s of a leading environmentalist organization, the Israeli Union for Environmental Defense. It is due to his background that the book is written with an environmentalist slant. However, Tal does not succumb to turning the environment into a secular religion, as quite a few environmentalists do. In almost all cases, he shows the perspectives of other interest groups as well. The one substantial exception is his bias toward recycling, even if it is uneconomic. He justifies this on moral grounds, as if saving government money by using cheaper alternatives should be considered immoral.

The author shows familiarity with the many subjects he deals with. Having come to Israel from the United States, he is also able to insert an international perspective into his analysis, which sets him apart from many more narrowly focused Israeli environmentalists.

Throughout the book, Tal refers from time to time to Zionist positions on the environment. He points out that the definitive study on the attitudes of early Zionism toward the environment remains to be written. He could have gone further and said that there is little significant analytical literature on the entire subject.

Tal rightly points to the great ideological variations within the Zionist tradition on the environment but does not go into much depth. He could have illustrated the variety by quoting the few remarks Herzl makes about the subject which show a total lack of environmental awareness. He claimed that those who wanted to turn Jews into farmers were mistaken, and he considered the farmer an anachronism.

Read with modern eyes, one specific text from Herzl's The Jewish State sounds like a strong anti-environmentalist statement:

If we were in the situation where we wanted to liberate a country from wild animals, we would not do it the way the Europeans did it in the fifth century. We would not go out with a spear and lance against bears, but rather organize a great pleasurable hunt, drive the animals together, and throw a bomb under them.

On the other extreme of the spectrum was Aaron David Gordon, who preached a religion of labor. He held a very one-sided romantic view of nature and considered it and manual labor as inseparable values. In reality however, nature isn't romantic...