Published: 8 October 2019
Last updated: 5 April 2024
I ALWAYS SMILE AT the unique capability of Israelis to argue and debate until the cows come home about pretty much anything at all. Never mind how much one actually knows about something, let alone how relevant the issue is to them; all that matters is that it should be put the test of a hearty debate.
When my extended family would come over, discussions unceasingly danced around elections or philosophies or Zionism or whatever else was on the guests’ minds. The exchanges often took up the better chunk of dinnertime and even spilled into dessert, when we would crowd into the lounge room to drink instant coffee and eat my aunt’s cake.
Israelis can argue about anything. Which is why I find it so interesting that one of the only things they seem to have any common ground on is the environment.
Israel, even under its otherwise highly conservative government, has prioritised the impending climate collapse by engineering some of the most advanced water management techniques in the world, reducing air pollution and enthusiastically signing the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The religious right, motivated by theological instructions found in foundational Jewish texts to care of the Earth, and the secular left, motivated by modern progressive environmentalist values, both back action on the climate.
There’s just one very uncomfortable elephant in the room: the Environmental Protection Ministry identifies the Israeli Defence Force to be the single largest polluter in Israel, followed by transport and energy. The ministry exposed the IDF’s normalisation of the illegal dumping of waste and ammunition, the spillage of fuels and oils into important water sources and even the expulsion of sewage into the environment.
This report was not alone. In 2014, an article published by the Globes business website revealed that an IDF base in Tel Hashomer was exposing thousands of nearby civilian residents to carcinogenic substances, eventually forcing a water well at the nearby Sheba Medical Centre to be shut down.
In 2012, the Environmental Protection Minister Itzhak Ben-David witnessed first-hand the IDF behaving with impunity towards the environment, watching raw oil and fuel spill out into the open after visiting bases in the West Bank. Despite asking how this was allowed to happen, he reported no action was taken.
By 2018, 8% of Israel’s groundwater was reported by the Water Authority to be wholly unfit for human consumption. The leading cause for this was identified as the activities of Israeli Military Industries.
The IDF is increasingly untouchable in Israeli society and public life. We make its former leaders cabinet members, we send our children devotedly to its ranks and many of us generally feel quite uncomfortable when silence is broken about its missteps. This attitude spills into how we talk about the environmental costs of maintaining such an overwhelmingly sized military - that being, we don’t talk about it all.
With countless fighter jets, training exercises, tanks, vehicles and bases, our military, established to protect this land at all costs, is in fact damaging it - and killing far more Israelis per year than the likes of Hamas or Hezbollah ever could. Only last year, the new Environment Minister Ze’ev Elkin stated that it was found that 2,200 Israelis were dying of pollution related causes every year- that’s more deaths per year than in both the First and Second Intifiada combined.
But, unlike deaths caused in the intifiadas, deaths caused by pollution or environmental maltreatment don’t seem to transform public opinion, determine elections or stoke public rage. This is because although we see deaths by pollution we often don’t recognise them as that. The increasingly thinly breathed Saba and Safta, the asthmatic toddler, or the hospital wards bombarded with desperate cases of respiratory illness - they are the slow victims of our war and they just don’t make the headlines.
The impending climate emergency only pushes all of the above concerns into the forefront. Every year, the costs of our failure to address the environmental and carbon related impacts of the military will grow more and more urgent.
I’ve always felt that this war, more specifically the occupation, has had a persistently corrosive effect on the Israeli and broadly Jewish consciousness. But I’ve only recently began to realise that it is killing us in more than just the binary ways of war we expect. It is choking our lungs and damaging this sacred land we all publicly seem so dedicated to defend.
It’s widely understood, although unsaid, that Israel’s habit of getting tied in to expensive military escalations every few years and the subsequent cost of maintaining our enormous armed force so we can keep doing this is unsustainable both for the economy and our democratic system - but it’s also unsustainable for the planet.
Israelis talk so much about defending and securing this land for the Jewish people that they forget that in the process of defending it they seem to be wearing it down, sucking it dry and clogging its airways.
The military will likely remain the largest polluter in Israel for the foreseeable future, and whilst improvements in transport and agriculture have been encouraging, we cannot continue to ignore the bluntly obvious environmental costs of maintaining nearly 700 aircraft and almost 3,000 tanks for a war many Israelis increasingly feel isn’t worth it.
Without peace with its neighbours, without the at least partial dismantling of the apparatus of occupation, Israelis will have no choice but to keep polluting, keep producing and keep arming ourselves at the expense of more than just their values.
It is time for the Israel to decide if they wish to truly fulfil their ancient role as stewards of the earth and the Land of Israel, or if this war takes precedence over that too.
