Mon 09 December 2002
Haifa, ISRAEL

Hidden victims of a poisoned river

After five days in transit, we could finally see the mountains of Haifa in the distance. We have been thrilled by the idea of coming to Israel -being in a place and seeing it with your own eyes is very different from hearing about it all the time in the news. Reality is always much more complex and multi-dimensional than what can be imagined from far away. Many details, many issues start to emerge, and even if only for a few days, one gets to hear the stories people here tell about their lives.

One of these is the story of Jeries Danial. He lives in the village of Abelin with his wife and eight year old son, some 30 km north of Haifa, where he has been working as a fisherman in the Kishon River since he was 12. The Kishon, which flows northwest into the Haifa Bay is known to be one of the most polluted rivers in the Middle East. It is used as an open sewer for the industrial wastewater of petrochemical plants, oil refineries and food additive manufacturers. Jeries Is today living with the consequences of having been exposed to its waters.

In the 60s and the 70s, many factories were built to accommodate the increasing population of young Israel and to provide goods for economic growth. In those years the effect of these industries on people's health and on the environment were not a very high concern, and Israel today is more polluted than ever. Most of the rivers in the country, as well as two-thirds of groundwater reserves are contaminated, and at least 1000 people die each year from air pollution in the cities.

Jeries remembers the first time he went fishing in the Kishon at 6: "It was green and full of fish, and some one thousand families were earning an honest living fishing in the Kishon and in the Haifa Bay". But unchecked industrialisation changed all that. In 1994 a malignant tumour was found in his right eye. "I have been a fisherman for 30 years, and I never imagined that I would lose my eye, my upper jaw and other parts of my face due to fishing in the Kishon", said Mr Danial.

The two hundred fishermen still working on the area today, who over the years had to go further and further away into the sea to find fish, show an appalling cancer rate of near 20%, 70 times higher than the national average. Nineteen of the fishermen have already died of cancer. The government's proposed "solution" to the problem is a pipe planned to bypass the river and pour the pollution straight into the heart of Haifa Bay, the source of about half of the fish caught along the Israeli coastline. This, of course, will solve nothing, except allowing the polluters to get rid of their wastes where nobody can see them.

There are several court cases against Haifa Chemicals and the rest of the Kishon Industries filed by some of those who have been poisoned by its irresponsible practices. But until a regime of corporate accountability is put in place, it will always be an uphill battle for the victims, where on most cases compensation, if ever obtained, will be too little, too late.

Meanwhile, the Kishon flows, day by day, spilling its cocktail of chemicals into the Mediterranean, which knows no national or religious boundaries. Jeries' is just one of the millions of untold stories of those injured and killed by a very insidious and low-level kind of conflict -the clash between corporate criminals and ecosystems, in which common people all over the world pay the price.

Street activists

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