Thu 12 December 2002
Haifa, ISRAEL

Israeli fishermen make authorities face up to their actions

The fishermen and the activists carried water from the river all the way to Jerusalem. But it wasn't just water. More precisely, it was a cocktail of lead, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals, with detergents, toxic chlorine compounds, ammonia and more. This is what passes for river water in the Kishon, north of Haifa, Israel, a dying river poisoned by dirty industries that pours a constant stream of pollution into the Mediterranean.

We took a bus from Haifa to Jerusalem, 26 Kishon fishermen and 26 activists, as well as Champadevi Shukla, a survivor of the Bhopal disaster, with her interpreter. The bus was followed by a truck full of barrels with the Kishon water, which a team had pumped the previous afternoon under pouring rain. We parked in front of the Israeli Ministry of Environment (MoE) and started unloading the barrels from the truck. Ms Shukla led the way upstairs into the Ministry, as the rest of us followed with the barrels.

"This is a peaceful action" informed the advance team to the confused security people. The scene was almost chaotic, as more and more barrels came up the stairs and from the elevators. We managed to get 22 barrels of polluted river water up into the MoE, which the fishermen angrily and loudly banged on as they chanted. It was time to confront the authorities with the result of their irresponsible policies.

How to kill a river

The Kishon river, which drains into Haifa Bay on the Mediterranean, receives discharges from a wastewater treatment plant, as well as industrial wastes from six other facilities. These include petrochemical, biochemical, food additive and fertiliser plants, as well as an oil refinery, but the most notorious is the plant owned by Haifa Chemicals. Haifa Chemicals is a US owned fertiliser company with revenues of US$280 million in 2000. Their factory along the bank of the Kishon has been operating since 1966, and until last year it had discharged into the river an average of five million litres of toxic effluents each day.

A lenient government and a highly industrialised economy make a very bad combination. The river's noxious waters have changed the lives of many who have come in contact with them. Until 2000 the Israeli army used the waters of the Kishon river to train divers of a marine unit. The reasoning was, if these marine commandos can dive on a river as polluted as this, they can dive anywhere. Now at least 120 of them have cancer. The 200 or so fishermen of the area, who regularly have to replace parts of their boats corroded by the acidic water, show an astonishing cancer rate of 20%, and 19 have already died from it.

License to poison

Although some reductions in the amount of effluents have been achieved after years of campaigning, the MoE has kept granting pollution permits to the Kishon industries regardless of past promises to stop. Its next plan is to deal with the problem by pumping the discharges from the industries through a pipe, bypassing the river, directly into Haifa Bay. This will, naturally, just shift the pollution farther out, in the tradition of trying to banish waste by putting it where it can't be easily seen. And given that Haifa Bay provides around 50% of the coastal fish catch in Israel, it is unlikely that this will do anything to prevent some of these chlorine compounds and heavy metals to end up in people's dinner plates.

The problem is, decisions are many times taken from faraway offices by government technocrats or politicians who have cosy relationships with industry, while those who have to live with the consequences have no real participation. For the fishermen of the Kishon, who see their colleagues maimed or killed by cancer and have to go further and further away into the sea to find fish, to allow the industries to go on polluting is a particularly odious policy. "Since the Minister is planning to dump these in our workplace, we have a right to bring it to his", said one of the fishermen.

Righting the wrongs

The Kishon river fishermen have filed lawsuits against Haifa Chemicals and the other industries that created the poisons that are killing them, and environmental groups have been campaigning against Haifa Chemicals for years. But nevertheless, without a formula for defining clear legal and financial responsibilities for corporations, there will be many more Kishons -the individuals responsible for corporate misdoings will walk free, companies will evade liabilities and their victims will seldom receive appropriate compensation.

Champadevi Shukla, the Bhopal survivor, knows first hand what it is to suffer the consequences of irresponsible corporate behaviour. "The need to establish corporate liability, even here in Israel, is urgent in order to stop the pain and suffering of innocent victims of polluting industries", she said.

Zero discharge

The solution to the agony of the Kishon, its people and of other rivers like it in the world, is not pumping pollution farther away as the bypass pipe plan proposes. The answer lies in eliminating pollution. In clean production systems, products are designed so that they are necessary, reusable, recyclable and generate only non-hazardous wastes.

Achieving clean production will not be done overnight, but it isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. Mediterranean nations have agreed to a first step for reaching this goal. The Barcelona Convention, an international framework for protecting the Mediterranean, which Israel has signed but not ratified, embraces the concepts of pollution elimination, the precautionary principle and clean production.

The Israeli government is notorious in the region for holding back international regulations to protect the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Barcelona Convention. Instead of wasting public money on providing short-term escape routes to keep things as they are, governments must set incentives or force polluting industries to change their processes to make their activities compatible with human life.

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. More

Street activists

Sat 30 November 2002, Thessalonica, GREECE

More

Greek corporation forced to stop dumping at sea

Wed 20 November 2002, Larymna, GREECE

The issue was industrial dumping at sea. The oceans are many times seen either as eternal sources of fish or as bottomless sinks for discharging human and industrial wastes. The Mediterranean Sea is particularly sensitive to pollution, as it is mostly closed and takes some 80 years to renew itself.. More