Environmental campaigner joins the Knesset
[Jerusalem] – In a new first for Israeli politics, a representative from the Green campaign has been appointed to parliament, a move which could have environmentalists in the country celebrating for some time to come. But as the appointment now – years after many other democracies have had green representatives in parliament – shows, Israel has a number of challenges and obstacles to overcome if it is to become a green economy. But it also has some important advantages, environmentalists say.
Yael Cohen Paran, the newest member of Parliament, takes her seat after a colleague on the ‘Zionist Union’ ticket stepped aside. As Paran had narrowly missed out on receiving a seat in March’s election, as 25th on the ticket when the center-left party won 24 seats, she automatically won a place.
“(My) first goal is to bring the issue of sustainability and long term thinking towards decision making in Israel,” Paran, who described herself as “very excited” to finally enter parliament, told The Media Line
Among the issues on Paran’s new horizons are transportation, waste management and government policy towards the environment. She said Israel’s sustainability problems “tend to do with policy rather than technology,” and were partly caused by frequent changes of direction as each new minister arrived wishing to leave an impression on his or her portfolio.
But before any of these issues, the priority for Paran is Israel’s energy policy, which the new parliamentarian has been focusing on for the past eight years. In this area, “Israel is really lagging behind all the rest of the world,” particularly on greenhouse gasses.
Paran is not the only one thinking this way. “Yael (Cohen Paran) is uniquely qualified to speak on the green agenda but let’s be honest about how far Israel has to go,” Yosef Abramowitz, a leading environmentalist, told The Media Line. Abramowitz, President and CEO of Energiya Global Capital and co-founder of the Arava Power Company with David Rosenblatt of New Jersey and Ed Hofland of Kibbutz Ketura, described Paran’s appointment as “an historic moment in Israel’s green history.”
But Israel’s energy policy concerns him, particularly arguments over the country’s huge new natural gas supply, discovered in 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea. “Israel is about to move towards 70% dependency on a single gas line – in a fault line where we have enemies – it’s asking for energy problems,” Abramowitz said. Natural gas, like other fossil fuels, should be seen as a temporary solution to allow countries to modernize with sustainable energy programs, he warned.
The country’s 2% reliance on sustainable resources was inadequate, Abramowitz said, particularly when the potential of Israel’s solar sector was so strong. “Sixty percent of the country is desert – there is enough land associated with kibbutzim (collective towns) and Bedouin tribes that could today power 100% of the country,” the environmentalist argued.
Countries with an abundance of sunshine are able to use solar energy exclusively during the hours of daylight and then can make use of more traditional means to keep the electricity running at night. But increasingly technologies are being developed that can create solar fields which can collect sunlight during the day and then continue to power homes during the night using captured and stored energy.
This is something that the Arava Power Company has been working on, leading to its solar fields supplying up to 30% of the southern city of Eilat’s energy needs. “There is a revolution underway worldwide for this transformation and we are yet to see the solar spring sweep Israel and the Middle East,” Abramowitz said.
Paran pointed to water policy as an example of how she would like to see Israel running its other green sectors.
“Israel is one of the leaders in the world – reusing 70% of its waste water for agriculture – and this is an example of how we could be on other issues,” she said. Drip irrigation was also invented in Israel, a country that has turned around it water shortage in recent years.
But other issues have a tendency to eclipse the green agenda, Paran said, explaining, “There are always more important or more urgent issues… security, foreign policy, conflict resolution.” This was why a Green Party never previously entered parliament and had to do so on a shared ticket with the ‘Zionist Union,’ the new parliamentarian concluded.