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Environmentalist-activist Dr. Alon Tal kicked Israel's green movement into action 15 year ago with the founding of Adam Teva V'Din - Israel Union for Environmental Defense, and he's not done kicking yet
By: Tali Heruti-Sover
Globes Online
January 12, 2006
In 1960, the Rosenthals, a strongly Zionist family living in North Carolina, were blessed with a son named Albert. While growing up, Albert spent a lot of his time on long wilderness trips and river canoeing. He finished his BA in economics and political science when he was 20, immigrated to Israel, and enlisted in the IDF paratroopers. He served three tough years. Operation Peace for Galilee led him to change his name to Alon Tal, and he made an irrevocable decision to live in Israel.
While studying law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he began to look for something that could be what he calls, "my special contribution to life here." As the son of a scientist who dealt in environmental pollution ("More than once," he says, "supper at my parents' house took place around water and air samples"), he decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
"In the early 1980s, the environment in Israel was ignored to the point of criminal negligence," he remembers. "Factories did whatever they wanted to, and no one bothered to stop them. Awareness of the issue was just beginning. The Ministry of the Environment did not yet exist. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), the most prominent environmental organization, dealt mostly with open spaces, and less with ecology and urban problems."
As a student, Tal worked as a legal assistant in the environmental protection service section of the Ministry of the Interior, which later became the Ministry of the Environment. "Ruth Rutenberg, who headed the department, has shaped my philosophy to a great degree, even today," he says. He served his internship with then-Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir, whom Tal says he admires more than anyone else in Israel. He learned from Zamir "how to be strong and influential, but also honest and pleasant. I saw how, as a jurist, he managed to channel things calmly, and how, in the eye of the storm, he managed to evaluate and choose the judicious and correct path."
Because he wanted to specialize in his favorite subjects, and there were no such study programs in Israel, he went to Harvard University to study. He completed his doctorate in political science and the environment there, and returned to Israel with his wife in 1990, settling on Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava region.
Tal says, "When I returned, I was horrified in particular by two problems: air pollution and waste in the public domain. It was clear to me that something had to be done."
Tal began to look for a place where he could contribute his knowledge commitment. He discovered a small non-governmental organization (NGO) called Econet, founded by immigrants from the US who were active on environmental issues. Econet won the Knesset Speaker Prize.
"I was invited to speak before the Econet executive committee on recycling. One of the participants asked me how much money I needed in order to found and lead an NGO. I answered, '$1,000 a month,' and he donated $12,000 on the spot for the first year," Tal explains.
Tal choice of the Hebrew name for his NGO, Adam Teva V'Din - Israel Union for Environmental Defense (IUED) , was inspired by the book "Environment Law and Policy: Nature, Law, and Society," which he studied at Harvard. "I founded the NGO, hired a small office in Tel Aviv, and slept on the floor of the office two or three nights a week for seven years," he recalls.
The sealed rooms and gas masks in the first Gulf War did not keep Tal from filing his first court petition against the flow of sewage into the Red Sea. "It was obvious to me," he says, "that the court could stop such terrible things, and the NGO was founded for exactly this purpose."
Intel retracts
The new organization grew as time went on. Tal learned how to raise money from American Jewish funds (up to $500,000 a year), which were very glad to help an American-born Jew preserve the promised land.
Tal recruited a number of lawyers to his cause. "We all received very low salaries, but a large dose of ideology. We operated just like a start-up. Since there was chronic and absolute disobedience to the law, we had a lot of work," he says.
Among other things, the IUED was the first to petition against the flow of sewage into the Kishon River, after the organization discovered, with the help of independent laboratory tests, that factories were pouring many times more than the quantity they were reporting.
The organization's victory led to construction of a $10 million purification installation, awarding of compensation to fishermen, and the establishment of an enterprise fund to handle environmental issues.
Another battle, this time unsuccessful, was against the Yitzhak Rabin Highway (Highway No. 6), also known as the "Cross Israel Highway". "We asked for a total halt in the work, because we thought that roads should be built only as part of a complete plan that took the environment into account and included railway lines," Tal says. "Supreme Court Justice Mishael Cheshin, however, who is thought to favor environmental issues, turned his back on us. The Supreme Court showed a complete lack of legal creativity, and chose the easy way out."
As part of the IUED's activity, a local branch of "Friends of the Earth" was founded, which initiated Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian cooperation on water, brackish water reclamation, and other problems.
The IUED goes over the donations that finance its activity with a fine tooth comb. As part of its overall ideology, the organization never receives government financing for its activity. Private sources wanting to donate also encounter difficulties.
"Intel contacted us and wanted to donate money," Tal relates. "We made our acceptance conditional on an inquiry designed to verify that Intel protected the environment. We found that, were all factories to follow Intel's example, we'd be in an excellent situation."
After the money that the organization had agreed to accept was already on the table, Tal and his friends were asked to help residents opposed to expansion of Intel's facility in Jerusalem. As part of its observance of the disclosure rules, Tal told Intel that the organization would not turn the residents down. He was asked on the spot to return the donation to the company, which was sent back the way it came.
For a joint effort
By 1998, Tal felt that he had reached a dead end in his job. "You have to know when to go and leave the stage to new faces," he says. He left the IUED, and was appointed chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella organization for Israel's environmental NGOs.
Within a short time, the number of organizations listed in Life and Environment grew from 24 to 80. Spokesperson and legal aid services were upgraded. "I thought that we should replace a culture of suspicion with one of organization in order to bring the various NGOs into a joint effort" Tal says.
At the same time, he continued to develop the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and to study there. Tal founded the Arava Institute at Ketura with the help of CRB Foundation - Keren Karev, under the auspices of Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The Arava Institute offers an MA program in desert and environmental studies.
The Arava Institute has taught dozens of students from Israel, Jordan and the rest of the world. Its studies have been an academic crucible for coexistence. It is currently working hard, and Tal hopes that it will obtain the status of a Ben Gurion University affiliate campus.
As chairman of the umbrella organization, his most recent activity was filing a petition against the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which he alleges is not taking the National Outline Plan into account. "To me, my connection with JNF proves that you have to be inside this important organization in order to change it," says Tal, who is currently a director at JNF, and is helping to convert it from a development organization into a nature-preserving and environmental one. He also teaches at the Arava Institute and is a full professor at BGU.
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