Introduction
Environmental justice is an ideal to which modern democratic societies aspire, and which many government officials and planners espouse as goals, some in earnest, some paying lip service to a popular concept. Just as Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs places `self-actualization' at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, so is environmental justice at the pinnacle of desired outcomes for environmental issues and conflict resolution. The bases for human needs range from survival through security, social acceptance, and self-esteem before reaching self-actualization. The hierarchy of envi-ronmental issues also begins with human survival and security; it then turns to economic well-being and established patterns and local norms, before `justice' becomes the prime consideration.
The environmental hierarchical range is particularly striking in Israel, given its very small size, high population densities, limited resources, and demanding security requirements. The presence of its large Arab minority population that may be pre-sumed resentful, if not at times hostile, to the dominant society, makes the search for environmental justice all the more challenging. For the Arab citizens of Israel, envi-ronmental justice is inextricably tied to the more general demand for treatment equal to that accorded Jewish Israeli citizens, and restoration of lands lost in the wake of Israel's War of Independence and later expropriations. Neglect of this issue could exacerbate the alienation of this population, with broader geopolitical implications for the Israeli pursuit of peace with Arab Palestine and the region as a whole.
Most established theories of environmental justice focus on environmental aspects of distributive justice (outcomes); some focus on processes which lead up to and affect justice issues and decisions. This paper, building on these established theories, has as its point of departure a holistic approach which encompasses distributive issues as they relate to land allocation and use within the unique Israeli context, adding as process elements participation, recognition, and compensation.
General macroenvironmental risks, which are the focus of many environmental justice studies internationally, are less applicable to Israel because its very limited size means that the bulk of the risks located in its core areas affect everyone. However, outside the core areas there exist inequities for Israel's Arab minority which are critical.
Environmental justice in the Israeli context
Deborah F Shmueli
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel; e-mail: [email protected]
Received 15 December 2006; in revised form 20 March 2007; published online 4 August 2008
In this paper an approach to environmental justice which might best fit Israel is applied to a case study of the Arab Galilee town of Sachnin, and the policy implications of its adoption explored. My intent is to provide a workable and realistic concept of environ-mental justice for policy makers and nongovernenviron-mental environenviron-mental advocacy groups that can be applicable to the complex Israeli scene.
Theoretical approaches to environmental justice
In the extensive literature devoted to the subject, environmental justice is generally considered to be an offshoot of distributive justice. On what basis should goods and services be distributed? What constitutes a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of economic life? Both distributive and environmental justice are concerned with how to allocate that which people either desire or wish to avoid.
The limitations of many of the approaches to environmental justice is that they do not take a holistic approach to the topic. Schlosberg (2004), however, does offer a broad, inclusive definition of environmental justice that integrates equitabledistribution of environmental risks and benefits, recognition of the diversity of impacted peoples and communities, and their participation in the political process which creates and manages environmental policy. I supplement this approach with the concept of correc-tive orcompensatoryjustice. These four concepts constitute the operative definition that I have chosen to apply to the discussion of environmental justice in the Israeli setting. The narrower theoretical approaches focus on the distributive aspect, and are based on widely divergent methods and theories. Arthur and Shaw (1991) set forth four major philosophical doctrines on which a number of these theories of distribution are based:
(a) `Libertarian'öa free-market operation where justice ensures the right of individuals not to be coerced and to be free from interference;
(b) `Utilitarian'öneeds or interests of people are the primary concern measured in terms of happiness (satisfied desires)öthe course of action that promotes the ``greatest good for the greatest number'' (Smart, 1991);
(c) `Utopian'ösocial contract between government and citizen to apply to the equal distribution of the benefits of society [see Rawls (1971), whose utopian philosophy is that the contract includes the least advantaged members of society];
(d) `Rewards'öhow much is deserved in accordance with contributions of time, effort, and labor (Feinberg, 1970; Rachels, 1991).
For those allocations that have spatial outcomes and spillover effects, distributional justice has application to geographical research. Harvey pioneered the linking of geo-graphical differentiation to environmental issues, applying a Marxist critique to such local issues as housing finance, neighborhood deterioration, and urban gentrification (1973). In his later work (1996) he expands his definition of `environment' to include the spiritual and cultural conditions which are problems of the inner city . In doing so, he recognizes that Marxist economic theory alone, casting the issues in solely monetary terms, is inadequate to address environmental issues and problems of urbanization more generally. These seminal works inspired a generation of geographers to engage in studies of distributionally based environmental justice (examples include Goldman, 1996; Heiman, 1996; Lake, 1996; McDowell, 1998; Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). Almost all environmental injustices have a spatial character. They affect particular places and people in those places, whether the issues arise from the location of pollu-ting industries, runoff problems, or zoning issues. Therefore, environmental justice and spatial justice are inextricably bound.
and lower income groups (see, for example, Been, 1994; Bullard, 1993; Colin, 1992; Jerrett et al, 1997; 2001; Mitchell and Dorling, 2003; Newton, 1996; Pearce et al, 2006; Solimano, 1998). Often, the communities most impacted by environmentally risky activities have been excluded from important decision-making proceedings, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because they lack the resources, specialized knowledge, and other structural requirements (Shmueli, 2005). Another aspect, often overlooked, involves the skewed distribution of the benefits of environmental resources, policies, and programsöan abrogation of the `social contract'.
As distinct from `environmental justice as distributive justice', Rechtschaffen and Gauna (2002) add three other concepts to the environmental justice typology:
(a) environmental justice as procedural justice, defined as ``the right to treatment as an equal ... not to an equal distribution of some good or opportunity, but to an equal concern and respect in the political decision about how these goods and opportunities are to be distributed'' (Rechtshaffen and Gauna, 2002, page 9), and by the perceived fairness of the procedures leading to the outcome;
(b) environmental justice as corrective justice, which involves fairness in the way punishments for lawbreaking are assigned and damages inflicted on individuals and communities are addressedöincluding the duty to repair the losses by the responsible party (Kuehn, 1994); and
(c) environmental justice as social justice, which has been described as the marriage of the civil rights movement and environmentalism. Bullard refers to this aspect of envi-ronmental justice as ``social equity: ... an assessment of the role of sociological factors (race, ethnicity, class, culture, lifestyles, political power, and so forth) in environmental decision-making'' (1993, page 11).
Writings that urge environmental justice span fields beyond political, geographical, and legal theory. For example, De-Shalit (2000) explores the questions of why environ-mental ethics have failed to penetrate environenviron-mental policy and serve as its rationale. As a philosopher he tries to bridge this gap by combining tools of political philosophy with questions of environmental ethics and environmental politics and points to the overriding importance of participatory democracy. Shrader-Frechette (2002), using the same philosophical tools, makes an eloquent and heartfelt case that environmental injustice is wrong because it is immoral, with the more powerful groups in society exploiting the vulnerability of those more marginalized (see also Light and De-Shalit, 2003).
At the same time, there are some insightful critiques of environmental justice studies. Pulido (1994) examines the practice of environmental justice activists in California and argues that the gains achieved by the movement as of the mid-1990s had been based largely on procedural justice, which she demonstrates was insufficient to ensure universal environmental quality.
Some critiques focus on methodology. Critics such as Bowen (2001) and Ringquist (2005) dispute the scientific and statistical rigor of studies claiming environmental injustice to disadvantaged groups, especially those based on race and class. Whatever the merits of these arguments, they are inapplicable to the Israeli situation on the national macroscale. It is indisputable, however, that on the basis of their ethnicity the Israeli Arabs suffer from poor access to land and inadequate governmental funding to deal with environmental hazards, as I aim to demonstrate in the remainder of this paper.
Israelöthe environmental setting
issues as global warming and industrial pollution are particularly relevant to Israel because of its limited area and concentration of population and industry along the narrow coastal plain. Israel is thus particularly vulnerable to potential exposure to rising ocean levels, Mediterranean shipping-oil spills, and wind-blown and sand-blown pollution. The local approach to environmental justice cannot be divorced from such universal forces, as well as other global and regional factors that shape a nation's political and socioeconomic conditions.
In Israel's case such broader forces have built an economically and militarily advanced Westernized nation, with special ties to the United States, within a hostile Islamic Middle East. The deep-seated enmity of the Arabs to the Jewish presence in the area predates the establishment of the State of Israel. It is in this context that Israel's Arabs, who live within a `Jewish' state, face greater hurdles than those experienced by deprived sectors of the Israeli Jewish community. The Israeli reaction has been wariness of and resistance to any Israeli Arab efforts to assert a separate Palestinian nationalism within the state.
For Israel, environmental justice issues are determined by the country's small size and the high population densities that characterize the living and work spaces of so much of the populace. A major factor is the security concern, which strongly shapes Israeli policies on land allocation and use at the national, regional, and local governmental levels, and influences the meanings that officials assign to the concepts of environ-mental justice. This runs counter to the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and historic forces through which the Arab minority frames its striving for environmental justice.
The country covers a land area of only 20 330 km2, with a population of seven million that is 80% Jewish and 20% Arab. Some 60% of the total populace is highly concentrated along a narrow coastal plain, extending for 130 km from Metropolitan Haifa on the north, through the central coastal plain and metropolitan Tel Aviv, to the southern coastal plain at Ashdod. The plain is approximately 25 km in its widest portions. This region constitutes Israel's ecumene: that is, the country's area of densest concentration of population, industry, and commerce, covering 2200 km2and embrac-ing a total population of approximately four million, with an average density of 1800 persons per km2. The other major population center, Greater Jerusalem, is connected to the ecumene via a 20 km strip string of smaller towns and villages (see figure 1).
0 10 10 km
Settlement Green Line Ecumene
Major power stations Major landfills Petrochemical industries Cement factories Major sewage purification facilities
Major sewage pipe outlets Sea dumping
Coal harbors
This class of environmental threats needs to be addressed by vigorous legislative and civic environmental protection actions, but does not raise issues of environmental justice and equity. One of the five committees sponsored by the National (Israeli) Council for Environmental Quality was the Committee for Environmental Justice, headed by Professor Arza Churchman. Two studies published by the committee explored the justice issues surrounding the distribution of environmental pollution by waste water (Kliot and Hophmayer-Tokich, 2003) and the siting of waste facilities (Strul-Dabull and Rotstein, 2003). Neither study found connections between siting policies and either socioeconomic status or ethnicity. Milgram (2006) found that this also holds true with regard to the distribution of quarries.
One environmental macrohazard lies outside the ecumene, posing a potential risk to a large proportion of the country's populace. This is Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona, which is located at the northern edge of the Negev east of Beer Shevaöthe country's southern periphery.
On a country-wide level there are also environmental issues which manifest them-selves not as hazards, but as economic benefit inequitiesöand indeed can be categorized as issues pertaining to justice. These include access to beaches, nature reserves (460), and historic national parks (120) which in recent years have become `tourist attrac-tions' which an increasingly large segment of the population cannot afford to visit. Tal (2006) reports that ``One of the less conspicuous manifestations of the widening gap between `haves' and `have nots' in Israel is in the public's access to nature'' (page 46). The Israel Park and Nature Authority has been forced to generate an increasingly large part of its budget through entrance fees (some twenty one of the most popular reserves and most of the key national parks are fenced in and sell entry tickets).
Israel has a special situation that is distinct from general macroenvironmental risks and benefit inequalities. This is the category of conflicts which arise from limitations to Israeli Arab political and civic equality within a state which is defined as a `Jewish state' and which is politically, economically, and socioculturally structured to ensure the dominance of the Jewish majority. This is in contrast to the situation in the ecumene, where the Jewish and Arab populations live in close proximity, and the impact of pollution and other environmental factors has little to do with class or ethnicityöhence the American and British studies which demonstrate that the inequities based on income and race have little relevance within the core region.
However, the majority of Israel's Arab population (1 million of the 1.4 million) is concentrated in the northern (the Galilee) and southern (the Negev) peripheries, Wadi Ara's Um el Fahm and the rest of the `Little Triangle' outside of the coastal plain, and in Jerusalem. It is in these peripheral regions that issues of environmental inequities for Arabs are most sharply felt.
Major issues with environmental consequences are related to land allocation and land use. The small size of the country magnifies the value of every dunam. Roads, sewage systems, waste disposal, and public facilities all require space. The siting of regional industrial parks generates competition and often friction. Those located within Jewish communities which abut Arab ones cause the Arab communities to share in pollution hazards, but not the revenues which industry generates.
Arabs is `an-Nakbah'ö`the Catastrophe'. Some 725 000 Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel in the fighting that preceded the War of Independence, as well as during and after the war. Many expected to return with the success of invading Arab armies. However, the Israeli victory resulted in the appropriation not only of private Arab-owned land, but also of public lands of the Ottoman and British regimes that had been used by Arabs for farming and grazing. Many abandoned villages were razed to be replaced by Jewish settlements, and access to the remaining Arab villages was limited by land expropriation.
An example of the differing perspectives toward land are the National Master Plans for Nature Reserves and Forests. They are seen by Jews as preservation tools which also provide security benefits. Arabs view these national plans as regulations designed to limit their ability to expand in order for them to maintain the geographical cohesiveness of families and clans, and to maintain their cultural distinctiveness (Khamaisi, 2006). Limited opportunities to participate in the processes that lead to the development of national and regional master plans fuel the Arab feelings of discrimination and injustice.
Yiftachel has taken a leading role among Israeli geographers in criticizing Israeli planning policies that affect the Arab populace unfairly (Yiftachel, 1999). He faults the National Plan for authorizing thirty Jewish private farms spread over a swath of the northern Negev plateau. He rejects the initial rationalizations for the Plan as a means of preventing the Bedouins from taking over Negev land and, hence, as a means of stimulating tourism. Advocating the need for planning authorities to adopt proper planning policies, he calls for recognition of the rights of the Bedouins of this region to equality and distributive justice (Yiftachel, 2006).
Severe local and regional environmental hazards are posed by solid-waste disposal, sewerage, toxic waste, noise, foul smell, well-water pollution, soil erosion, forest fires, access to green space, and air pollution from quarries. There may, indeed, be instances of unfair distribution of these risks. An example of a particularly troublesome case for a Bedouin community is the siting of a large chemical complex and hazardous waste facility at Ramat Hovav in the northern Negev, just 500 m from the Bedouin encampment of Wadi el Na-am.
There is no question that there is a differential both in the abilities of the Jewish and Arab communities to cope with these environmental dangers internally and in the governmental support for their amelioration (Kliot and Hophmayer-Tokich, 2003; Strul-Dabull and Rotstein, 2003). Most Jewish Israeli communities are able to levy local taxes which supplement state revenues, while Arab communities depend for the most part on state support for their budgetary needs, which are generally insufficient to address many of the environmental risks. These communities make only limited efforts to levy local taxes, but even when they do so, their tax collections yield far lower revenues. This inequity in economic capacity is a major basis for the Arab claims that the absence of compensatory governmental support is unfair. In determining whether these issues fall within the definition of environmental justice, given the Israeli parameters, it is useful to examine a case that embraces the specifics of the categories discussed.
Sachninöa case study
Sachnin is well known nationally on two counts: first, for its leading role in protests by Israeli Arabs against land expropriations and other discriminatory actions. Such protests are highlighted by the actions that took place there in the Land Day protests. Second, and most recently, it is known as the home of one of Israel's leading soccer teams.
Approximately 70% of the Sachnin population lives below the national poverty line, and its rate of unemployment is between 12% and 14%, among the highest in Israel. Job opportunities within the town are limited as industry there consists mainly of small workshops, primarily iron, metal, and glassware, building materials, and garages; the service sector is relatively undeveloped; and the agricultural base has largely disappeared.
Before Israeli independence, Sachnin was a small agricultural village with a popu-lation of 2600 covering over 45 000 dunams of Arab-owned land with the use of another 25 000 dunams of public land. It is now limited to a land area of 9699 dunams for a population of 27 000 that is currently over 90% urbanized. Planners estimate that the town will grow to 40 000 by 2020, with a total Arab regional service population of 120 000 (Khamaisi and Sachnin Municipality, 2004).(1)The town is surrounded on three sides by lands that are under the jurisdiction of the Misgav Regional Council, within the boundaries of which are twenty-nine Jewish and six Bedouin communities with a total population of 19 000 on 180 000 dunams. To serve security purposes, many of Misgav's smaller Jewish settlements were strategically located on hilltops overlooking
(1)For comparison, the size of large Arab towns in the Galilee ranges from Nazareth's population
of 64 500 to 32 000 in Shefaram; Tamra has a population of 26 400 and Kfar Kana 17 900. All demographic data is from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, as of June 2006.
0 5 km
Misgav Regional Council Bedouin village
Jewish communities Arab city/town Jewish city
the Arab villages and towns. On the eastern side of Sachnin lie the Arab communities of Arabeh and Dir Hana, forming an urbanized strip within the Valley of Sachnin (see figure 2). Sachnin has repeatedly applied for permission to expand onto adjoining public lands that lie within the jurisdiction of Misgav, and has sought to remedy the risks and to share in the benefits generated by facilities that are located within Misgav along Sachnin's current municipal boundaries.
While restoration of land is a common demand amongst Israeli Arabs, and espe-cially those of the Galilee, this issue has particular resonance for Sachnin. Much of its land, which was taken by Israeli authorities in the wake of Israel's War of Inde-pendence and in subsequent expropriations, was ultimately allocated to the Misgav Regional Council to be used for Jewish settlements and for regional industrial, commercial, and educational purposes, as well as to Israel's Ministry of Defense for military installations. Such allocation is in line with the long-established Israeli governmental policy of ``Judaizing'' the Galilee, where Arabs now account for 52% of the total population.
Sachnin's application to expand its boundaries to provide for population expansion, industrial development, and infrastructure improvement (see table 1) is thus rooted both in its needs and in its appeal for environmental justice.
The concept of environmental justice as applied to Sachnin
Application of our operative definition of `environmental justice' to the Sachnin case includes distribution of land and other resources, recognition of the diversity of impacted peoples and communities, their participation in the political process which creates and manages environmental policy, and compensation for imposed environ-mental hazards suffered. This fourfold approach makes plausible a pluralistic yet unified theory and practice of justice. What follows is an exploration of the utility of the application of these conceptual components of environmental justice.
Table 1.Summary of Request for Expansion (refer to figure 3) (source: Khamaisi and Sachnin Municipality, 2004).
Designated area Size, ownership, and jurisdiction Proposed uses
A 3111 dunams between ring road Residential, commercial, industrial and Sachnin's northern boundaries. sports, and other public facilities, Lands either government-owned joint Arab ± Jewish educational or privately owned by Sachnin facility (Eshbal), road infrastructure, residents,aMisgav jurisdiction open space
B 62 dunams, between army camp Regional school, ring road, and
and Sachnin's western border, public space development Misgav jurisdiction
C 1058 dunams of the army base, The land use would remain as is
Misgav jurisdiction (army base); rationale is to obtain jurisdiction for tax purposes D 4186 dunams between Sachnin's Regional hospital, cemetery, access
southern border and the road to road, ecotourism development Yodfat ± Harrarit ± Evtalyon,
Distributive justice
The current conflict has been sparked by Sachnin's application in 2004 (Khamiasi and Sachnin Municipality, 2004) to add 8417 dunams of unimproved land, most of which is national public land, north, west, and south of the town, and lies within Misgav Regional Council's jurisdiction, although the area includes no part of any incorporated Misgav towns (figure 3 and table 1). A small portion of the these requested lands is already owned by Arab residents but is located within the Misgav Regional Council's bounds (see figure 4 regarding landownership) and is subject to its zoning regulations. The rationale put forth in Sachnin's application to the Interior Ministry for expanding its boundaries was that this would increase its tax base and enable it to build homes, and commercial, educational, and sports areas for its growing population. Sachnin also requested that one of the industrial parks slated to be built in accordance with the Galilee regional master plan be located within these enlarged borders.
A number of factors are at the core of the dispute. While based upon claims for additional land, the dispute also relates to pressures on waste-disposal, water-supply, and road facilities, as well as pollution from adjoining industrial and military com-plexes over which Sachnin has no control. Misgav is opposed to giving up land that could be used for future Jewish settlement and industrial expansion, and also wants to set aside additional tracts of open land, including forested areas, to preserve the rural character of the landscape. The council also wishes to retain and expand a greenbelt that will put a geographical screen between its communities and Sachninöa reflection of security concerns which deepened after the violence which the area experienced during the Palestinian Intifada of 2000, as well as of discriminatory ethnic practices.
The Misgav Regional Council refused to recommend this application to the Ministry of Interior. On principle, the council is not prepared to recognize claims for
0 1 2 km
Current boundary
Requested expanded borders boundary Sachnin industrial area
Teradyon regional industrial area Army base
Israel armament facility
3111 dunams requested for expansion
Arab lands lost in 1948öwhich is in line with Israeli governmental policy (Darushe, et al, 2006). While the council has taken the position that it is willing to give up small tracts of land, totaling less than 10% of Sachnin's request, it has also put forth the argument that Sachnin's natural expansion should be to the east, on lands that lie between Sachnin and the other Sachnin Valley Arab towns of Arabeh and Dir Hana, and which constitute the logical locus for a growing, cohesive, urbanized complex. The Ministry of Interior appointed a five-member committee to review the case. The committee's ruling, now under appeal by the town to the Ministry of Interior, was to transfer from Misgav to Sachnin just 1700 of the 8400 dunams which Sachnin had sought. The committee also decided that the new industrial zone proposed for the region should be situated within Misgav's jurisdiction, rather than within Sachnin's municipal boundaries. The Ministry of Interior's actions regarding the appeal are still pending.
Recognition
Recognition by Israeli Jews of Arab claims to lands formerly held by them is part of the broader Arab struggle for acknowledgement of the legitimacy of their claims to equal respect and treatment as a distinct people. The land issue has therefore both political as well as specific environmental meaning.
Resentment over historic loss of land and rejection of the application for expansion resonates especially in Sachnin because of its history of leadership in the Arab demand for land restoration, and the ensuing tragedies that befell the town. As the Arab center
0 1 2 km
Current boundary
Requested expanded boundary Government/Land Authority ownership Private Arab landownership
for the Lower Galilee, Sachnin played a key role in the events that had led to the first Arab `Land Day' in 1976. On 30 March 1976, thousands from the Arab minority in Israel protested Israeli government plans to expropriate 60 000 dunams of Arab-owned land in the Galilee. The protests had been preceded by clashes over an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Training Zone, most of which lay in Sachnin's former farmland, and whose location had fanned resentment over past injustices. This served to spark wide-spread Arab demonstrations throughout the Galilee for restoration of former Arab lands. The riots that erupted in Sachnin on the 1976 `Land Day' culminated in the deaths of three Sachnin residents.
A quarter of a century later, on the 30 March 2000 Land Day, a few thousand Arab residents of the Galilee gathered in Sachnin to protest the relocation of a new army base at the town's western border on land which Sachnin claimed as within its juris-diction, but failed to change the government decision. A few months later, in October 2000, the first Palestinian Intifada broke out across the West Bank and Gaza. Simulta-neously, sympathetic demonstrations erupted in Sachnin and other Israeli Arab towns in the course of which two Sachnin demonstrators were killed (Nir, 2001). This added to the sense of martyrdom that had been sparked by the events of the first Land Day and has served to intensify the community's appeals for recognition of the just nature of its land claims. The lead role of Sachnin in protest activities and the antagonism of many of the residents has intensified the anxiety and fear in Misgav concerning security.
An interesting sidelight to these weighty issues was engendered by the near-global passion for soccer. The stunning national Israeli Cup win by the town's Bnei Sachnin soccer team in 2004, followed by its participation in the European Cup competition the same year, stirred a deep sense of pride and emotion for having attained superiority in the sports arena, not only amongst the townspeople but amongst all of Israel's Arab populace. It also sparked widespread recognition by many Israeli Jews of Bnei Sachnin's achievement.
However, this success has also served to put a spotlight on past indignities. Before becoming the national soccer champions, Bnei Sachnin had to play on a hardscrabble field befitting a class C team. A request for 50 to 75 dunams of public land for a new stadium and sports center had been rejected by Misgav in 2001. Four years later, thanks to Bnei Sachnin's feat, a large modern stadium was built as the core of a proposed new sports complex for Sachnin. It is located not on land outside the town's current boundary, as had been requested, but within the Sachnin industrial park in the north center of Sachnin. The major source of the funding was from Qatar, with substantial Israeli central and municipal government financial participation. (The new stadium is called the Doha Stadium in recognition of Qatar.)
Participation
``Sachnin is a municipality with 25,000 Arabs on 9,000 dunams, while the Jewish Misgav Regional Council has 15,000 Jews and Arabs on 180,000, but the Ministry of Defense has decided to build its base at Sachnin'' (Usher, 2000).
The town's protests were of no avail and the government's decision was not reversed. Despite government promises of distancing the base from the town, the perimeter fence of the base is located immediately adjoining Sachnin's junior high school, with the attendant risks of pollution from engine exhausts and vehicular oil spills, as well as noise, dust, and heavy traffic. In addition, residential sections of the town next to the camp suffer from winter floods and soil erosion caused by the camp's inadequate drainage system.
Another focus of conflict over land is a facility of the Israel Armament Develop-ment Authority, built twenty-five years ago on the southern outskirts of Sachnin (figure 3). The land was expropriated from the town and placed within Misgav's jurisdiction. Sachnin residents did not participate in the decision to site the complex. A far more speculative environmental issue has to do with the secret functions of the facility. In this case rumors abound among the Arab populous about the alleged use of carcinogenic materials (Nir, 2001).
Still another source of tension has been the environmental impact of industry located within TeradyonöMisgav's industrial park which adjoins Sachnin on the west, just north of the army base (figure 3). This regional industrial zone, currently housing nineteen plants, was sited without Sachnin being given away opportunity to voice concerns over potential environmental hazards. Teradyon is located only a few meters from one of Sachnin's neighborhoods, subjecting it to air pollution and possible groundwater contamination from its factories. The town's residents have also voiced their concerns over the dangers of possible explosions from materials used in some of the plants.
Compensation
Neither the army base nor the Israel Armament Development facility provide, or have the potential to provide, jobs to Sachnin's residents since such jobs are restricted to Jews. The army base, while located on land expropriated from Sachnin, pays no taxes to the town. Instead, the tax revenues are garnered by Misgav. Deprived of these tax benefits, Sachnin feels entitled to compensatory benefits and also claims the right to regain and develop the area should the base be moved in the future. In such an eventuality, it would also expect support for clean-up of the site.
The Israel Armament Development Authority facility also pays taxes to Misgav while hindering Sachnin's potential for expansion. While a major employer for Misgav, for Sachnin it poses only environmental risks. Here, too, Sachnin is deprived of compensatory tax payments and employment opportunities.
Twenty dunams of Misgav's regional industrial park, Teradyon, are privately owned by Sachnin residents and Sachnin demands a proportionate share of the property-tax revenues, which are currently collected solely by Misgav. Misgav has rejected this demand. Instead, it has proposed expanding Sachnin's own industrial park, which is located at the town's north central edge (figure 3), onto lands currently under Misgav's jurisdiction, thereby turning the expanded park into a regional facility whose revenues would be shared (Khamaisi, 2004). Sachnin has agreed to the proposal because joint Jewish ^ Arab ventures have the potential for attracting stronger tenants. Thus far the pro-posal has not progressed to the planning and implementation stages, despite Sachnin's persistence.
location in Israel's north. Approximately half of the civilian deaths suffered in this action were of Israeli Arabs living in the Galilee. Many Jewish towns in the north have been recipients both of volunteer rebuilding efforts and of governmental compensa-tion, which have not been forthcoming to Arab towns. Thus, lack of compensation compounds the sense of unfairness.
Discussion
All four elements of the operative definition of environmental justice put forth in this article are intrinsic to the understanding of environmental injustices in the case of Sachnin. Thedistribution of environmental hazards is such that they are generated by facilities located within Misgav while abutting Sachnin on three sides, and Sachnin is denied jurisdiction over the green-belt areas and circumferential roads. As the residents assess the density of their city (5510 per km2, they do not compare it to Carmiel (the nearest Jewish city, with a density of 8810 per km2), but to neighboring rural Misgav, whose densities are so much lower. The infrastructures in both the Jewish urban and Jewish rural communities in the area are so far superior to that of Sachnin, that the feeling of inequity is magnified.
In terms of recognizing their diverse needs and interests, the two peoples have widely divergent frames of reference which often prevent the understanding of one another. Most Israeli Jews frame their interactions with their Israeli Arab neighbors in a security context. This often applies to issues of allocation and use of land. `Judaizing the Galilee' is more than a slogan. It is a long-held strategy pursued by Israeli leaders, widely supported by the Jewish public, and deeply rooted in Zionist ideology. This has led to the appropriation of public lands for Jewish settlementölands which in some cases were formerly owned by Arabs, or used by Arabs as traditional grazing grounds. The Jewish-dominated regional council of Misgav balances the injus-tice of containing Sachnin's territorial expansion, with the just cause of self-defense. While Misgav's residents and government ministries may officially oppose Sachnin's expansion on the basis of needing the land for industrial development or open space, the roots of its opposition are in the security frame. The Northern region's current population of 1.2 million is now precariously balanced at 52% Arab and 48% Jewish. Misgav's leaders may rationalize their land-use policies as a just strategy against the possibilities of becoming demographically outnumbered, and of an Arab-dominated Galilee region becoming a source of Israeli Arab/Palestinian irredentism.
In contrast, the Arab frame concentrates on the need to alleviate overcrowding and to absorb future demographic growth by expanding municipal borders. The combina-tion of limited housing opportunities outside Arab communities and the tradicombina-tion of multigenerational clan (hamula) living adds to the urgency of finding expansion space. More broadly, they also frame their claims in terms of land restoration, the righting of historical injustices, and recognitionof their sense of being part of the Palestinian people as well as their rights as Israeli citizens.
to the north to construct road connectors to the ring road (figure 3öArea A) and provide urban land-use expansion, the government decided to approve the establish-ment of Eshbal, a small new Jewish settleestablish-ment in that very area. This was despite a stated government policy to expand existing settlements rather than establish new ones. Nevertheless, the new residents of Eshbal have declared their desire to cooperate with their Arab neighbors in joint Arab ^ Jewish educational pursuits and other mixed activities.
There has not been adequatecompensationfor the environmental risks and damages inflicted on Sachnin. It does not receive tax revenue from the military establishments or the regional industrial park which are directly adjacent to them, sometimes on expropriated land.
Conclusions and policy implications
The nature of environmental justice is geography specific and culture specific. In countries with large areas and abundant resources, the emphasis may be on macro-environmental risks and their disproportionate burdens on certain segments of the population. The move up the hierarchy ladder from survival and security to the peak of environmental justice can be sequential.
Israel, in its fifty-eighth year as a national state, is still focused on the lower rungs of the environmental justice ladderöat the stages of survival and security. Despite the country's having advanced to the next rungöeconomic well-beingöthe established patterns and local norms are an impediment to, and not a catalyst for, progressing toward environmental justice. The special difficulty of Israel is that, in advancing up the environmental justice hierarchy, the security issues remain embedded in the suc-ceeding rungs of the ladder. Recognizing that until there is a solution to the overall Arab ^ Israeli conflict, environmental justice will not be a prime governmental policy objective, it is nonetheless incumbent on Israeli policy makers to take some steps in that direction now. This is important not only for resolving environmental crises, but also to begin to address some root causes of the tension between Israel's Jewish and Arab communities.
In the Israeli Arab situation, the concepts of environmental and spatial justice are inextricably intertwined. The growing Arab populations need additional land to accommodate their infrastructure requirements, economic development plans, and municipal tax base. Without additional lands they cannot address locally produced environmental hazards stemming from waste and sewage disposal, inadequate water supply, and vehicular exhausts. Moreover, they are exposed to environmental hazards from facilities located on their borders.
In this paper I have put forward a holistic approach to addressing environmental injustice, using the Arab town of Sachnin as a case study. I posit that policy makers must take into account the four key elements that characterize environmental injustice. In the case of Sachnin, ignoring the elements of distribution, recognition, participation, and compensation has clearly led to environmental injustice.
other hand, covets some open spaces for recreation and leisureöas they see such spaces used in Misgav. It should be possible to come to some agreement on divided, shared, or joint jurisdiction and/or usage.
Access roads to regional arteries have significant environmental impact, which also calls for joint decision making. By extending Sachnin's boundaries to the northern ring road, much of the traffic that currently traverses the heart of the town's main east ^ west artery would be redirected to north ^ south streets leading from the ring road. This would reduce air and noise pollution within the most crowded sections of the town. Also, given the proclivity of the newly established Eshbal community toward cooperative efforts, consideration could be given to extending Sachnin's border north-ward to include Eshbal as a Jewish enclave, providing Sachnin with revenue for use of the land.
Based on addressing the environmental inequities cited above, a more generous response by the government to Sachnin's pending appeal of the decision, which granted only 20% of its requested expansion of jurisdictional boundaries, could improve rela-tions between Sachnin and its neighbors without undermining either Israel's security or Israel's aim for a Jewish majority in the Galilee.
On a country-wide scale, the problem has deep roots. Policy makers are reluctant to address the environmental issues between Jewish and Arab Israelis, for fear of opening even more intractable societal conflicts. Nevertheless, there are steps that can be taken. Until now, when considering these types of issues in the planning boards, the Ministry of Interior, the Land Authority, and the Ministry of Defense have been the key decision makers. The Ministry of Environment has been involved only peripherally, and the Ministry of Justice even less so. Environment and justice are their logical purview. In other contexts, these two ministries have been leaders in introducing and promoting alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms, including mediation and public dialogue techniques. It is time that they were seriously involved and applied their experience and expertise to interethnic environmental disputes.
One sign of the incipient recognition that it is possible to balance environmental justice and security demands have been recent Supreme Court rulings with respect to the impact of the Separation Barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. On several occasions over the last year, the court has ruled that the costs of Palestinian suffering and economic losses from land takings caused by the building of the fence have been greater than the benefits of security, and that the fence be moved.
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