By Zafrir Rinat – Haaretz Correspondent

Published on December 9, 2004

The petrochemical and steel industries around Acre that had stopped polluting the environment over recent years have now resumed their activity.

With the resumption of production the ground, water and air in the Acre valley are becoming more polluted, and anxious citizens have turned to environmental activists for help.

One of the groups involved is Citizens for the Environment (CFE) in the Galilee. It was founded 15 years ago and is a good example of a group that fights government and private polluters. Today it has some 500 members from the Arab, Druze and Jewish towns and villages in the region. CFE receives donations from members and grants from organization and, on principle, does not have an office, so that there is direct contact with those working in the field.

Membership is base on voluntary work. CFE utilizes the services of its many professional members to attain specialized opinions, for help in measuring pollutants or analysis of the results of measurements carried out by institutional bodies.

Liora Aharon, 38, a resident of a Galilee village and a former guide with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, is the director of CFE. “We have a volunteer who searches the Internet for fields in which we are interested and a Hebrew teacher who proofreads our documents,” she says. “We have lawyers, economists and chemists who provide us with professional backing.” CFE, like other green organizations, is also helped by Tel-Aviv University’s legal department, which is currently handling six cases for the Galilee organization.

Industrial pollutants, illegal waste dumps and polluted water sources are all examples of the type of issues tackled by CFE. Group members wander through sites, taking samples and reportin findings to the Environment Ministry.

One successful example of CFE’s work is in the Druze village of Yanuah, where an illegal garbage dump had appeared. The local school principal, Raja Faraj, is a member of CFE’s executive. The association decided it would be worthwhile mobilizing all the villagers to deal with the matter of the waste. Thus, the school’s pupils went to the dump, driven by the adults, and collected waste for recycling. Carpenters from the village made tables for the school from discarded materials, while tires that were thrown away were turned into flowerpots.

One of the more complicated issues is the Tefen industrial park. Here, CFE is in conflict with an industry that has earned an image of being environment – friendly and that provides a living for large numbers of people from the erea. Over the past two years, CFE – sometimes aided by the Environment Ministry, other times putting pressure on the ministry – has succeeded in making Tefen industries curb polltion. The ministry recently sued Tefen industries for polluting the River nearby with toxic waste. The court fined the local council.

“The whole environmental story is one of public presstory is one of public pressure,” says Aharon. “everyone keeps pushing environmental issues into the corner and claiming there are more pressing matters, But these are equally important issues, especially when we are talking about people’s health.”

Aharon says everyone needs to be educated – including the politicians. She says the aim is to create a symbiosis between the greens and the establishment. “I once organized a meeting with the dirctor of the minstry’s northern district who had stopped talking to me after we critcized him. I told him we might oppose him on one issue and agree to assist him with another,” she says.

Aharon says she has received threatening letters from various parties that want her to stop action against them. This has happened in other countries, she says, but she is not deterred.

“we want a situation where the public knows what is happenig in every factory and what it emits, and many firms try to hide this. The establishment helps them and says that sometimes this can cause panic among the public. We are not interested in creating panic but in dealing with the risks in a matter of fact way,” she says.

“Once upon a time, I believed factories that said they were green, but I discovered there is a gap between image and reality,” she adds. “If a firm invests in gardening, it does not give it the right to pollute water sources; if a chimney does not give off black smoke it does not mean it is not emitting other pollutants that are colorless.”

Aharon says that “there is an approach to first build and develop and then to find technologies that will prevent pollution. We are not prepared to accept that.”