c. 1999 Religion News Service
KIBBUTZ NACHSHONIM, Israel _ What was once a field of wheat has been consumed in a giant sea of mud and dirt, extending west almost as far as the eye can see. Yellow tractors crawl like giant bugs across the land. In the distance, smoke rises from a burning orchard.
At the edge of the wasteland, a small group of Israelis is camped in a tepee and a lean-to style shelter, warmed in the winter chill by a wood fire and plentiful cups of herb teas.
Almost every day, in what is now an orchestrated ritual, the protesters charge toward the tractors working in the distance to stop the giant machines. Police quickly zoom in, arresting one or two members of the group, which carries signs proclaiming,”Israel 2000: The Trans Israel Highway turns the land of milk and honey to asphalt.” The Trans Israel Highway, say the critics, is not just another highway. It is destined to become the backbone of an enormous, new Israeli urban grid that will extend unbroken from the Negev desert in the south, through the Judean foothills, the Sharon Plain and to the northern Galilee.
The road, the critics add, will thus strike a fatal blow to the Holy Land’s historic geography.
Until recently, these wide open spaces on the plain of Sharon, where the tractors are working and the tepees are camped, were a sparsely settled hinterland. It was a plateau region linking the fertile Mediterranean coastal lowlands with the highlands of Samaria and Judea _ today the modern West Bank and Jerusalem area, which rise eastward.
As such it was also the ideal battleground in antiquity for a massive grouping of forces, the place where Joshua clashed with the Canaanites, and later, where the Philistine forces gathered their men against the Israelites. In the second century B.C., the rebellious Hasmoneans hid out in the caves of the countryside to the south of this area, fomenting revolt against the dominant Hellenistic culture and rulers of the period _ a rebellion remembered today by the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.
And here, along the original Roman road from Jerusalem to the Mediterranean coast, the Apostle Paul spent the night at the Roman fortress of Antipatris in 60 A.D., while en route to Caesarea. The fortress is built above the lush springs of Rosh HaAyin, which channel the mountain rainfall to the coastal plain and once fed the Yarkon River, before the water was siphoned off into pipes for drinking water.
In the British mandate period and the early days of the state, this area retained its character as a frontier of the Jewish settlement line. Jewish forces of the underground Hagana hid here in ditches at night to monitor the road movements of traveling British convoys; decades later, young Israeli army recruits would march through practicing the grueling routines of basic training. “I can still remember the smell of the rosemary and sage as I crawled with my army unit through the mud and thorns here on rainy winter days in the 1970s,”said Arye Shavit, today a prominent Israeli journalist.”It was a classic biblical landscape of exposed and stony cliffs, with nothing much for miles around. Our commander never tired of telling us: `Remember that here in this place there is no one but you, me … and God.'” Today, however, this expansive terrain has undergone dramatic change. Trash from illegal dumping lines the once scenic old roadside for miles on the approaches to Kibbutz Nachshonim. Cancerous quarries have eaten away at the cliffs and hills, as have new suburbs of houses that stand out awkwardly against the skyline, steadily advancing the Tel Aviv metropolis eastward.
And now road construction buries what remains of the stony countryside and fertile farm fields of antiquity, preparing Israel for the 21st century.”Unfortunately, at the turn of the millennium we have become a wasteful people,”83-year-old Yosef Tamir, grandfather of Israel’s environmental movement, declared recently after a visit to the Trans Israel Highway protest site.”We have related with barbarism and vandalism against the very sources of our life and against the principles of our religion,”he said.”The `man of the field,’ after all, was the ideal of the Bible and the Oral Law, or Talmud, and of the great Jewish commentators such as the Rambam. Yet we have created a modern state based on high technology that is abandoning the environment.”We have blindly imitated American capitalism, creating a lifestyle which isn’t any more suitable to Israel than the Trans Israel Highway.” The young Israelis camping out in protest against the Trans Israel Highway are protesting not just the road but what they see as a legacy of waste and consumerism that has marked Israel’s last decades of the second millennium. So far, they have failed to gain sufficient support to force a change in priorities.
One protester who is due to be arrested by police this day, after hand-cuffing himself to an enormous tractor, is 47-year-old Czech-born, Canadian-Israeli Henry Gold. He immigrated to Israel as a teen-ager before moving to Canada, where he studied engineering at McGill University. No stranger to such struggles, Gold’s gaunt, weather-beaten face reflects the decade or so he later spent executing development projects in Africa as co-founder of Canadian Physicians for Aid in Relief.
The child of a Holocaust survivor, Gold returned to Israel in 1994 and soon became a leader in the battle against the Trans Israel Highway. But Gold, who once oversaw an $8 million budget for African development, has been unable to raise more than $20,000 to fight the Trans Israel Highway project.
His appeals to the religious and the rich, to the politicians and the socially conscious, have met with indifference.
Religious and social leaders here are not yet attuned to the human price societies pay when the natural environment goes awry due to wrongful development, said Gold.”I learned in Africa that societies end up in conflicts when they reach a social and environmental disequilibrium. Here, we may not suffer from famine. But we are making political decisions that will eventually create larger social gaps, not reduce them.”Israelis today live mostly in urban environments, rich neighborhoods alongside the poor, and therefore enjoying similar access to jobs, schools and services,”Gold added.”Building big roads will not only destroy much of the Holy Land’s landscape, it will lure young families, the middle classes to new and developing regions. The poor, the elderly and new immigrants, who have no cars and can’t afford the new housing, will remain trapped in the cities, which will decay, along with the transport system.” To those who say that there is no alternative, both Tamir and Gold point to a third way.
Their vision of the Holy Land in the next century or two, both said, should be a Holland or a Denmark, rather than Los Angeles or Detroit. Development of the next century should be channeled into more compact, European-style, quasi-traditional cities and villages rather than strung along roadsides. Urban centers should be linked by clean rail transport networks, which impose less damage on the countryside than massive new highways.
Imitating that style, they said, offers the only way out for the Holy Land _ the only chance that Israel might develop economically and also preserve its historic legacy while it embarks on a period of unprecedented growth.
IR END FLETCHER
