The Green Zionist Alliance is an unlikely force in Jewish
environmental politics. Run by volunteers and largely unknown, the New
York-based group heads into the 2010 World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem
in June armed with seven resolutions, touching on topics from Israeli
farming and sustainable business to renewable energy and climate change.
At the previous World Zionist Congress in June 2006,
where the alliance held just two of about 400 seats, it succeeded in
passing its three resolutions. It called on KKL (the Jewish National
Fund in Israel) to strengthen its environmental policies, demanded
environmental-impact statements for World Zionist Organization building
projects and required the Jewish Agency for Israel, KKL and the WZO to
vastly increase their use of recycled paper.
“It’s estimated that air pollution in the Tel Aviv
metropolitan area alone kills more Israelis every year than wars and
terrorist acts combined,” said alliance President David Krantz, citing a
World Health Organization study. “Israeli society often focuses on
terrorism and war — and they’re important issues — but pollution has
been much more deadly.”
The alliance was founded in 2001 to educate and mobilize
Jews to support Israel’s environmental movement. It won one seat to the
2002 World Zionist Congress (which convenes every four years), becoming
the first environmental organization ever to attend. This year, with
three seats, the alliance is pressing for its most ambitious set of
proposals yet.
The alliance’s resolutions include a call for the WZO,
the Jewish Agency and KKL to install energy-generating solar panels and
rainwater-saving systems on their rooftops. There is a resolution for
future World Zionist Congresses to fund carbon-mitigating projects in
Israel to offset emissions from delegates’ travel. There is also a
proposal for KKL to increase funding for projects including
environmental research and river restoration.
These proposals have every chance of passing. But experience indicates a question mark hangs over their implementation.
For example, the recycled paper resolution of 2006 called
on the WZO, KKL and the Jewish Agency to buy at least 50% of their
paper from recycled sources. But Michael Jankelowitz, a spokesman for
the WZO and for the Jewish Agency — which share a building in Jerusalem —
said the cost of recycled office paper in Israel is prohibitive.
Instead, the only sign of progress so far is the use of recycled toilet
paper and air hand dryers, rather than paper towels, in the building’s
bathrooms.
Alliance co-founder Rabbi Michael Cohen pointed out that
resolutions do not always lead to results. “The resolutions have value
because they give a sense of the direction in which the World Zionist
Congress and the KKL should be going,” he said. “Maybe we didn’t have a
complete success with recycled paper, but at least it put on the radar
that this stuff needs to be done.”
The Alliance is a critic of past environmental policies
of KKL, such as the planting of nonindigenous trees and the draining of
the ecologically important Hula Valley during the 1950s. In 2006, the
alliance called on the KKL to make improvements, such as increasing
budgets for river restoration and developing a more sustainable
transportation policy.
Although resolutions help, the alliance has achieved the
most success by placing three of its members on the KKL board of
directors. At the 2002 Congress, the Alliance teamed up with the
Conservative movement’s Zionist wing, MERCAZ Olami, and MERCAZ Olami
offered the alliance two seats on the KKL board. Alliance co-founders
Eilon Schwartz and Alon Tal took the seats, joined later by a third
member, Orr Karassin. (Rabbi Yoav Ende, another GZA member, replaced
Schwartz on the KKL board last year.)
Tal said World Zionist Congress resolutions are sometimes
not implemented because the WZO, the Jewish Agency and KKL have “a lack
of respect” for the Congress. “The only way things get done,” said Tal,
“is by having people in positions of power to implement them.”
Tal listed achievements made while he has been on the KKL
board: sponsoring a program for Rwandan villagers, pushing for a
20-million-shekel bike lane plan in Israel, quadrupling funding for new
forests.
Jankelowitz, meanwhile, said the WZO and Jewish Agency
continue to adopt greener practices. He said the removal of paper towels
had caused “an uproar” among employees.
“There is a big sign here explaining why there’s a hand
dryer,” he said. “It explains that … you are saving 12 trees a year. So
there is this attempt to convey to workers why there’s no paper and why
we have to be environmentally conscious. All this is because of the
resolution of the green Zionists.”
Source: http://www.forward.com/articles/128801/