About a half hour’s drive north of Ramallah, construction has begun on the first planned Palestinian city. Surrounded by sleepy hilltop villages and terraced olive orchards, Rawabi, which means “hills” Arabic, is being marketed as a green and affordable alternative for the Palestinian middle class.

“Unlike any other in Palestine, Rawabi will be characterized as a modern, high-tech city with gleaming high-rise buildings, green parks and shopping areas,” boasts a fancy brochure published by the Bayti, the Qatari-Palestinian company developing the project. With features like underground parking garages and American-style mortgages, Rawabi would appear to have more in common with Israeli cities like Modi’in than with nearby Palestinian cities like Ramallah.

The new town will have extensive green space and infrastructure (including schools, mosques, a church and office buildings), which the developers hope will also serve the inhabitants of 9 surrounding villages. Initially housing 25,000 residents, Rawabi is eventually set to grow to 40,000.

A rendering of Rawabi’s city center. (courtesy of Bayti)

Special attention has been paid to the project’s environmental aspects. The town will feature elements like wastewater reclamation, alternative energy and extensive tree planting. According to the developers, pedestrian paths and mixed-use streets will discourage the use of cars, and the town will be served by public transportation.

In a show of corporate responsibility, Bayti also conducted an assessment of the social and environmental effects of the project, both during and after construction. The company also has plans to set up a center for urban planning at nearby An Najah University in Nablus.

The red roofs of Ateret, a nearby settlement housing 70 families. (photo by the author)

Meanwhile, Israeli settler organizations have reportedly launched a campaign against the new town, claiming (with no sense of irony) that it will cause pollution, traffic jams and security issues, while benefiting only the Palestinian elite. Questions also linger about an access road that requires the approval of Israeli authorities.

However, if everything goes according to plan, Rawabi could become the prototype for a new, more sustainable Palestinian urbanism. The first residents are set to move in around 2013.

A rendering of Tel Aviv’s new central promenade: stairs leading down to the beach, a paved lower level, shade-providing structures and new sidewalk and beach furniture. (image courtesy of Tel Aviv Municipality)

Two years ago, Tel Aviv presented a plan to redesign its central promenade. The plan – vague, unclear and buried inside another policy proposal – drew plenty of opposition from the public.

Last week, however, an improved version of the plan was presented at a public hearing. Over 100 residents showed up, all eager to make their voices heard. City officials listened to their concerns, and promised to take them into consideration as they draw up the plan’s final version. But neither the process nor the plan itself could please everyone.

Municipal officials and a handful of city council members also attended the meeting, which began with a short presentation by municipal planner Orly Harel, followed by a presentation by Udi Kassif, the architect charged with designing the new boardwalk.

Kassif, of Mayslits Kassif Architects (which was also commissioned to redesign Tel Aviv’s old port), was charged with designing the section of the beach between the Dolphinarium in the south and Gordon Pool in the north. The goal, he said, was to fuse the beach, the boardwalk and the adjacent Herbert Samuel street into a single public space, while connecting the beach to the city.

Among the problems with the current boardwalk, according to the architect, are the many obstacles (including scattered palm trees and benches) to pedestrian traffic, the old fashioned paving stones and street furniture, the wall that exists between the boardwalk and the beach, the haphazard storage spaces along this wall and a large, “unused” strip of sand between the boardwalk and the beach’s main bathing areas.

In order to improve the situation, he proposed removing those obstacles, new paving stones, stairs leading down to the sand instead of the wall that currently exists, new street furniture and shade-providing structures and a paved pedestrian area at the bottom of the stairs that would cover several meters of sand. He also proposed paved handicapped paths to the sea, as well as moving seaside restaurants closer to the boardwalk and away from the beach.

The hundred or so residents in attendance began by listening patiently to the presentation, but soon began losing their patience. The text of Kassif’s presentation, displayed in a small and dense font, was impossible for most to read. A related plan to narrow the adjacent Herbert Samuel Street was not presented at all. And many were outraged at the architects’ claim that parts of the beach were underutilized and could be paved over without inconveniencing anyone.

However, residents were very pleased to hear that the promenade would include a new bike lane (this, in fact, was the only part of the presentation which drew the crowd’s applause).

After the presentations, the audience was divided into small discussion groups, in which everyone was encouraged to contribute their thoughts and ideas, which were duly recorded. City officials promised that some of these suggestions would be integrated into the final designs.

Ira Rozen, a recent graduate of an urban planning program at Tel Aviv University, was disappointed with the event. “The presentation was poor,” he said. “The hall was large and the screen was small and difficult for the crowd to read, even from the front rows.”

Rozen, who wrote his master’s thesis on the privatization of planning in Israel, said the event was typical of participatory planning exercises in Tel Aviv, in which public input is only welcome at the end of the design process.

“It was like: ‘This is what we are going to do, now tell us what you think’,” said Rosen. ” It was clear to everyone that the municipality is not obligated to take anyone’s comments into account, and I think that because of that a lot of people related to the event as a chance to let off steam.”

In Israel, renewable energy has become almost synonymous with solar energy in its various forms.

But what about that other renewable resource – the wind? Worldwide, the wind energy industry is booming, with a $63 billion global market as of 2009, and half a million people employed in wind power-related jobs. China has been doubling its wind power capacity every year for the past five years.

Egypt and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar have just announced plans to build a 200MW wind farm, which would supplement an existing 430MW in Sinai. Jordan is also expected to set up its first wind farm soon.

And in Israel? Currently, the country’s entire wind power sector boils down to 10 outdated wind turbines on the Golan Heights. But that may be about to change, as old turbines are replaced with more advanced models, and a handful of other wind energy projects attempt to make their way through a cumbersome bureaucratic process.

At the recent Eilat-Eilat Renewable Energy Conference, solar energy and, to a lesser extent, energy efficiency dominated the discussions. The two sessions that were dedicated to wind power contained good news and bad news for Israel’s emerging wind industry.

The good news: Israel has the potential to generate significant amounts of wind power (one speaker, the CEO of a company that sells wind turbines, estimated an enormous potential capacity of up to 2,500 megawatts). Studies have identified several areas with sufficient wind, including the Golan Heights, Arava, Gilboa and Galilee regions. Plenty of local companies have entered the arena, and a feed-in tariff is even in place.

The bad news boils down to one major obstacle: bureaucracy. Granted, most of the speakers in the sessions were start-up entrepreneurs (whose economic interests tend to clash with government regulations), but even government officials themselves described an exhausting bureaucratic process. Moshe Shitrit, of the Israel Public Utilities Authority, explained the complicated process of attaining a permit to generate power from the wind, which he said currently takes at least 5 years.

Maksim Rakov, a wind entrepreneur, criticized the government’s approval process as “too paternalistic,” noting that every permit requires coordination with multiple state bodies. The Interior Ministry, he said, which is charged with national-level spacial planning, has not yet formulated a policy on wind power. “In a centralized state like ours, no policy is the same as prohibition,” he said.

Dr. Daniel Farb, another entrepreneur, had a few ideas for the regulators, including mandating small wind turbines on the roofs of buildings (alongside solar water heaters), equalizing feed-in tariffs for all forms of renewable energy generation and working with architects to incorporate small turbines into urban landscapes.

Still, despite the difficulties, several new wind power projects are in the planning stages in Israel. In the Golan Heights, those 10 old wind turbines are due to be replaced by 150 modern turbines, boosting capacity to around 300MW – reportedly enough to power the entire eastern Galilee. New large and medium-scale projects are also being planned in the Arava and near Mt. Gilboa, as well as on Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, where a combined solar and wind power scheme is expected to lead to significant savings on electricity costs.

For more news on Israel, see the Jerusalem Post.

A conflict may be brewing between an emerging renewable energy industry and environmentalists over land preservation in Israel. The heart of the controversy has to do with where to put the massive solar installations that are expected to be built in the arid Negev and Arava regions in the south of the country.

To the untrained eye, Israel’s southern deserts are a vast expanse of empty land, largely uninhabited and ostensibly a perfect setting for solar energy initiatives, something which the country’s environmental movement has been pushing for quite some time. Now, however, when the country seems on the brink of setting up an extensive system of solar power plants both large and small, green organizations are expressing concern that covering large swaths of land with solar energy infrastructure could disrupt desert ecosystems.

“We aren’t saying we don’t need renewable energy – quite the opposite,” clarified Yael Cohen-Paran of the Israel Energy Forum last week at the Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Conference. Speaking in a panel discussion on ”land as the main constraint to the growth of renewable energy in Israel,” Cohen-Paran calculated that meeting Israel’s renewable energy commitments with current photovoltaic technologies could result in hundreds of square kilometers of land being covered with solar panels and related infrastructure.

In a letter to the Prime Minister last week, the Israel Energy Forum criticized the government’s renewable energy policy for putting too much emphasis on photovoltaic technology, which it says is costlier, less productive and more land-intensive than other technologies currently available. The Forum suggested transferring resources away from encouraging PV, and into renewable energy R&d, high-output technologies such as solar thermal and especially energy efficiency.

Iris Hann of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel added that government regulation should protect open spaces by encouraging solar energy production on the country’s rooftops. “The more we allow open spaces to be exploited,” she said, “the less of an incentive there will be to develop roof space. Developing open space should be the option of last resort, and even then only on land adjacent to built-up areas.”

In the southern Arava, a number of kibbutzim are taking advantage of a new government policy that allows for the conversion of agricultural lands to renewable energy production of up to 5 megawatts. Ruti Frum of the Agriculture Ministry noted that “agricultural plots are a golden opportunity for renewable energy entrepreneurs, but we have to be careful we don’t sign all of them away.” She also noted that, as technologies improve over time, solar energy production will require less land.

Kobi Dinar, CEO of Sunday Energy, argued that a piece of land can be used for multiple purposes, estimating that 500 MW of solar power could be produced by overlaying solar energy installations on top of Israel’s water reservoirs.

Udi Gat, Chairman of the Hevel Eilot Regional Council in the southern Arava, admitted that there are disagreements about open spaces, with demands coming from farmers, environmentalists and energy companies (as well as the military, which he said controls 90% of the land in the Arava.) “We can certainly use agricultural lands to generate power, especially in the south of the country, where there is more sun and less water, but we have to aspire to leave as much untouched land as possible,” he said.

Gat also mentioned that the regional councils in the south are working on a strategic plan to locate open spaces that can be used for renewable energy generation without disrupting the desert ecosystem. One example of such an approach is the planned Timna Renewable Energy Park, which is slated to be built on degraded lands once used for copper mining.

Israel and Egypt are discussing a possible collaborative solar energy project in the Sinai desert, Israel’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Binyamin Ben-Eliezer announced this morning at the third annual Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Conference.

According to Ben-Eliezer, he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the issue with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on a recent visit to Egypt. According to the plan, Israel would supply the technology, with Egypt supplying the land required for the project. The electricity produced from the project would power both states, with excess energy being sold to other countries. President Mubarak reportedly expressed his interest in the idea, and agreed to explore the issue.

If carried out, the project could go a long way toward solving one of the major obstacles to the development of renewable energy in Israel: land. Much of the discussion this week at the 3-day conference has revolved around the need to develop renewable energy projects, especially solar energy, that utilize limited land resources in an efficient manner.

Ben-Eliezer went on to say that he sees Israel’s Negev and Arava regions developing into a “Silicon Valley” of solar and renewable energy technologies over the coming decade. He also proposed declaring the entire area a national priority zone for the renewable energy industry, a status which would confer a variety of benefits on companies active in the region. “It breaks my heart when I see these companies setting up projects abroad, but not here in Israel,” he said.

He added that, in his meetings with representatives of foreign governments and businesses, there is no place where the subject of Israeli renewable energy technology is not on the agenda, and that investors around the world are eager to invest in Israeli water and renewable energy companies.

He concluded by telling the conference, “I want you to know that my office is always at your service,” and that “the Prime Minister is also open to these issues.”

For more news on Israel, see the Jerusalem Post.

“I used to get off at the old bus station, and to me it was like another country…” goes the Tipex song (free translation mine). Above: Tel Aviv’s Old Central Bus Station demolished. Photo by Moran Beth Halachmi, via Flickr.

This week, Tel Aviv’s unused Old Central Bus Station became history. The much-maligned New Central Bus Station may soon follow suit, while a New New Central Bus Station is still in the planning stages.

It sometimes seems to me that there must be some kind of curse on all things transportation in Tel Aviv. The traffic jams are unbearable, the drivers obnoxious, the buses lousy and the bus station even lousier. And who even knows if the light rail/subway project will ever actually happen…

Recently, however, things have started to happen in Neveh Sha’anan, where the old and new bus stations lie on opposite sides of a busy pedestrian mall.

The old bus station, more or less abandoned (except for a couple of businesses and perhaps the occasional junkie) since the early 1990′s, was demolished last week. After the Egged bus company finally vacated the place, the city decided to redevelop it. The first new tenant will be the Minshar art school, which will build a brand new building on the site. Other educational institutions are expected to follow, and in the meantime the rest of the plot will be transformed into a temporary park.

Meanwhile, local newspapers have been abuzz lately with rumors that the New Central Bus Station, an almost universally detested structure credited with destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood, may soon be vacated as well. Billed as the world’s biggest bus station, the place has never functioned well, is almost impossible to navigate and much of its commercial space sits unused.

Bus companies Egged and Dan are reportedly fed up with the place, and are looking to transfer their activities elsewhere when their contracts with the station’s owners expire in a couple of years. The Ministry of Transportation and the Tel Aviv Municipality are said to support the move, according to local newspaper Ha’ir.

According to Ha’ir, a new transportation terminal is likely to be built at the Holon Interchange, south of the existing station. The current bus station, which was recently aquired by new owners, may be reincarnated, possibly as a skyscraper development. Or, the new owners might be able to convince the bus companies to stay put. In either case, any change in the status quo is likely to take years to pan out.

But if a New New Central Bus Station is in the cards for Tel Aviv, let’s hope that this time they do it right.

Other ways to get around Tel Aviv:

Anywhere You Go FreeGo Electric Scooters

Trekkers Electric Scooters Fly Around Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv Cafe Offers Great Lattes and Free Bikes 

Solar panels at a testing site in Abu Dhabi. (photo by Jesse Fox)

According to a report published this week in Globes, Israel’s public housing company Amidar is set to begin installing photovoltaic solar panels on the roofs of its buildings. And with 72,000 housing units in its portfolio, that could add up to a lot of renewable energy.

The plan, already approved by the company’s board, is to install photovoltaics in three small pilot projects in the south, and later in another ten sites in the center of the country. If everything works as planned, the company will begin installing solar panels on the remainder of its properties throughout the country. Amidar CEO Yaakov Brosh estimated that each building could eventually produce up to 50KW of clean electricity.

Similar projects have had success in places like California and Singapore. The Vatican even hopes to use rooftop solar arrays to help it become the world’s first cabon-neutral state. In Israel, the idea of generating solar energy on the country’s numerous flat roofs is just beginning to take hold.

However, it appears that Amidar, which has been criticized for its (mis)treatment of public housing residents, is focused more on its own bottom line than on looking out for its tenants. Instead of benefiting residents of the buildings directly, electricity generated from rooftop solar panels on Amidar buildings will apparently be sold to the grid, with the profits pumped back into the company’s coffers.

Brosh’s claim that the extra income will help Amidar expand public housing is questionable, considering that Amidar stopped building new public housing years ago, and today makes do with providing those eligible for its assistance with ever-shrinking rental subsidies.

Via Globes (Hebrew link).

More solar power in Israel reading:

1. Lots of Sunshine Power in the Holy Land as China and Israel Complete Solar Plant 
2. Immersion Arabic Course in First Solar Bedouin Village in Israel 
3. Siemens Mulls Buying Israeli Solar Company Solel 

The Tel Aviv City Council held a discussion yesterday on a handful of building plans that, if approved, would effectively transform some of the city’s most historic areas beyond recognition.

The discussion, which council members described as “fateful” and “dramatic,” drew a large number of city residents, eager to have a say in the planning of their neighborhoods.

However, the discussion was conducted in a manner that seemed to exclude the public, while avoiding a serious discussion of the city’s future development.

The plans under discussion included the widening of Yitzchak Elchanan Street, north of Neveh Tzedek, as well as the new Mesila Highway, south of the neighborhood.

Both are plans for new roads, lined with skyscrapers, that together would form a ring of traffic and tall buildings around Neveh Tzedek, one of Tel Aviv’s oldest and most charming (and richest) neighborhoods.

When connected with the Shlavim Highway, another highway + tall buildings plan that the city is promoting east of Jaffa, the plans would create a major new traffic artery, channelling cars from the Holon Interchange south of the city to a series of new parking lots along Rothschild Boulevard.

From the beginning, it was obvious that there would be no real and honest discussion at the meeting, which was held to discuss several appeals against the plans submitted by council members.

Instead of being held in the usual City Council hall, the discussion took place in a small meeting room on the 12th floor of the municipality building.

Dozens of residents, refused entry on the grounds that there was not enough space, speculated that the meeting was deliberately held in a small space in order to keep them out.

When they were finally let in, over an hour into the meeting, the residents made their presence felt with catcalls and hearty applause for council members that spoke out in opposition to the plans.

Left: Dozens of angry residents were initially denied entry into the meeting, on the grounds that there was not enough space for the public. (Photo by Jesse Fox)

Opponents of the plans claimed that they would necessitate the destruction of two schools near Neveh Tzedek, form a “separation wall” of concrete buildings between south neighborhoods instead of connecting them and ruin the character of neighborhoods slated for preservation.

The Mesila Highway, a three-story right-of-way (a subway line and an underground highway below street level, with a park on surface) was criticized as unrealistic and unlikely to ever actually take shape.

The plans themselves were only drawn up after a higher planning committee ordered Tel Aviv to formulate a comprehensive planning document, instead of haphazardly promoting a collection of individual building plans and roads, as it had done until then.

The city presented and approved the comprehensive plan recently, resulting in several appeals.

The plan, which was neither printed nor submitted for public review, was only presented halfway through the meeting, on the request of a council member.

Several neighborhood representatives criticized the plan as being superficial, unprofessional and hastily put together. The documents contained no serious discussion, for example, of the effects that the tall buildings would have on breezes, or of where their shadows would fall.

Apparently, no one thought about where all of the new residents’ children would go to school, or what effect their cars would have on the already traffic-clogged area. Some council members pointed out that the new residential buildings, in all likelihood populated largely by foreign residents, would add little to the fabric of life in that part of the city.

Only after the meeting ended did it become clear that someone had actually drawn up an alternative plan, in which the thousands of housing units proposed by the city would be built in low-rise buildings instead of skyscrapers. No one had mentioned this alternative during the meeting itself, although neighborhood representatives had expressed their clear preference for such an alternative.

After all sides’ claims were presented, Deputy Mayor Doron Sapir, who chaired the meeting, declared a closed discussion and asked all observers to leave.

In the end, the plans will probably be approved. That’s the way it is in Tel Aviv – Mayor Ron Huldai demands strict discipline from members of his coalition, and he knows that he can easily find the votes to pass any proposal he likes.

The fact that so many major new roads (accompanied, of course, by parking lots, giant intersections, gas stations, etc.) are being approved in southern Tel Aviv speaks volumes about the city’s planning policy. Increasingly, the mythical light rail, which is still not even close to implementation, is looking like a smoke screen.

The bottom line is that the city backed itself into a corner. By encouraging developers to buy up large plots of land in an area of the city that it thought no one cared about, city planners found themselves with a series of plans for tall buildings in an area where no other building rises above four stories.

By promoting skyscrapers around Neveh Tzedek, the city found itself antagonizing a hornet’s nest of wealthy and well-connected citizens. And by excluding opinionated residents from most of the planning process, the city found itself with an uncompromising front of opposition that no longer believes a single word uttered by its officials.

While the future of the area remains unclear, there is still reason for optimism. Politicians are slow learners, preferring a bitter fight to the end over an agreed-upon compromise. However, a line in the sand has been drawn by residents and activists in the city, and a new kind of politics is slowly taking shape in the city.

More on urban planning in Tel Aviv:

1. Tel Aviv Puts Jaffa Skyscraper Plans on Hold
2. Coming Soon: A Wall of Skyscrapers Between Tel Aviv and Jaffa?
3. Florentine Fights Back
4. Tel Aviv Plans Expanded Tayelet – and Shrunken Beach
5. Tel Aviv “City Rats” Give New Ideas to Urban Planners

Top image: The future of Neveh Tzedek? A map, prepared by the residents’ committee, illustrating future construction plans. (Image via: www.nevetzedek.org)

The city also has plans for a series of new highways that will crisscross the area, in addition to the first line of the Tel Aviv light rail. However, residents of the area are less than enthusiastic about the idea, claiming that the new buildings will be out of scale with the existing character of the area.

A year ago, in response to protests by the residents, a district planning committee instructed the city to formulate a coherent policy for the entire area. Residents had argued that the city was promoting the buildings one by one, without a comprehensive master plan.

The new policy document is meant to address these concerns. It includes plans for another 6 towers, in addition to a 38-story building that already stands in the area. Altogether the plans would add some 650 apartments to the area, approximately doubling the number of housing units in the area.

The residents, however, are still up in arms, calling the new plan “wretched” and a “false representation of a comprehensive plan.” Last week, they told Haaretz:

“In practice, the decision confirms an automatic mechanism for getting plans passed, without any solution being proposed for the neighborhood and for South Tel Aviv… Its only purpose is to approve the construction of a wall of high-rises along Eilat Street, which will partition Florentin and Neveh Tzedek.”

“It has no content because it has no transportation solutions for the thousands of people who will live in the apartments. There are no educational institutions, which the area needs. There are no new green areas to alleviate the crowding. The only reason for the city’s position is pressure from developers.”

Via Haaretz.

When asked why he was giving election fliers to people who had already voted, he replied: “To get people ready for the next elections.”

The Green Movement – Meimad, a collection of people with an exceptionally strong record of environmental activity in Israeli society, did not make it into the Knesset this time – although they came close. However, according to Daniel Orenstein, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Technion’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies and the man behind the movement’s “Unofficial Blog”, the Green Movement – Meimad is just getting started, and is already planning its campaign for the next Knesset elections.

So what now? What does a political movement, whose entire mandate is to influence Israeli law, policy and society, do when it cannot take part in the formal parliamentary process?

Orenstein: After the election results were announced, we had a short mourning period while absorbing the results – obviously we thought we had a good chance of getting in to Knesset. But within a day, activists and leaders of the party looked at our impressive performance – 27,000 votes for a party that had only formed two months earlier. Everyone – in meetings and blogs and personal conversations – declared that this was the beginning of our long road into politics.

We’ve already begun assessing where we succeeded and where we failed in the last election, and are asking important questions about our strategies, our platform and our partnerships. There are meetings taking place in local chapters, among the academic advisors and among the party leadership. Some of the important questions we are asking
are whether the Green Movement and Meimad should continue together (there is a lot of support for this), how to re-approach the various “green” parties regarding potential merging, and how to better convey our message to the broader public.

But it is nearly unanimous that we want to continue the effort we’ve begun, and that the Green Movement is here to stay.

The Green Movement – Meimad was the closest of all the parties that did not make it into the Knesset to passing the threshold. Will it attempt to regroup and make another effort in the future (especially considering that the next government is already talking about making it more difficult for small parties to get elected)?

We are absolutely continuing on. The Green Movement-Meimad activists were fired up in a way that surprised even the activists themselves – it was an amazing and invigorating process to be part of. We are talking about thousands of people who – like most of the Israeli electorate – were becoming incredibly cynical about Israeli politics and the ability of individuals to affect real change here. The Green Movement-Meimad vision and platform gave us new energy and optimism.

Activists were committing hours of volunteer work – canvassing the streets, working the internet, talking one-on-one with friends and family, demonstrating. I’ve never seen anything like it in politics – with the possible exception of Barack Obama’s campaign. And it paid off. No other party had that kind of energy and public presence. We will likely aim for municipal elections and then – once again – challenge the big parties in national elections.

We are not a special interest group – as much of the public perceives “small parties” to be, but rather a broad-based multi-issue party with something unique to say about all aspects of administration and governance in Israel.

To what do you attribute the results of the election? Is Israel perhaps not yet ready for its own green party? Or was it the war in Gaza, which skewed the agenda toward security issues?

I think it is a little of everything you’ve mentioned. It didn’t help that there were four parties with “green” in their title. It confused mainstream voters. However, we successfully conveyed the difference to the environmental community and won three times the vote of old Green Party (which in the eyes of the environmental community presented environmental issues in a very narrow and ineffective way).

It also didn’t help that so many traditionally ideological voters panicked and voted Kadima – a party devoid of any ideology and which exists, in my opinion, only to assure seats in the government for its members. These voters feared Netanyahu and Leiberman more than they believed in promoting their own values.

And it didn’t help that Hamas ignited another armed confrontation in the south, which once again wiped away the possibility of focusing on a strong domestic policy agenda. We’ll have to address each of these issues in the coming months and think how we can overcome each challenge.

In the end of the day, we have a platform – focusing on education, environment, health care, social and economic equity, grassroots democracy, pluralism and tolerance – that most of the electorate can relate too.

Our merger with Meimad strengthened each of these issues, as well as adding the important component of progressive Jewish values.

Meimad’s Rabbi Michael Melchior is one of several green legislators that will not be returning to the next Knesset. What is the outlook for the environmental lobby in the Knesset without them, especially presuming a strong shift to the right?

Rabbi Melchior was considered by many as one of the finest legislators in Knesset – not just on environmental issues, but also on social and education issues. His is a true loss to our parliament. That said, in the past, many excellent environmental legislators came from the right side of the spectrum (Yuri Shtern z”l, Lea Ness, Moshe Gafni, even our own Yosef Tamir originally came from Likud) – perhaps more than came from the left – so, this is not a left-right issue.

So, I think there will still be an active environmental lobby. That said, with the exception of Dov Khenin of Hadash, most Knesset members are environmentalists in the narrow sense – they can identify environmental problems and would support economic or technical measures to address them, but they won’t likely address the core socio-economic issues that give rise to environmental problems. These include economic disparities, values and education, funding priorities, respect of place and of fellow humans. Rabbi Melchior understands the systemic problems, as does the Green Movement.

It is our job now to fine tune our issues, organize our chapters, recruit members and perfect how we deliver our message to the Israeli electorate.

Via Sustainable City Blog.

More on Israel elections:
Re-evaluating Green Parties in Israel
Israel’s Political Parties And Platforms On Sustainability
Environmental Platforms For Israeli Elections