Refusing to pay exorbitant prices for shoebox apartments amid the city’s concrete lanes and glass towers, twelve protesters have taken up residence on a former fruit orchard in Arsuf, where they are establishing a small ecological community.

At first glance it looks like a group of young people squatting on a 1.75 acres roughly 15 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, but the property on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the family of Amir Ben-Ya’ar.

Instead of cashing in on a stellar real estate sale, he decided to invite his friends to help form an eco-community there, according to Ha’aretz.

Most of the residents are living off bare bones and the food grown on site, including radishes and lettuce. Sometimes scouts volunteer to gather up scraps from nearby restaurants, and they build most of what they need out of recycled materials.

It should be noted that all of this is happening in one of the wealthiest clusters in all of Israel, and that the activists are totally at ease surrounded by people who value material wealth over living half-naked in a so-called “utopia.”

Meanwhile, they’re even growing their own sugar cane in order to keep their tea nice sweet, though they buy their tobacco from a nearby Palestinian community called Barta’a.

The community’s five chickens are especially revered. Ha’aretz writes that a doctoral anthropologist student said that building a shrine to them is more valuable now than working on a book that will land up on a shelf somewhere.

Although it gets somewhat chilly in parts of Israel during winter, a new generation of farmers can still take relief in the country’s relative mild weather.

Ben-Ya’ar told the paper that the Hof Hasharon Regional Council “has begun to sniff around,” though the nomadic nature of this place ensures that residents and stray guests can pack up and leave within hours if need be.

:: Ha’aretz

Image of Arsuf by Dany_Sternfeld, Flickr

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It’s definitely a hot time in our world this summer: there are massive brush and forest fires in the American states of Colorado and South Dakota, there’s a full fledged civil war going on in Syria that has resulted in indigenous plant seeds being stored away in a vault in Norway ; and worst of all, a 58-year-old down and out man in Israel who set himself on fire during a night time social protest rally in Jerusalem. How are all these events connected?Our environment, especially in normally arid and semi-arid regions like the Middle East, is becoming increasing vulnerable to the ravages of global warning and climate change. These environmental realities are resulting in destruction of wildlife as well as human habitats due to prolonged droughts that cause more rapid depletion of available water supplies.

More than 500,000 Syrians fleeing drought stricken farming areas in their country back in 2010. This could be just part of the reason why social protests evolved into mass street demonstrations, and then into civil war in Syria.

Lack of reasonably priced rental housing in Israel’s largest cities resulted last summer in tent cities being erected all over the country, and more then 400,000 people assembling in one mass protest rally.

Some of the relatively peaceful protests that occurred in the period between mid-July and September 2011 were also about green issues like air pollution and traffic congestion which are issues common to all large cities everywhere.

Although promises were made by the government  to try to improve things, especially regarding affordable housing, the over all situation on the ground was virtually unchanged. This reality has resulted in renewed protests this summer, with some of them even becoming violent to property and to people.

We must all be mindful that environmental issues like global warming and climate change can greatly effect the human environment as well as the4 natural one. With all of Middle East sweltering under higher than normal temperatures; and with the  beginning of the month long Muslim fast of Ramadan just days away, people living in this region can expect to experience even more “hot times”. So the best advice might be to stay indoors – for more reasons that just to beat the heat.

Read more on global warming and related environmental issues in the Middle East:

Israeli Social Protestor Sets Himself on Fire at Jerusalem Rally
The Wrath of Global Warming and the Middle East
Worst Wildfires in Israel’s Modern History Continue to Blaze out of Control
 500,000 Syrians Flee Drought Stricken Regions

Image from Mohamed Elsayyed / Shutterstock.com

The post Social Protests Connect the Dots to the Environment appeared first on Green Prophet.

The man who is in his 40s is now being treated for serious burns in a Jerusalem hospital. Cases of self-immolation are rare in Israel. The last case was in 2005 when a woman set herself on fire to protest the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Israel’s latest waves of social protests are to revive the movement from last summer. Organizers from last year say little has changed, despite their efforts.

Saturday’s demonstrations belonged to an effort that started with rising housing costs, but which quickly moved to issues on the high cost of food, low salaries, and better education. At its peak over a million people turned up at rallies, and the protestors took over the city streets by erecting tent cities in public areas.

::Washington Post; Image by Ben Kalmer/Associated Press

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Following a spate of violence against African migrants living in southern Tel Aviv, the Defense Ministry has dispatched dozens of bulldozers to Ketziot near the Egyptian/Israeli border to clear land for a detention center. Called Ir Amim, which means City of Nations in Hebrew, the desert asylum center will initially contain enough recycled shipping containers to house 3,000 African migrants.

Eventually the Ketziot center will be expanded to accommodate an additional 8,000 people. The Defense Ministry also announced that it will erect up to 25,000 tents for migrants in five detention centers that will be run by the prison service. The idea is to keep African migrants out of Israeli cities and create a deterrent to any future asylum-seekers. But the Negev Regional Council and local residents are deeply opposed to the plan.

Sanctuary in tents

Although Israel has begrudgingly provided sanctuary to African migrants who face political instability and violence in their home countries, a Jerusalem court recently ruled that Israeli can deport Southern Sudanese nationals despite the ongoing trouble in the newly-formed country. But Sudanese only represent a small minority of African migrants living in Israel.

For the rest, including thousands of Eritrean nationals and other future asylum-seekers, shipping and containers and tents in the Negev will be home. The first phase of the Ketziot center is expected to be completed by the end of this year, although people may start moving in as early as November, and the tent cities will follow soon thereafter.

But locals are not impressed.

“Setting up a tent city simply looks bad. You take people from south Tel Aviv, stick them in tents in the middle of the desert, and now [I’m supposed] to look after them,” said Ramat Negev Regional Council head Shmuel Rifman.

Solarize the centers

No sewage treatment facilities exist yet and energy in the region is already intermittent and scarce. Locals worry that these new compounds will usurp their own resources. Proving sufficient water to the new desert dwellers will also be an issue.

Palestinian politics aside, Israel is a small country, so there isn’t a lot of extra space to house the 2,000 migrants that enter the country each month. Although there is a risk that these centers could become unhealthy, unruly camps, there is also an opportunity to make use of the desert’s resources to mitigate that potential.

Instead of tapping into the national grid for power, the Defense Ministry should install solar panels to provide energy, which might placate local residents. And rather than build chemical waste treatment plants, hundreds of carefully-placed compost toilets would process human waste far more efficiently. It would only be necessary to replace the bins once a month.

Asylum-seekers who show leadership qualities can be tasked with monitoring the panels and toilets to ensure that they function properly, which in turn would help to promote internal rather than enforced order. Even though Israel wants to discourage further “infiltrators,” the public will be more supportive of this initiative if it is run humanely and without diverting a pile of resources financed by their tax contributions.

:: Haaretz

Image credit: Haiti refugee by Arindambanerjee, Shutterstock

More on Tent Cities and Shipping Containers:

How Israel’s Tent Cities Influenced Occupy Wall Street

Tent City Dismantled in Tel Aviv – Now What?

Street Art Meets Castro Fashion in Recycled Shipping Containers

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