Yes, it was a total disappointment. But the very existence of COP15 has already changed the rules of the game.

Environmentalists marching for clean air in Tel Aviv in 2008.

Last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, which inspired so much expectation, seems to have pleased no one. Asked to describe their feelings post-Copenhagen in one word, TreeHugger readers responded with words like “disappointed,” “cop-out” and “fail.” Many people have described COP15 as a resounding failure, and maybe it was – but maybe not.

The environmental movement’s struggle is an incremental one. Activists around the world fight local battles within a common, global context. You win some and you lose some, but you’re always working within certain limitations: the public’s awareness of the issues, the receptiveness (or lack of it) of politicians, the limits of the possible as defined by national laws.

Then, every few years, something comes along and changes the rules of the game.

In the country where I live, the last time this happened was when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out several years ago. The film was screened extensively around the country, providing Israelis with a clear and coherent explanation of an issue that many had previously considered esoteric and controversial. Its effect was surprising and profound, and it changed the way Israeli society thought about climate change.

Something similar has happened with Copenhagen. As the summit approached, more and more politicians seemed to be getting the message. Just before the summit, a group of lawmakers proposed a package of four green bills. Two are moving forward.

In Copenhagen, Israel’s President announced the country’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. The Ministry of the Environment is already working on practical ways to make this happen. And COP15 may have tipped the scales against a new coal-fired power plant, a battle that environmentalists have been stubbornly waging for years.

Failure or not, Copenhagen has already changed the rules of the game in Israel, and I’m convinced similar things are happening in other places as well. For example in Brazil, where a new post-Copenhagen law calls for a 39% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. We can expect to hear about a lot more of these commitments in the wake of the summit.

The reason is that the world’s governments now realize that they will be required to cut their countries’ emissions at some point in the future. Even if it didn’t happen in Copenhagen, it probably will in Mexico City, or after. It may take time, but now it’s clear to everyone that it will happen, eventually.

And, broadly speaking, the outlines of a future agreement are there in the Copenhagen Accord. Although undoubtedly a disappointment, this document is still an enormous precedent. It will be hard to backtrack on its principles – the only way to move will be forward, especially as countries that were excluded from the discussion this time make their voices heard in the next round.

For the environmental movement, Copenhagen marked a sort of coming of age. It has emerged as a major player in the dynamics of climate politics, and no one can ignore its influence any longer. The challenge now will be to refocus its energies on taking what has already been agreed upon in principle in Copenhagen and leveraging that into a real, binding agreement that truly addresses the problem of global climate change.

That may still be a long way off, but I, for one, am optimistic.

Originally posted at TreeHugger.com on January 3, 2010. Photo by Jesse Fox.

In an article entitled Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com takes a critical look at the popular Transition Towns movement, which attempts to prepare communities for the challenges they face due to peak oil and climate change.

But what I found fascinating, and indeed inspiring, about his piece were his thoughts on transforming local politics.

What Steffen proposes is a new way of looking at civic engagement, minus the standard cynicism and defeatism. “Cynicism is obedience,” he writes, while public processes are too often crafted to sap the will of the public to engage. Such processes, he says, which attempt to deter citizen participation with the promise of boredom, should be viewed with “deep distrust.”

Below, excerpts from Steffen’s piece. Well worth reading:

What can any of us do in the face of planetary catastrophe?

Staring into the ecological abyss, it’s easy to feel small and unimportant. Edward Abbey wrote truly, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” But it’s often hard to see how any actions we might actually take, as individuals, will have any meaningful effect, whatsoever: leaving aside the pablum about small steps and each doing our part, we all know in our hearts that taking out the recycling will not do much to slow the melting of Greenland…

What we need is a movement of local efforts aimed at changing things that matter at scales that matter, based on the politics of optimism. The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren’t, and that we’re so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.

Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it. They craft public process to sap the will of the public to engage: as Richard White writes, bureaucracies use boredom the way a skunk uses smell. They make an effort to keep us in a state of constant economic and social anxiety undermining our willingness to connect with and trust each other. Whether these tools are used consciously or unconsciously is completely beside the point — you can apply whatever degree or lack of conspiracy theory you like: the effects are observable, and well-documented.

The great secret here is that we are more powerful than any of us usually admits. While it is true that organized greed beats unorganized democracy every time, it’s also true that organized, educated, passionate democracy is the most powerful political force ever seen, and we live amidst an exploding proliferation of tools for organizing our communities, sharing our knowledge and connecting our passions.

What is more, we live in a time where transparency and collaborative insight give ad hoc groups the capacity to understand the vast, complex systems we depend on, but which the powers that be have cloaked in layers of exclusionary expertise, regulation and jargon. We are not only capable of understanding the systems around us, but of imagining and inventing their replacements, and mobilizing the constituency to make that happen…

What would it take to design a movement that actually changed what needs to be changed? How can we design a networked movement that aims to forestall and undo catastrophe, by building bright green regions and sharing innovation?

Here are a few of the larger design challenges involved:

• Finding places where a system has been draped in complexity, and revealing it in clear, beautiful, interesting ways. How things work is of inherent interest to many people. How can we reveal the workings of the systems around them in ways that help them see the usefulness of change?

• Making public life exciting where boredom has dampened people’s enthusiasm, if not simply driven them completely out of civic involvement. How can we simultaneously reject needless process in favor of quick, transparent and measured decisions and enliven participation? Being part of democracy ought to feel exciting, and invigorating: we should view every part of it that’s boring with deep mistrust.

• Launching a counter-attack on pervasive cynicism and finding fresh ways to call it what it is: cynicism is obedience. The very origins of the word mean “like a dog.” Stripping cynicism of its rebelliousness, making it looks as entirely whipped an attitude as it is, is a huge step towards reclaiming the public realm. Indeed, I think we need to deploy our full battery of humorists, satirists and artists on looking at what part of us makes us so ready to accept the idea that all is sham and we’re beaten before we start.

• Reaching out to people have been made afraid of participation, and spreading enthusiasm and a delight in civic life. How can we make civic participation more welcoming, and jam the manufactured reactionary anger that conservatives use to gum up our public processes (through tea-bagging and astroturfing)?

• Reclaiming the media sphere by supporting local journalism that actually reveals, informs and educates. How can we develop means to support reporting, writing, filmmaking and public discussion that advances our understanding of what to do, leaving behind the tired debates of the last generation?

• Reinventing or replacing the kinds of civic institutions — the university departments, think tanks, research labs, planning agencies — that democracies need to make informed decisions, in the wake of 40 years of work by the right wing to either destroy these institutions or overwhelm them with new, better-funded ideologically-conservative versions.

• Diffusing innovation through our local businesses and industry groups. Unsustainable business is bad business, even in the fairly short run: sound economic strategy in times like ours is to get in the business of replacing the broken systems around us. How do we build local business cultures that support transformation as the opportunity it is?

• Above all else, reimagining the future. Since we can’t build what we can’t imagine, and visions of the future dominate our ability to understand the present, how can we embrace future-making tools to redefine the possible in our communities? Because the powers that be have one gigantic weakness: they offer us no future, none at all, and every time we shift the debate to be about where we’re going, we win.

We don’t yet know how to do all this, but we can iterate our way into it through experimentation, exploration and innovation, consciously practicing ally etiquette to link efforts across a spectrum of systems into a collaborative whole. Indeed, since the whole thing starts with vision, simply sharing our visions for what this looks like is a huge step in the right direction.

We don’t need to wait for some mythical cultural awakening, either. There are more than enough of us, already. In most cities around the world, a fraction of one percent of the citizens getting energized and turning out — using new tools to learn together, coordinate strategy and exert public pressure — would feel like a tsunami of democracy and creative engagement.

And hidden allies can be found everywhere. Public life is full of people who want to see change, but need political cover. Change agents await activation in our government agencies, businesses, schools, political parties and media. If we can begin to engage the systems in which they’ve been quietly laboring at the systems level, we can expect unseen helpers in unexpected places.

It’s time to make ourselves into the people who can do what’s needed. To fight the powers that be, we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be, building the future we want.

Scenes from a new film on post-Katrina New Orleans, which chronicles the city’s troubled attempts to deal with its destruction, while planning its reconstruction.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt the city of New Orleans a near-fatal blow from which it has yet to recover. With entire neighborhoods underwater, communities suddenly finding themselves in exile and city services and infrastructure in disarray, the prospects for reconstruction looked bleak. Hundreds lost their lives in the disaster, while economic damaged was estimated to be over $100 billion.

Over four years later, a battle still rages in New Orleans over where, what and how to rebuild.

Producer and director Luisa Dantas has been following the reconstruction process on the ground in New Orleans since 2006. Working alongside local social justice and grassroots organizations, Dantas has pieced together a narrative about post-Katrina reality called “Land of Opportunity.”

From the website: “A feature-length film and multi-platform project, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY follows a diverse group of people in the early years of post-catastrophe New Orleans as they struggle with the most American of pursuits: seizing opportunity in the wake of tragedy. We get to know local and displaced residents, urban planners, immigrant laborers, and activists, as they try to build a better future for themselves and their families while restoring the “water-proof soul” of America.”

Land of Opportunity is scheduled to be released in 2010.

Check out the trailer:

More clips:

Sectioned Off from JoLu on Vimeo.

Out of Site from JoLu on Vimeo.

Deep Sixed from JoLu on Vimeo.

St. Joe (experimental short) from JoLu on Vimeo.

Tel Aviv’s affordable housing plan remains on paper, while rents continue to rise.

In August of 2008, the Tel Aviv Municipality announced with much fanfare that it had a “revolutionary plan” to build hundreds of affordable apartments for young people in the city.

One year and a global financial crisis later, apartment prices in the city continue their inexorable climb. Mayor Ron Huldai, who announced the plan just months before the local election, was re-elected, and the plan to build affordable housing vanished from the headlines.

Meanwhile young people, faced with rent hikes at the end of their leases, have increasingly decided to move out of the city center. Those who stubbornly insist on staying put have crowded into smaller, more dilapidated apartments. Others have come up with creative ways to save money, like converting their living rooms into an extra bedroom.

What happened to Tel Aviv’s revolutionary plan?

*****

One thing, at least, is clear: work on the plan is done. Earlier this year, in May, the municipality announced that the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing, the panel of experts that put together the plan, had completed its work.

The commission, composed of external consultants from various disciplines alongside municipal officials, had come up with a list of recommendations that sketched out approximately what an affordable housing program in Tel Aviv would look like. Now it was up to the political echelon to decide what to do with those recommendations, which aspects to approve and how to proceed with the initiative.

To date, the commission’s work is still awaiting approval. Despite the city’s promise back in May that the plan would be presented to the mayor and deputy mayors “in the coming weeks,” that has yet to happen. The commission’s full report, which contains details on the various policy tools under discussion, has not been released to the public.

Dr. Emily Silverman, a researcher from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, headed the team of professional advisors to the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing.

“Our main recommendation was that new residential projects built in the center and north of the city include affordable units for rent,” she says. “In exchange for these units, developers would be given extra building rights.”

Silverman continues: “Another recommendation was to push forward building plans in the south of the city and in Jaffa which have already been approved, but have yet to be built due to various regulatory obstacles. Pushing forward those plans would significantly increase the supply of housing.” Indeed, according to press releases put out by the municipality last August, two such projects, slated to contain some 1,650 new apartments, were to be pushed forward immediately.

In addition, a range of other policy tools were proposed, and the commission even suggested specific plots of land for pilot projects.

As to why the commission’s recommendations have yet to be approved, Silverman blames the delay on opposition to the plan among senior figures in the municipality.

The municipality, for its part, appears to be keeping its cards close to its chest for the moment. In response to an inquiry regarding the delay in approving the plan, the Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro:  “The subject of affordable housing is a strategic issue of great significance. Therefore it is important that the approach be allowed to mature in order to reach an operative state. The same goes for the full publication [of the commission’s recommendations].”

*****

The concept of affordable housing is not really new in Israel. From the early days of the state, government policy aimed to make decent, affordable housing accessible to the majority of the population. The Housing Ministry, which wielded tremendous power and influence, once built entire cities from scratch and provided housing for millions of new immigrants.

Over the years, however, as Israel’s centralized, socialist economy gave way to a privatized, capitalist one, the state effectively withdrew from the housing market and the Housing Ministry lost much of its power and resources. The government ceased building public housing apartments for low-income populations, and instead began selling off publicly-owned apartments. In cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where changes in the rental market threatened to make housing out of reach even for middle-income people, pressure began to grow for local governments to intervene.

Israeli municipalities, however, strapped for cash and constrained by antiquated legal structures (the law setting out the powers of local authorities in Israel is a leftover from the British Mandate), were hardly in a position to respond. The demand for a new sort of affordable urban housing grew out of this situation, led by young people struggling to remain in their urban neighborhoods and academics who pointed out that many cities around the world, including London, New York and Paris, had successfully implemented programs to regulate rents and build affordable housing units. In both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the issue played a key role in the elections for mayor in late 2008.

Initially, officials inside the Tel Aviv Municipality approached the idea with trepidation. Mayor Ron Huldai was quoted more than once criticizing the idea in the media.

Dr. Emily Silverman recalls that the project, ironically, grew out of an attempt by the municipality to justify not taking action. It was back in 2007, Silverman recalls, that calls from local politicians calling on the city to explore the issue of affordable housing were growing louder. In response, City Engineer Chezi Berkowitz asked the municipal planning team to draw up a professional opinion explaining why the municipality did not have the capability to create such a project, based on two previous assessments of the issue written by economists.

However, when members of the planning team consulted with Silverman, a known expert on the subject, she managed to convince them that it was possible. The planners in turn convinced the City Engineer, and thus the idea for the commission was born.

*****

Another irony is this: even if the plan is eventually approved and implemented, it probably won’t lower rents across the board. A certain number of people, it’s unclear how many, would be eligible for cheaper apartments, but the steps that the municipality is currently considering are not expected to have a significant impact on the greater housing market.

Gil Gan-Mor is a human rights lawyer at The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and a leading advocate of housing rights and affordable housing. ACRI is part of the Coalition for the Advancement of Affordable Housing in Israel, which also includes The Association for Distributive Justice, Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, and research institutes from Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa and the Technion. The coalition has started a Hebrew-language blog as a platform for public discussion on the issue and is working on passing an affordable housing law in the Knesset.

Gan-Mor says he supports the move to create affordable housing in Tel Aviv, but believes that the city’s plan in its current form leaves much to be desired.

“The municipality could decide to set up a rent control mechanism that would allow landlords to raise rents incrementally, according to a set percentage every year,” says Gan-Mor. “Today, landlords take advantage of a lack of supply to hike rents substantially, and if a renter doesn’t agree to this, he simply has to look elsewhere.”

Dr. Emily Silverman admits that building a large number of affordable apartments for a specific group would probably not have a significant effect on the general rental market. “Affordable housing programs don’t usually result in a general lowering of prices, except for the target population,” she says.

However, she adds, speeding up construction of already-approved plans in order to increase supply (which was recommended by the commission) could theoretically lower rents across the city – it’s a matter of supply and demand. Silverman agrees that rent control mechanisms could also potentially benefit all of the city’s renters.

The problem, says Gan-Mor, is that regulatory tools, like rent control, which have been implemented successfully in many places in the world are not even being discussed – at least not according to the information that the municipality has made public. Says Gan-Mor: “The city’s method of releasing information through periodic press releases does not allow for a proper public discussion of the issue.”

He also notes that the municipality is considering making army service a condition for eligibility for affordable housing, a move which would effectively exclude the Arab community of Jaffa from the program.

Questions have also been raised regarding the project’s choice of target population. The commission’s mandate was to find affordable solutions for households with monthly incomes of between NIS 12,000-13,000. Last year, Dr. Emily Silverman described the target group to Metro as “moderate-income, socially-mobile young professionals.” For this population, the city would offer rents of around NIS 2,800.

However, as Gan-Mor points out, the plan provides no solutions for low-income residents of the city.

The municipality admits that this is the case, but argues that it does not have the resources to provide housing assistance to a low-income population. The Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro: “Public housing, everywhere in the world and in Israel as well, is the responsibility of the government, and not the responsibility of the local authority. The municipality does not have the capability to supply public housing like the government, without any means or appropriate tools. Therefore, the recommendations define the target population as an intermediate population, which is able to pay, but unable to afford to live in the city at market rates.”

To Gan-Mor, the city’s refusal to provide housing aid to low-income families is unacceptable. “The municipality’s plan states that it trusts the government to provide housing assistance for people in the lower income deciles,” he says. “The problem with this is that the State has scaled back its public housing programs in recent years. The waiting period for public housing in the center of the country can be over ten years, and rental subsidies provided by the government are way too low to cover rents in the Tel Aviv area. The inevitable result is that people with low incomes are forced to leave the city.”

*****

Not everyone, of course, is convinced of the merits of affordable housing. A number of conservative economists have publicly expressed their doubts about the plan. One of them is Dr. Yair Duchin, a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who made headlines last month when he called the idea of providing affordable housing in Tel Aviv “idiotic.”

Though he admits that, from a social perspective, there may be a problem in Tel Aviv’s housing market, Duchin says he prefers to look at the larger picture. The country’s periphery, he says, is emptying out. “Youth from all over Israel, including graduates of universities in Haifa and Be’er Sheva, are streaming to Tel Aviv. Affordable housing will only serve to attract more of them.”

“Of course the mayor of Tel Aviv wants to attract a young, strong, productive population. That’s perfectly legitimate. But there are also national goals. I think that the country’s limited resources should not be invested in those who want to live in central Tel Aviv.”

As for Tel Aviv’s young residents, Duchin suggests that they move out of the city, to Bat Yam, Holon or Petach Tikvah. If enough people move out of central Tel Aviv, he says, perhaps market forces alone will be enough to lower rents.

*****

For Prof. Noah Efron, a city council member from opposition party City for All (Ir Likulanu), it’s pretty clear why the plan is not going anywhere. “Nobody within the municipality wants to advance it, so it’s simply not being advanced,” he says.

While Efron thinks that the commission’s plan is insufficient, he admits that “it’s excellent for what it is,” and should be implemented right away. Noting that City for All has a much more extensive affordable housing plan of its own, Efron says he believes that the municipality’s plan has the potential to establish a number of important principles.

“The implementation of mixed housing, building for the rental market, dealing with apartment sizes – talking about these issues, even on a small scale, can begin to change the discussion about housing in the city and create important precedents, making it easier for the city’s planning committees to insist that developers build projects that are mixed, and not just for the rich or super-rich.”

To a limited extent, that has already begun to happen. Even without an official stamp on the commission’s plan, city planning committees have begun to use the momentum created by its work to require developers to integrate affordable housing units into new projects.

This is what happened, for example, in discussions regarding the former site of the city’s wholesale market. An enormous real estate project is planned for the 60-dunam site, which sits partially on city-owned land near Carlibach Street. When representatives from several local political parties insisted that the plan include an element of affordable housing, the developer agreed to add 60 small, affordable rental units.

“In the scheme of things,” says Efron, “it’s a drop in the bucket. But it’s also a sign that, if we continue to be vigilant in the municipal committees and bring enough public pressure to bear, we can begin this process, eventually making it into the norm. The municipality has publicly committed to doing this, now we have to push it to honor its commitments.”

This article was originally published in The Jerusalem Post’s “Metro” supplement on Sept. 11, 2009 (click here for a pdf of the original print version).

This month, Tel Aviv’s derelict 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.

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

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, recently aquired by new owners, may be reincarnated as something different altogether, possibly a high-rise complex. 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.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com on August 9 2009.

Photo by Oren Ziv, courtesy of Activestills.org.

This past weekend, a couple friends and I helped four Sudanese families move out of Tel Aviv. We rented a van (which of course broke down mid-move), loaded up their possessions along with some furniture donated by several kind people, and set off for Nazareth, Hadera and Ashdod – distant cities where they hope to set up new homes. The families, refugees from conflict zones in Darfur and South Sudan, were grateful to us for our help. Leaving Tel Aviv was not their choice – as of the beginning of July, they are no longer allowed to live and work in Israel’s largest urban area.

Refugees everywhere tend to concentrate themselves on the fringes of big cities. Here, too, most of African refugee community, which began arriving here after Egyptian police attacked and killed Sudanese refugees protesting in Cairo in late 2005, took up residence in Tel Aviv’s poorer southern neighborhoods.

A particularly large wave of refugees arrived in Tel Aviv during the winter of 2008. During that time, it became common to see people sleeping outside in public parks or cramped into overcrowded shelters. Noticing the obvious distress of these newcomers to our city, several friends and I set up a voluntary organization to provide them with food, English and Hebrew lessons, children’s activities and whatever other services we could muster on a shoestring budget and with the help of a handful of volunteers.

Around the same time, the Israeli government, which also caught wind of what was going on, decided to restrict African asylum seekers from living inside Greater Tel Aviv (illegally, according to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). This policy still applies to the vast majority of the almost 20,000 refugees from Sudan, Eritrea and other countries currently living in Israel.

Apparently, the policy stemmed from a combination of NIMBY-ism on the part of the Tel Aviv Municipality, economic nationalism (“they are taking jobs from Israelis”) and the government’s fear that, if treated well, the refugees would tell all of their friends and family to come to Israel as well. The policy, called Hadera-Gedera after the two cities that delineate the edges of Metropolitan Tel Aviv, recalls (to my mind, anyway) the Pale of Settlement, Imperial Russia’s attempt to physically remove the Jews from the mainstream of Russian society.

While a small minority have been officially recognized as refugees, and thus granted ID cards and the right to work legally, the rest have been labeled by government officials as “refugee work immigrants” and “illegal infiltrators from enemy countries,” and told the leave the center of the country.

Until recently, the Hadera-Gedera policy was only loosely enforced. However, July 1st marked the inauguration of a new unit at the Population Administration, called “Oz,” charged with arresting and expelling all “illegal” foreign workers and asylum seekers. Whether the new unit’s appearance has anything to do with the rise of the nationalist far-right in Israel is unclear.

In any case, since then they have been conducting daily manhunts on the streets of Tel Aviv, targeting anyone with a foreign appearance. After they arrested hundreds of African refugees and ordered them to leave the city, the refugees got the message, and thus began the latest in a long series of displacements that this community has suffered.

The tragedy of it all is that the refugee community was finally beginning to find some stability and normalcy in Tel Aviv. Here, their kids studied in Israeli schools, they found jobs, free health clinics and aid organizations. How they will find jobs to pay their rents outside of the center of the country, where work is scarce, I do not know.

Needless to say, this is a community of sharp, resilient and warm people fleeing unimaginable circumstances. Many, many people in Tel Aviv reacted to their arrival with an outpouring of hospitality and generosity. There are more than a few people in Tel Aviv for whom the decision to expel them from the city represents the crossing of a red line – and it takes a lot for people to really take up such a cause in a country where every week seems to bring some new scandal or political upheaval.

The government, however, has hardened its heart toward these uninvited guests. Passed around like a human hot potato, the African community has not always been made to feel welcome. Almost every refugee that I have met spent the first several months of his or her stay in an Israeli prison, and, for most, the only official document they carry is still their “conditional release” from incarceration.

The government is promoting a new law which would criminalize the refugees, threatening them and those that assist them with long jail terms. According to the bill, my friends and I, by choosing to spend our weekend helping refugee families move, could find ourselves sentenced to 20 years in jail.

For the sake of comparison, Avraham Hirshson, Israel’s former Finance Minister who was found guilty of stealing millions from a workers’ federation, got only five and a half years in jail.

Like most Israelis, I come from a family that was forced to flee its home more than once. Almost everyone in this land, whether Jew or Palestinian, knows what it is like to be a refugee. If anyone should have compassion for these unfortunate people, it is us.

Originally published at Mondoweiss on July 26 2009.

A dramatic plan that would change the face of Tel Aviv is likely to be approved, despite the adamant opposition of residents and charges of sloppy and unprofessional planning.

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

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

The discussion, which some 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. The meeting, however, was conducted in a manner that seemed designed to exclude the public, and avoided discussion of the plans’ repercussions for 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 traffic arteries, 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 skyscraper-lined expressway being promoted by the city, the roads would create a major new traffic artery, channelling cars from the Holon Interchange south of the city to the office towers along Rothschild Boulevard.

The plans were 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 recently presented and approved the comprehensive plan, resulting in several appeals being submitted by city council members.

The day got off to a bad start when dozens of residents were refused entry into the meeting. 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, with officials claiming there was not enough space to let everyone in. The residents did eventually manage to get in, though, and made sure to make their presence felt, jeering the plan’s proponents and applauding when some council members spoke out against them.

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

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, which were neither printed nor submitted for public review, were only presented halfway through the meeting, on the request of a council member. Several neighborhood representatives criticized them 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 who live outside Tel Aviv, would add little to the fabric of life in that part of the city.

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

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.

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.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com.

A few days after T and S, refugees from South Sudan, had their first daughter, they were forced to leave Tel Aviv. By Florentine Lempp.

If I was the kind of person that had heroes, T. would be one of them. At the age of 23, she has just had her third child, the first girl after two boys. She’s a refugee from South Sudan who lived in Egypt for a while, until there too life became unbearable.

Almost two years ago, she walked across the border from Sinai into Israel, together with her husband S., in the search of a better life for their children. They carried the boys through the night, fearful of being caught by Egyptian soldiers or abandoned by the Bedouin smugglers to whom they had paid a large sum of money to guarantee their safe crossing.

They are devout Christians. According to S., they prayed, and their prayers were answered. They crossed the border unharmed and finally found their way to Tel Aviv. The rent here is outrageous, but what can you do – if you don’t take the apartment right away, another refugee will come, who might be willing to pay even more in order not to have to sleep in the park.

When I first met T., she was already four months pregnant. She had quit working in a kindergarten for children of refugees and foreign workers and was now only taking care of her own two kids – the quiet but very affectionate five year old, and the cute but hot-tempered little one, whom they lovingly call “Balagan (chaos) Boy”. I’ve never seen her sad, or worried, or even exhausted in light of what she has been through. When a friend got sick, when a neighbor had a child, she was always there to help.

On a very hot June afternoon, when the little electric fan in the apartment was unable to provide any relief from the heat, we took the two kids to the park. With a belly as big and as round as a basketball, about a week before she would give birth, we were sitting near the playground in Lewinsky Park, watching the boys running and climbing, ignoring the comatose homeless man sleeping under the slides and the used needles in the grass. We talked about the immigration police and the expected raids, their orders to expel those who don’t have a valid visa.

T., like so many Sudanese refugees, holds only a “conditional release” from prison, but it doesn’t allow her to live in Tel Aviv – or, for that matter, anywhere between Hadera and Gedera. It also does not allow her, or her husband, to work legally in order to support themselves. But someone has to pay for the apartment and for food.

The reason why the authorities don’t want the refugees to live in Tel Aviv is because, so they argue, the refugees take jobs and apartments that would otherwise go to Israelis. But whoever has paid attention to the kinds of jobs that refugees are doing, will see that it has been decades since those have been done by Israelis. Dishwashing (and other low-wage jobs in restaurants), cleaning and construction work have long been the domain of Palestinian laborers. Ever since the Second Intifada, the void of Palestinian laborers has been filled by refugees and foreign workers.

As for the apartments, I doubt that the shortage of affordable apartments would be solved by removing the refugees from the houses around the two bus stations, an area which is very unlikely to undergo the same process of gentrification that we have seen in other quarters of South Tel Aviv.

T. likes Tel Aviv. There is work here, and the landlords in the south of the city are used to renting their apartments to refugees (even though they demand exorbitant prices). The UN offices are here, and it is not too far from the Population and Migration Authority’s offices in Lod. Here, there are several aid organizations that support refugees and there is a free clinic in nearby Jaffa. But most of all, there is a community of refugees from South Sudan here who know and help each other. If they had to move to the periphery, they would lose their support system.

Two weeks later: the new baby was born, and S. was arrested shortly thereafter by the immigration police. They let him go, under the condition that he and his family leave Tel Aviv within the next six days. He went to Hadera to look for an apartment and a job, while T. stayed home with the kids, partly because she’s worried about the immigration police and partly because it’s too much of a hassle to leave the house with all three of them to look after.

He was not successful. Landlords and employers alike are wary of the “conditional release” that makes him look like an ex-convict. But he’s not giving up.

Neither T. nor her husband is expecting any favors or welfare from the state, all they want is safety for a while, for themselves and for their children, until they can go back to South Sudan. While in Israel, all they want is the chance to support themselves, to work for their living, like everybody else. In the meantime, despite the dire situation, and against all odds, they are optimistic that God will help.

The little baby girl is called “Joyce”.

Florentine Lempp is a political scientist, and works as a program coordinator for German study tours to Israel. She has spent much of the past year volunteering on behalf of the African refugee community living in Tel Aviv.

Published on Haaretz.com on July 27, 2009.

US High Speed Rail Association opens its doors this month in Washington DC. 

A national high-speed rail network up and running by 2030. Yes we can? (image courtesy of USHSR)

President Obama strongly supports high-speed rail, environmentalists are behind it (well, at least some of them) and the Federal Railroad Administration is already reaching out to other countries that have had success with it. High-speed rail looks like it’s going to happen. The question now is what kind of system will be built – how extensive, how fast and how integrated?

Last week, a new organization was founded which aims to help answer those questions. The US High Speed Rail Association, based in Washington DC, plans to lobby for a state of the art rail system that covers the entire country and provides service on par with the most advanced systems in the world. It has already unveiled its vision for high-speed rail in America – a significantly more ambitious vision than what has been floated thus far by the Administration in Washington.

“Our main objective is to organize the industry and to build public and political support for a nationwide high-speed rail network, built within 20 years,” USHSR President and CEO Andy Kunz said. “We see this as the next industrial revolution in America and our chance to convert our country to true sustainability and prosperity.”

The organization’s first move was to unveil a map showing what a complete national system, built in 4 phases and completed by 2030, would look like (see map above; for the animated version, click here). The map bears a certain resemblance to the “Vision for High-Speed Rail in America” unveiled by the Obama Administration in April. Both are based on the same 10 regional corridors, but USHSR’s plan raises the bar significantly. Calling for 17,000 miles of track, multi-modal stations and travel speeds of 220mph, the proposal bears a resemblance to rail maps in Europe.

USHSR plans to generate support for the plan and help advance the rail industry in America by organizing a series of public events and conferences (the first one is scheduled for October 22-23 in Washington DC). A partnership with the International Union of Railways in Paris has also taken shape, and USHSR plans on hosting tours of European and Asian high-speed rail systems in the future.

Said Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, Director General of the International Union of Railways and a member of USHSR’s Advisory Board:

“The ambitious plan recently publicized by President Obama in the framework of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act announces a fascinating time for railway development in America. A competitive high performance railway system – including a large network of high speed links – will constitute one of the pillars of US policies for transportation and sustainable development.”

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on July 12 2009.

Israel’s new point man on refugee issues spouts some pretty shocking opinions in an interview with Haaretz.

Handwritten poster hanging in a Darfuri refugee shelter in Tel Aviv (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

For about a year and a half now, I have been volunteering with the African refugee community in Tel Aviv. I’ve heard some of their stories, formed several friendships and met some incredibly inspiring and resilient people along the way.

Although in many ways the community is much better off now than it was a year or so ago, African refugees continue to face adversity and prejudice in Israel. While gradually emerging from their own personal traumas, and their collective culture shock, the refugees have met with a strange sort of hospitality on behalf of the Israeli government.

For several weeks, rumors have been circulating that the government is gearing up for a large-scale operation to arrest and expel “illegal” foreigners, including foreign workers, refugees and asylum seekers. Recently, a bill was overwhelmingly approved by the Knesset which would criminalize the refugees (Hebrew link to the text of the bill) and those who assist them.

Last week, Haaretz’s Nurit Wurgaft published an extensive interview with Yaakov Ganot, head of the Population Administration in the Interior Ministry, who agreed to shed some light on the subject (read it in English here and in Hebrew here).

Ganot, the architect of the government’s “Hadera-Gedera” policy (which prohibits refugees and asylum seekers from living and working in the center of the country) is in charge of a newly-formed government body, the Population, Immigration and Border Authority. Among other things, the authority will take over the issue of refugees and asylum seekers in Israel, and is set to begin operating July 1st.

I have to admit that I was so shocked after reading this article for the first time that I had to read it again. It wasn’t any easier to digest on the second reading.

The good news for people who care about human rights is that Ganot has no intention of forcibly deporting the 20,000 or so African refugees currently living in Israel. The bad news is that he is not inclined to do them any favors either, and apparently views them as lawbreakers by default: “The kind of thing you find nowadays in Tel Aviv, where illegal workers and infiltrators can just go about freely, this has to stop.”

In a display of circular logic that only an authentic Israeli bureaucrat could produce, Ganot explains that the refugees’ poverty is bad for Israel’s image: “They send the money home, live in horribly crowded conditions, and also give Israel a bad name, because they live in such poor conditions. A hundred people in a moldy shelter, 20 people in one apartment.” If Ganot’s new authority has any concrete plans to improve their living conditions or reduce the crowding in their apartments, he doesn’t mention them.

Ganot admits that the refugees are exploited by employers because they are illegal. The reason they are “illegal” is that they are not officially recognized by the government as refugees. Still, Ganot doesn’t understand what the big deal is: “We don’t send them back, so why do they need that official recognition right now?”

“They’re not going to be lovers of Israel because they’re hunted,”he adds. This is one of the myths put forward by the government – that these are mostly Arabic-speaking Muslims from enemy nations, and they are no great friends of ours. Many will also hint, as Ganot does, that there are security issues at stake.

From my personal experience, the opposite is usually true. While most do speak Arabic, and a great many are Muslims, the refugee community is probably among the more patriotic groups in the country. While I can’t speak for all, the refugees that I know are eternally grateful to Israel and to the Jewish people. They study Hebrew, hang the Israeli flag and some even wish to enlist in the army.

To write off the entire community as “not lovers of Israel” is not only an affront to the refugees, it is also short-sighted. Imagine what will happen when these young Darfuri and South Sudanese men return to their country speaking Hebrew and grateful to Israel for the asylum that they were granted here. What better allies could Israel ask for in a hostile state like Sudan? That officials like Ganot cannot grasp this testifies to an unfortunate lack of imagination.

In an apparent contradiction, Ganot admits that the refugees are just “scraping by,” but then goes on to criticize them for making “pretty good money,” which he says they send out of the country to their relatives: “When a Sudanese arrives here and goes to work cleaning houses, he makes pretty good money. He doesn’t pay income tax, or health tax. They live 20 people to a room. That’s [an income of] two thousand dollars.”

And, of course, Ganot cannot resist delving into meaningless and irrelevant demographic calculations: “We’ve reached a situation in which 1,680 people arrived in one month alone, when our entire aliya [Jewish immigration to Israel] is 14,000 people per year.”

He also can’t help but indulge in ignorant and racist stereotypes: “There are people who defecate in the waiting rooms, who attack and bite.”

In Ganot’s world, this is a new kind of phenomenon, which he calls “refugee foreign workers” – here by choice, not for lack of choice: “In our examinations, I would say that 99.9 percent of them are here for work. They’re not asylum seekers, they are not at any risk.”

On the South Sudanese: “Nothing is happening in southern Sudan. They didn’t come to us from Sudan. They come from Egypt, where they heard there’s a chance to make money in Israel.”

On the Eritreans: “The Eritrean ambassador met with me and he said, ‘Tell me, sir: If you had army deserters, what would you do with them?’ I said, ‘I’d put them in jail.’ He said, ‘They’re deserters. It’s not right that instead of returning them to Eritrea, you keep them here.’”

He neglects to mention that, unlike Israel, Eritrea is a cruel dictatorship that forcibly conscripts its young men in order to fight frequent and superfluous wars. The US views it as a “rogue state.” Ganot, apparently, has found a common language with its officials, who last year called on Israel to repatriate Eritrean “army deserters” to their homeland. Eritreans in Israel, for their part, are convinced that returning to their homeland would mean certain death at the hands of the regime.

And, as if his comments were not sufficiently insulting, Ganot even mocks the suffering of the refugees: “They’re upset about one thing only: That they can’t be in Tel Aviv, make a lot of money to send home, sit here and cry.”

The fact that the Israeli government has chosen to appoint someone who openly makes statements like these to a position where he is responsible for the fates of some 20,000 African refugees is revealing. As opposed to the (mostly volunteer) organizations that approach the refugee community from a position of compassion, respect and human solidarity, the government is determined to deal with the refugees as an unwanted nuisance – banishing them to the margins of society and issuing self-fulfilling declarations describing them as hostile infiltrators and enemies of Israel.

One can’t help but wonder if the politicians and government bureaucrats have already forgotten that they too, along with the entire Jewish people,  were once a nation of refugees, and that in their own interminable period in exile there were also those that chose to accomodate them, and those that chose to persecute them.

Postscript: In her July 1st op-ed in Haaretz, Avirama Golan offers an interesting explanation of the phenomenon described above. In her view, the Interior Ministry’s decision to target non-Jewish foreigners is the result of socio-economic and class politics, couched in the discourse of Jewish ethnic and religious identity:

“The Filipinas who bathe our elderly, the Chinese who build our luxury towers and the Thais who cultivate our fruits and vegetables for export often displace Israel’s Arab citizens. These citizens have no lobby, and no one cares about them or their lack of employment. In contrast, the Africans, South Americans, Ukrainians and all the rest, who clean houses and do other household scut work, displace a different group – the Jewish lower class.”

This class of people is effectively Shas’ electorate. Shas holds the Interior Ministry and dictates policy to officials like Yaakov Ganot that are charged with executing it. Shas, eager to serve as a lobby for its voters, thus chooses to expell foreigners working in one sector of the economy, while “importing” more and more foreign workers for another economic sector – all the while presenting these policies in the language of “Hebrew labor,” while ignoring questions of humanism and universal values.