COLUMN ONE : Israel Pays the Price of Progress : After making the desert bloom, the nation confronts the results of rapid growth and urban sprawl. Public concern over air and water pollution is just beginning.

As a young boy, Shai Ashkenazi used to swim in the clear waters of Haifa Bay and play on its beach of golden sand.

That was 45 years ago, when Israel was a brand-new nation and its leaders were still fired with the vision of redeeming the land they believed was the patrimony of the Jewish people.

These days, the only Israelis bold enough--some say crazy enough--to jump into Haifa Bay are activists desperate to call attention to the damage inflicted on the water and the land since then. Members of EcoAction, an Israeli group that patterns itself after Greenpeace, did just that in June, protesting the daily dumping of sludge into the bay by the Haifa Chemicals Corp.

Haifa is one of the country’s most heavily industrialized cities, and it is the most polluted. But environmentalists say Haifa is just an extreme example of the damage decades of poorly regulated industrialization have done to the entire nation. Rapid building has polluted Israel’s scarce supply of drinkable water, fouled its air and produced toxic wastes and garbage that the government can’t seem to get rid of.

“My children are experiencing a different Israel from the Israel I grew up in,” said Ashkenazi, 49. “We are living inside an ecological holocaust.”

The early Zionists drained the swamps, made the desert bloom and pulled what was once a backwater of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th Century. They created a vibrant, democratic state with a thriving economy, built the most formidable army in the region and fended off neighboring Arab armies in successive wars.

But now Israelis are looking at the environmental havoc that was wreaked along the way and asking: at what price?

Today, Israel is struggling with what government experts term multiple environmental problems--what environmentalists call multiple crises.

Experts focus on the continuing population growth and the accompanying urbanization. Immigration from the former Soviet Union is fueling a population growth rate of 2% a year, making Israel--with a population of about 5 million--the most rapidly growing industrialized nation.

“Israelis call it the Los Angelezatzia of Israel,” said Alon Tal, founder of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, a public-interest organization that specializes in environmental law. “You don’t build up, you build sprawled cities that are inefficient for public transportation. You gobble huge quantities of land and create pernicious air pollution.

“In California, with its huge quantities of land, it is not an intolerable situation. But Israel is so tiny, smaller than New Jersey. We are paving over the Holy Land and turning it into some sort of suburban nightmare.”

Urbanization is aggravating environmental problems that began to accumulate almost as soon as the early Zionist pioneers began clearing farmland and building factories here at the turn of the century. Raw sewage, hazardous chemicals and other pollutants pour into the Mediterranean Sea daily. Only the Tel Aviv area has a modern sewage treatment plant.

Jerusalem, the Holy City, has a small, antiquated plant that provides little treatment to the city’s sewage. Every day, tons of raw sewage runs off from Jerusalem’s hilltops, through polluted streams, and either pours into the Dead Sea or soaks into the Judaean desert.

More than 400 poorly run garbage dumps are leaching pollutants into the fragile coastal aquifer, a critical source of drinking water for the most populous part of the country. Tests run by the Environment Ministry show that some parts of the depleted aquifer already are polluted by the seepage.

Just outside Tel Aviv, near the nation’s only international airport, a 210-foot mountain of garbage, the Hiriya dump, is not only threatening ground water but also threatening airplanes landing at Ben Gurion Airport.

For 40 years, Hiriya has been the central dump for the densely populated Tel Aviv area. Flocks of birds swarm around the mound, drawn by the sight and stench of garbage. The Israel Airports Authority has warned that the birds could cause a disaster if one or more is sucked into the engines of a jumbo jet on its landing approach.

“It is a critical situation,” said Yossi Inbar, director of the solid waste division at the Environment Ministry. “Every day that we wait to close the illegal dumping sites and build proper landfills, we are contaminating the ground water. We are at a state of emergency.”

Household garbage is not the only waste threat. Hazardous materials continue to be illegally stored and dumped by businesses large and small. Traffic chokes the cities and highways, and air pollution is thought to be causing respiratory disease in children in the Haifa Bay area. Studies by the Ministry of Health have demonstrated a higher rate of such illnesses in children in Haifa than elsewhere in the country.

Air pollution is expected to become an even more serious problem in Jerusalem in coming decades. Ozone counts in the city already are frequently higher than standards that the Environment Ministry says are acceptable. At least one Israeli air-pollution expert insists that Jerusalem’s air quality will be as bad as that of Mexico City in 20 years unless tougher action is taken to reduce pollution spewing from factories and cars.

“I’m changing my mind quite frequently about which problem is the worst,” said Environment Minister Yossi Sarid. “Any time I think I have identified one problem as the most serious, another arises. We have many serious problems because the issue of the environment has been neglected for too many years in Israel.”

“Not one prime minister of Israel made the environment a top priority,” said Yosef Tamir, a former member of the Knesset, or Parliament, who is generally regarded as the only Parliament member in the nation’s history who has focused his political career on environmental issues.

Tamir, at 82 still an active environmentalist, blames the lack of widespread public interest on a combination of Jewish culture, Israel’s necessary preoccupation with survival and the fact that it is a nation of immigrants.

“It is not in Jewish tradition to have concern about the public areas, the areas outside the kitchen,” Tamir said. “In the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe, even in Jewish communities of Western Europe, there was a sense that the area outside the home belonged to the state, to the community that the Jews were not a part of.”

Awareness Is Low

Jews from more than 100 nations came together to form Israel, Tamir points out, many from societies where environmental awareness was low. Once here, they concentrated their energies--with spectacular success--on surviving six wars and building homes and businesses.

Even though the majority of the population is now native-born, the pressing concerns of daily life have hardly abated.

“My friends care about the environment,” insisted Sharon Tamir, Yosef Tamir’s 19-year-old granddaughter. “But when you know that you may have to do army service in Lebanon, where you can be killed, or that you may get on a bus that is blown up by terrorists, the environment does not seem like such an important issue.”

Never a Serious Issue

“Israel’s political leaders have always divided the issues facing the country into important issues and unimportant issues,” said Israel Barzilay, director of the Environment Ministry’s hazardous waste division. “Politics, foreign affairs and defense were always important issues. The environment was never an important issue.”

Now, with an energetic environment minister, an ongoing peace process with its neighbors and a rapidly advancing standard of living, the nation is making some important steps forward on some environmental issues.

Modern sewage treatment plants are planned, and money has been allocated for them. More unleaded gasoline is for sale in stations around the country, and catalytic converters are required on new cars. Tar on the nation’s beaches has been reduced, and penalties are being imposed for littering and illegal dumping. Inbar has closed nearly 200 illegal dumps and is hoping to open five centralized landfills--built to strict environmental standards--in the next three years.

Improvements have been made in the storage and transportation of hazardous materials and wastes, Barzilay said, but he acknowledged that there is still much to be done.

In southern Israel, for example, the government has pondered for years what to do about 40,000 tons of hazardous waste at the nation’s only legal toxic-waste dump, Ramat Hovav. Throughout the 1970s, the dump operated with little government oversight, and today there are massive pools of chemicals oozing into the ground water and emitting gases.

A $15-million incinerator is supposed to be installed next year to start burning up some of the stored wastes, Barzilay said. In the meantime, the site is open and collecting waste from around the country.

And as hazardous wastes continue to accumulate, so do hazardous materials that companies large and small import, handle and store without proper licensing. The ministry gained the authority to issue such licenses--and the staff to inspect sites--only two years ago, Barzilay said. He estimates that about 6,000 companies still are operating without the appropriate license.

Some communities have fought to block the construction of landfills, and some environmental groups are fighting the planned construction of a north-south superhighway that will connect the relatively remote southern region with the heavily populated central coastal zone.

Small Activist Groups

But Israelis have yet to organize any mass environmental movement; activist groups such as EcoAction remain small, under-funded and largely ineffective.

Yosef Tamir, who founded an umbrella group for non-governmental environmental organizations here, complains that American Jewish donors he approaches are uninterested in contributing to his organization: “The money always seems to go to efforts to promote Arab-Israeli understanding.”

Ashkenazi, an agronomist, has retreated to Kiryat Tivon, a small hillside community of 18,000 people 10 miles east of Haifa.

Founded by German Jewish immigrants in 1935, Kiryat Tivon is the only community in Israel with a comprehensive recycling program. The founders did their best to preserve the forest that covered Kiryat Tivon’s hills at the turn of the century. Now 20% of the land inside the city is set aside for parks and forests.

“Tivon is one of the small success stories as far as environment is concerned,” Ashkenazi said.

Yossi Sarid disagrees with the bleak vision that Ashkenazi and other environmentalists have of Israel’s future. Israelis are beginning to reorder their priorities, Sarid said. Despite the problems, he is optimistic that Israel will be able to turn around its environmental record.

“In the last three or four years, we have entered a period of recovery,” Sarid said. “The issue of the environment is finally becoming a national issue, as a result of the peace process and the normalization of life in Israel. Now more and more people in Israel do recognize the fact that the environment is a very serious matter.”

Sarid wins kudos from many for having infused the timid Environment Ministry with a greater sense of purpose and for having wrested from the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a bigger budget and larger staff.

But environmentalists complain that Sarid has found no comprehensive solutions to problems.

“In fact, a serious question remains [as to] whether the government of Israel is committed in a meaningful way to truly reversing the non-sustainable trends in Israel’s environment,” said activist Tal.

“In a year or so, Sarid will move on to some other ministry or this government will be out of power. And then what happens? Sarid has yet to win an important legislative battle on the environment.”

The nation has emission standards that are 25 years old, and its hazardous-materials law was issued by the British Mandatory government in what was then Palestine in the 1920s. The Environment Ministry’s inspectors are overworked and its powers are limited.

Until the government toughens pollution standards, builds a mass-transit system, encourages recycling and begins to more tightly regulate growth, Tal said, Israel’s environment will continue to deteriorate.

“There still hasn’t been a serious recognition that we are on the wrong track,” Tal said. “We have got to start asking for lifestyle changes if we are going to turn this country around. Otherwise, the myopia of the government, the short-term vision is going to deprive my kids of the kind of beautiful country we inherited.”