Yosef Tamir, a Gahal chairman of the Knesset’s Ecology Committee, said that there was not a single river in Israel which has not been polluted. During a meeting with newsmen in the Knesset, he warned that without drastic action, natural resources in the administered territories would suffer the same fate of those within the Green Line, the cease-fire lines established after the Six-Day War.
To coordinate the fight against environmental pollution, Tamir suggested the creation of a governmental body–preferably a separate Ministry as in many other developed countries–backed by the law and with legal power to take effective action.
The subject of ecology has been neglected, according to Tamir, because of a lack of interest among the other members of Israel’s Cabinet–an aloofness not shared by the younger ministers. Tamir’s unit, an ad hoc committee, will cease to exist unless the Knesset decides otherwise at the end of the current term.
He credited Koor industries with taking positive steps to fight pollution with its investment of millions of IL pounds in research. Another positive step, Tamir noted, has been the IL 10 million invested by the Nesher Works at Haifa for special filters.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
