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Israel's roughly 200-km. coastline provides the country with an essential outlet to the Mediterranean neighborhood and the world at large - a hub for commerce, communications, shipping, fishing and gas and oil exploration. While each of these industries fulfills critical national needs and enables Israel to secure its place as a local and global purveyor of energy, agriculture and innovation, the multitude of sectors dependent on the sea for survival are often at odds with each other, and experts fear that a sensitive marine environment may be the unseen victim of regulatory mismanagement.
"The ecosystem is not managed as an ecosystem," Tammy Ganot, an attorney for Adam Teva V'Din (Israel Union for Environmental Defense), told The Jerusalem Post in a recent interview. "We are in a hot mess basically.
"Up until now... the marine ecosystem wasn't addressed as such," explains Ganot. "Each and every use was regulated and managed, some better and some worse, as silos - each one individually, not from an integrative perspective or cumulative perspective, and lacking any vision."
As early as the late 1990s and early 2000s, nations around the globe began moving toward adopting ecosystem-based management policies for their oceans and seas, Ganot explains. In the United States, for example, President Barack Obama established the National Ocean Policy by executive order in 2010, while the European Union has several relevant directives and policy instruments.
"In Israel, we are very far behind," she says. "It's a bit surprising because the sea is so crucial to Israel. We depend on it for energy - not just gas; it's also the coal plants on the coastline. We depend on it for food, in the fishing industry. We depend on it for security."
Perhaps most importantly, she argues, Israelis depend on the Mediterranean Sea for their drinking water, as about 75% of Israel's drinking water is the result of desalinating sea water.
In Israel's Mediterranean exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the lines are blurry as to whether environmental regulations apply. The result is a problematic and confusing situation that leaves the waters vulnerable to mismanagement.
While a Justice Ministry opinion says that fiscal and environmental legislation should apply to the EEZ, the country's Planning and Building Law dictates the opposite, Ganot explained. In addition, the...