Environment groups are putting pressure on Defense Minister Benny Gantz to move veteran environment activist Alon Tal from 24th place on the National Unity party’s electoral slate, to be released Tuesday, to a realistic spot.
National Unity is a partnership between Gantz’s Blue and White and Gideon Sa’ar’s right-wing New Hope for the upcoming national election on November 1.
Tal, 62, who grew up in the US, has spent most of his life working in the environmental field and is the Knesset member with the deepest understanding of environmental matters by far.
Maya Jacobs, former director of the marine conservation organization Zalul, and co-founder of a new organization called Choose Green, recently gathered signatures from 26 environmental groups, including Life and Environment, the umbrella organization for all environmental nonprofits, which Tal once chaired.
The letter, dated August 23, which attracted little media coverage, largely because of Tal’s reluctance to be interviewed on the matter, appealed to Gantz to put a climate and environment expert in the slate’s top ten, expressed concern that the environment was absent from National Unity’s platform, and warned that Choose Green would publish a green index of parties in the run-up to the November polls.
Jacobs told The Times of Israel Monday that security-minded members of National Unity such as Gantz (a former IDF chief of staff) and Matan Kahana (a former fighter pilot who quit the Yamina party for National Unity) had to understand the national security dangers of climate changewhich, together with pollution, were killing more Israelis annually than war.
Pollution alone is thought to kill around 2,000 Israelis each year.
Maya Star, a young activist at the Saving the Jerusalem Hills organization, which has campaigned against a massive development project, said, “Prof. Tal has helped the voice of many civil societies’ struggles to be heard in the Knesset, and so it was with us from day one. He led the creation of a Knesset caucus for the protection of the Jerusalem hills, which drew more than 20 other MKs, initiated debates, submitted queries, and made sure that the Jerusalem hills remained on the Knesset agenda. He attended all the discussions in the planning committees and spoke and gave hope to future generations who don’t want Israel to be covered with concrete and asphalt.”
In July, the independent investigative website Shakuf (Transparent, in Hebrew) found that in one of the most polarized Knessets in history, Tal had managed to get a record 51 out of 83 private members’ bills, most of them dealing with the environment, signed by members of the opposition.
Before becoming an MK, Tal served as chair of the department of public policy at Tel Aviv University.
After several unsuccessful attempts to enter national politics, he slipped into the current Knesset under the Norwegian law, which allows MKs who become ministers to vacate their seats for others further down the list.