Sea change
By Amir Zohar
In April 2006, an architectural firm headed by Dr. Gil Har Gil and Dafna
Grinstein was informed that it was being awarded the Azrieli Prize for Urban
Planning, for the restoration of Ben-Gurion Avenue in the German Colony of
Haifa. Barely two months later, a challenging new commission, accompanied
by the offer of a high fee, arrived in the office of the landscape architects high
on Mount Carmel: planning the Israel Navy's new port in Haifa's Bat Galim
area. The project bore an impressive name from the realm of mathematics: a
polynomial.
"When the plans were presented to us, we blanched at the spatial
implications," Grinstein recalls. "We discovered a very large structure,
narrow, long and high, and around it buildings on dried sea areas. They
wanted us to plan the whole complex opposite Ben-Gurion Avenue. When we
found out the purpose of the central structure, which is a bit secret, we realized
that our design considerations, as architects of the German Colony and as
concerned Haifans, were not the only considerations. We tried to bring about a
substantive change of location, but found that we had no chance of exerting
any influence, so we dropped the project. Landscape architecture is a
profession of principles, and it is important for us to maintain red lines: our
decision about whether to accept a commission is based on values, not just on
the financial aspect."
Armed with the information about the new navy port, Har Gil and Grinstein -
whose exhibition on 60 years of landscape architecture in Israel has just
opened at the Zezeze Architecture Gallery in Tel Aviv - hurried to the office of
the Haifa city engineer, Ariel Waterman. Waterman was not surprised at the
plans to expand the military port, as the municipality was then in the midst of
negotiations with the navy and the Interior Ministry about the establishment of
a military anchorage west of the existing base. But he was appalled by the
scale of the planned central structure - the navy had not given him that
information.
Waterman briefed the mayor, Yona Yahav, and asked the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) for clarifications. The navy quickly overcame its embarrassment
and presented new sketches. These now contained several structures not in the
previous plan, but they were blurred. Furious, Waterman demanded more
precision and more detail. Only then were the vast dimensions of the
polynomial revealed, though most of the plans remained shrouded in mystery.
Naval algebra
"Polynomial" is a term from algebra. According to Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, it refers to "a mathematical expression of one or more algebraic
terms each of which consists of a constant multiplied by one or more variables
raised to a nonnegative integral power." The borrowing of the algebraic term
is suggestive of the complexity of the project. Maybe that is why the navy and
the Haifa Municipality have put out a variety of descriptions concerning its
planned exterior, all of which, nevertheless, have one element in common:
north of the present naval base, a new breakwater will be built and 520
dunams (130 acres) of the sea will be dried out. The nearby training base, with
all its buildings and facilities, will be moved to the new site; warships will
anchor at the new dock; and close by, other buildings will be erected for the
crews of navy vessels, for the shipyard and the administrative staff. The
polynomial will be built in the inner harbor - a structure 150 meters long, 25
meters high and with a roof area of about 12 dunams (three acres). It will be a
sophisticated facility for the maintenance of naval craft, including advanced
submarines and other vessels that are being built for the navy abroad.
"The polynomial is an anchorage for future vessels that the navy will receive,"
a senior naval officer explains. "The large central structure, namely the
polynomial, is intended to provide cover for operational activity of surface
vessels and submarines, which require an additional infrastructure for their
maintenance. Following the criticism of its size, it was lowered and is now
only 21 meters high. It was also moved 85 meters to the west, so it will not
affect the view from the German Colony."
This conversation, in which three navy representatives participated, took place
last week in Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. It was intended to
provide a first public response ahead of the public discussion of the project.
The navy officers also sought to rebut what they say are exaggerated
simulations of the project that have been posted on the Internet, as well as to
respond to renderings prepared for the Haifa Municipality by Prof. Yigal
Tzamir from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion,
which are here being made public for the first time. According to the navy
sources, "Tzamir's renderings may be correctly marketed, in terms of the
flecked colors and the black buildings, but they are not accurate."
But a perusal of the renderings shown to Haaretz by the navy, which are being
made public here for the first time, shows that the differences are not great. In
fact, the military renderings continue the obfuscation trend. Beyond the
question of whether the view to the north from the German Colony will be
degraded, the new base is going to change the shoreline where Mount Carmel
meets the sea. The new structures, to be built on a large area of what is
presently the sea, will be highly visible from all the city neighborhoods that
have a sea view.
"This story will cast a giant shadow over the shoreline that has been imprinted
in our minds all our lives," says the rector of the University of Haifa, Prof.
Yossi Ben-Artzi, from the Department of Land of Israel Studies.
Underlying the architectural ambiguity is operational secrecy having to do with
the new craft that the navy will acquire. In the second half of the 1990s, the
navy received three Dolphin-class submarines that were built in Germany. In
June 2002, Haaretz quoted a Washington Post report stating that "Israel has
acquired three diesel submarines that it is arming with newly designed cruise
missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads." According to a book published
at the time by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Israel could
"have a deployment at sea of one nuclear-armed submarine at all times."
(Source: www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0615-03.htm)
Since then, contacts with Germany continued for the purchase of two more
submarines, and last July, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized their
acquisition, at a price of $400 million each. In April of this year, The Boston
Globe noted that a fleet of five submarines will ensure Israel's ability to deploy
submarines in the Persian Gulf area, though Egypt's refusal to allow the
passage of Israeli subs through the Suez Canal will force the vessels to sail
around Africa. The result will be more frequent need for maintenance, thus
apparently accounting for the huge size of the polynomial: to enable a number
of vessels to be handled simultaneously, without the enemy having information
about the number of submarines and other vessels that are at sea or in port at
any given time.
The IDF spokesman stated in response: "In the seventh decade of its existence,
Israel continues to cope with a complex security reality and is deploying to
provide a response to the challenges. The navy received authorization to
expand the military base for additional vessels that will be received in the
coming decade."
Military misrepresentation
The national goals of the polynomial and the historic connection between
Haifa and the navy have sown much confusion among the residents of Haifa,
who voted into power a joint list of the Greens and Shinui (now Kadima). "In
every normal country, the army adapts itself to the citizens,and not the other
way around," protests MK Moshe Kahlon (Likud), who until recently was the
Greens' candidate for mayor. "This is another aspect of the disparaging
treatment of Haifa. I try to imagine the reactions if there were plans to build a
similar facility on the beaches of Tel Aviv or Herzliya. There they build
marinas, but here they build facilities for submarines."
Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens
in Israel, mourns the dream that the port of Haifa will one day be a purely
civilian site. "Experts worked here for years to develop an open port for
peacetime, but apparently no one intends to make peace here. All we know
how to do is criticize organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, which operate
from civilian areas."
Prof. Ben Artzi: "By means of a clandestine security committee, all the hopes
of restoring to the city what the English took from it - the opening of the
harbor and the creation of a sea front - are being dashed." The mysterious
security committee referred to by Ben Artzi has a name: the Security
Installations Committee [SIC] of the Interior Ministry. In March 2007, Dr.
Yossi Dalal, from the office of the Haifa Municipality's legal adviser, filed an
administrative petition against the authorization of the SIC plan. In addition to
a range of complaints relating to the plan's environmental aspects, the
municipality claimed that the navy had misled it for two years and had
extracted its consent by misrepresenting the plan as being intended solely for
an anchorage, without any mention of the polynomial.
The IDF Spokesman denies this: "The promotion of the plan took three years
and was characterized by full transparency and the involvement of all the
civilian planning bodies."
The court proceedings regarding the petition were conducted behind close
doors. In the end, the IDF agreed to allow the Haifa Municipality to put its
case to the National Appeals Commission of SIC. The local media and the
green organizations knew nothing of the new reality until September 2007,
when the gag order on the case was lifted and it was announced that the
appeals commission had rejected the municipality's appeal, citing urgency in
the military timetable.
So far the wave of public protest has been blocked by the municipality itself,
which believes it can solve the problem with its own resources. In October
2007, the municipality appealed the decision of the appeals commission, this
time in the Administrative Affairs Court in Jerusalem. At the same time, the
municipality is holding contacts with the Defense Ministry on the possibility of
moving the project to the eastern port, which will soon be built, or on changes
to the original plan.
Black globe
A week ago, the green umbrella organization Life and Environment gave its
Black Globe award to the SIC for its poor environmental record. The award
was presented to the committee - in absentia - at an event in which Green
Globe awards were presented to environmentally conscious groups. SIC was
condemned for a series of secret decisions to establish security installations in
cases where secret discussions were not called for. The polynomial was
described in the ceremony as "a vast security structure that is going to be built
on the Haifa shoreline and was approved in a short, closed procedure, without
public participation and contrary to the National Master Plan" as it relates to
the Haifa coast.
The SIC bodies of the Interior Ministry operate in conjunction with the District
Planning and Building Commissions. They consist of representatives of the
Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Israel Lands Administration,
and each of them is chaired by the district planner of the Interior Ministry.
Several High Court of Justice decisions in recent years have involved SIC. One
example is a petition by the Galilee community of Hoshaya against the Defense
Ministry. Residents were stunned one day to see bulldozers leveling the ground
at the edge of their community. It turned out that the IDF planned to move the
depots of the huge Kurdani base near Haifa to the new site. The petition was
accompanied by an opinion of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense
(IUED), stating that there was no need to use SIC to approve every military
facility.
"Since the army makes use of this instrument to establish every last logistics
base, we proposed creating a filtering mechanism to limit that usage to two
criteria," says Eli Ben Ari, the IUED legal adviser. "One, in the case of a
secret installation, only in the sense that it is not visible to the eye. The second,
in the case of an urgent security need, if there is not enough time to go through
regular planning processes." The High Court of Justice ruled that since the
work had already begun and money was already spent, the Hoshaya project
could continue, but took careful note of the two criteria proposed by IUED:
urgency and secrecy.
What are the implications for the Haifa project?
Ben Ari: "In terms of the principles of secrecy and urgency, this is a plan that
probably should have gone through a regular planning procedure. Therefore,
in the last analysis, the question is how the procedure will be handled
henceforth."
Hold that protest
In the past few weeks, work has begun to dry the project area and build the
breakwater. Photographs published last week in a local Haifa weekly by the
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel did not rattle the Haifa public or
prompt the municipality to take any unusual steps.
What accounts for the fact that a project of this scale is proceeding so quietly in
environmentally-conscious Haifa?
"Already two years ago, when everything was still secret, I urged Mayor Yahav
to form a coalition of all the relevant bodies," Prof. Ben Artzi says. "He said
we should wait until the mediation and court processes concluded. Now the
work has begun and patience is running out. The municipality has to wage the
struggle with the active backing of the public. I do not know of any proposal to
stop the work that is on the agenda, and if there is one, that is a grave matter,
because it means that again, they are not bringing in the public."
In fact, so poorly informed is the public that two Haifa writers and public
activists, A.B. Yehoshua and Sami Michael, had never heard of the polynomial
plan. "In February 2007, there was this hush-hush talk at City Hall about how
there was going to be a terrible natural disaster on the stretch of beach that is
most burned into world consciousness in regard to Haifa," says Shlomo
Gilboa, a member of the municipal council in a one-person faction. "Everyone
panicked, including the mayor and his deputy, Shmuel Gelbhart, both of
whom, it later turned out, had known about the plan long before. Everyone
who knew anyone in the government rushed to Jerusalem, and I remember at
least one trip with Yahav and the municipality director general for meetings
with cabinet ministers."
According to Gilboa, after the appeal was denied, the senior officials in the
municipality were divided in their reactions, with Gelbhart, from the Greens,
accepting the decision to approve the project in return for the development of
the harbor front for the public. After the failure in the appeals commission,"
Gelbhart says, "the mayor decided to drop the whole polynomial thing . All I
can do now is write a letter to the State Comptroller's Office. It looks as though
we will not find out the implications of all this until the state comptroller's
report three years from now."
On October 2007, Gilboa launched a private campaign against the polynomial
project under the slogan, "Get the monster out of the landscape." During the
Haifa Film Festival he and his associates got 6,280 people to sign a petition
against the project, and another 12,000 people have signed via the Internet, he
says. "No one wants to help me with the financing," Gilboa says. "Yahav only
declared his support, helped me formulate the posters and allowed me to set up
stands for people to sign in the streets. On the day the film festival ended I got
a phone call from him at 7 A.M. He told me excitedly that the director general
of the Defense Ministry had called him at 2 A.M. and said, 'Stop that, but we
will help you.' Yahav asked me to stop the protest activities immediately,
because 'we are going to set up a joint committee with the army and change
the plan. You won, you did your thing, and from now on it's only me.'" Gilboa
hesitated for a moment, but agreed, "because it's the mayor who is asking, and
this whole thing also cost me a great deal of money."
Shai Cohen, director of the Haifa branch of the Nature Protection Society, was
lambasted by Yahav for expressing a lukewarm position. "Yahav called me one
day in the car and shouted over the phone," he relates. "He was angry because
I had dared to tell the press that the decision of the appeals commission was
regrettable, though it also contained positive elements. I told myself that if this
is the attitude, then I too would move to all-out opposition. Since then I have
coordinated with them, but the message I got was 'Quiet, we're talking.' As
part of the preparations for the Green Globe event, I went to photograph the
area and saw that an area of 70 meters had been dried out. It's true that the
appeals commission said the work could go ahead, but where is Yahav?"
In the two years since it learned of the plan, the municipality has not taken the
measures required in strategic struggles of this kind. There has been no public
campaign, no lobbyists hired to talk to the defense establishment or to interior
and finance ministries, no PR people to get the national press involved.
"Integrated forces and a public tailwind are perfectly fine, but not at this
stage," says the municipality director general, Shmuel Gants. "With all due
respect to those who are involved from academe and politics, they are not well
enough informed about the security details, and populist election-eve-style
headlines will not change the decision."
That is exactly the complaint against Yahav - that the municipality's protest
campaign against the polynomial is waiting for his election campaign, and in
the meantime you lost precious time and will not be able to restore the status
quo ante.
"We are ready for every possibility of reducing the damage, but I believe we
will reach a settlement. We understand that the defense establishment has to
acquire new vessels under timetable and other constraints, whereas the defense
establishment understands the municipality's concern about the blow to urban
development."
Have you abandoned the alternative of the eastern port?
"I suggest to Haaretz Magazine, too, to publish the story at a later time,
because there will soon be new agreements. And no, the eastern alternative has
not been abandoned."
The eastern option
Public activists are not the only ones who have been burnt by Yahav's style.
The negotiating teams of the IDF and the Defense Ministry were also deeply
offended by him at the personal level. (Yahav chose not to respond.) "I was
disappointed to hear Yahav inform us that he will not take into account
compromises that will not be suitable for him," the senior navy officer said this
week. From his point of view, Yahav is the bad guy who is leading opposition
to the plan. "We proposed to the municipality to be a partner in the external
design of the structure, in form and in color, and we even proposed an
architectural competition. After all, after the new port is built, it will be opened
to the public on Independence Day and will integrate into the life of the city.
Yahav wants only one thing: to kick the navy into the eastern port."
He no longer trusts you. For two years you sold him a story about an innocent
anchorage and hid the series of structures and the polynomial. Then you sent
blurred sketches. "We reject those allegations. As early as September 2004 we
invited Yahav to a meeting on the roof of the Haifa base and showed him the
plans for the dried-out area and the breakwater. He was enthusiastic, and from
his point of view, it was clear that this would advance the plan to open the
seafront. There were many more meetings, and even Gelbhart, from the
Greens, understood that the plan would make possible the opening of the
harborfront and preserve territorial continuity as far as Carmel Beach."
Since the SIC decision, there have been many planning modifications in the
area. The master plan for the eastern port was approved in principle by the
National Council for Planning and Building. The municipality accepted the
proposal of the Transportation Ministry to forgo an airport in return for
shifting the entire port eastward, into the Kishon Creek area. But the navy
rejects outright the proposal to establish the new compound in the northern
section of the eastern port and receive vast tracts of land that will become
available upon the dismantlement of the container farm and the airport.
"It looks as though navy engineers and planners have simply fallen in love
with their plan and are locked into it," says architect Har Gil.
"These are changes and plans on ice," navy sources say. "It took them 10
years to plan and build Carmel Port I, so are they going to finish the eastern
port in 16 months, as the municipality has declared? They will not manage to
bring even the material to dry the area in that time. We have to complete the
work by the end of 2011, but apart from the timetable, the eastern port is
unsuitable for the military needs of the new vessels that are on the way.
Another difficulty is to channel by land military equipment in an area that is
saturated with hazardous materials adjacent to the petrochemical plants and
the oil refineries."
The chairman of SIC and the Haifa District Planner, Adam Kulman,
consistently expressed a position different from that of the defense
establishment, taking note of the probable environmental harm. In the
discussions by the appeals commission, he recommended moving the project to
the eastern port.
"So what if he is the district planner and chairman of the committee," the
director general of the Interior Ministry, Aryeh Bar, says in response. "I am
the chairman of the National Planning and Building Council and a geographer
by profession, with 50 years of experience in planning in the Housing and
Transportation Ministries and on the Ayalon Freeway. The polynomial is
definitely not an eyesore, and Israel's security considerations take precedence
over every other consideration. With all due respect to the environmental
protection document, we have a country to run here. Can't a country build
itself military installations? Where will we build them, in Turkey?"
By Amir Zohar
In April 2006, an architectural firm headed by Dr. Gil Har Gil and Dafna
Grinstein was informed that it was being awarded the Azrieli Prize for Urban
Planning, for the restoration of Ben-Gurion Avenue in the German Colony of
Haifa. Barely two months later, a challenging new commission, accompanied
by the offer of a high fee, arrived in the office of the landscape architects high
on Mount Carmel: planning the Israel Navy's new port in Haifa's Bat Galim
area. The project bore an impressive name from the realm of mathematics: a
polynomial.
"When the plans were presented to us, we blanched at the spatial
implications," Grinstein recalls. "We discovered a very large structure,
narrow, long and high, and around it buildings on dried sea areas. They
wanted us to plan the whole complex opposite Ben-Gurion Avenue. When we
found out the purpose of the central structure, which is a bit secret, we realized
that our design considerations, as architects of the German Colony and as
concerned Haifans, were not the only considerations. We tried to bring about a
substantive change of location, but found that we had no chance of exerting
any influence, so we dropped the project. Landscape architecture is a
profession of principles, and it is important for us to maintain red lines: our
decision about whether to accept a commission is based on values, not just on
the financial aspect."
Armed with the information about the new navy port, Har Gil and Grinstein -
whose exhibition on 60 years of landscape architecture in Israel has just
opened at the Zezeze Architecture Gallery in Tel Aviv - hurried to the office of
the Haifa city engineer, Ariel Waterman. Waterman was not surprised at the
plans to expand the military port, as the municipality was then in the midst of
negotiations with the navy and the Interior Ministry about the establishment of
a military anchorage west of the existing base. But he was appalled by the
scale of the planned central structure - the navy had not given him that
information.
Waterman briefed the mayor, Yona Yahav, and asked the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) for clarifications. The navy quickly overcame its embarrassment
and presented new sketches. These now contained several structures not in the
previous plan, but they were blurred. Furious, Waterman demanded more
precision and more detail. Only then were the vast dimensions of the
polynomial revealed, though most of the plans remained shrouded in mystery.
Naval algebra
"Polynomial" is a term from algebra. According to Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, it refers to "a mathematical expression of one or more algebraic
terms each of which consists of a constant multiplied by one or more variables
raised to a nonnegative integral power." The borrowing of the algebraic term
is suggestive of the complexity of the project. Maybe that is why the navy and
the Haifa Municipality have put out a variety of descriptions concerning its
planned exterior, all of which, nevertheless, have one element in common:
north of the present naval base, a new breakwater will be built and 520
dunams (130 acres) of the sea will be dried out. The nearby training base, with
all its buildings and facilities, will be moved to the new site; warships will
anchor at the new dock; and close by, other buildings will be erected for the
crews of navy vessels, for the shipyard and the administrative staff. The
polynomial will be built in the inner harbor - a structure 150 meters long, 25
meters high and with a roof area of about 12 dunams (three acres). It will be a
sophisticated facility for the maintenance of naval craft, including advanced
submarines and other vessels that are being built for the navy abroad.
"The polynomial is an anchorage for future vessels that the navy will receive,"
a senior naval officer explains. "The large central structure, namely the
polynomial, is intended to provide cover for operational activity of surface
vessels and submarines, which require an additional infrastructure for their
maintenance. Following the criticism of its size, it was lowered and is now
only 21 meters high. It was also moved 85 meters to the west, so it will not
affect the view from the German Colony."
This conversation, in which three navy representatives participated, took place
last week in Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. It was intended to
provide a first public response ahead of the public discussion of the project.
The navy officers also sought to rebut what they say are exaggerated
simulations of the project that have been posted on the Internet, as well as to
respond to renderings prepared for the Haifa Municipality by Prof. Yigal
Tzamir from the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion,
which are here being made public for the first time. According to the navy
sources, "Tzamir's renderings may be correctly marketed, in terms of the
flecked colors and the black buildings, but they are not accurate."
But a perusal of the renderings shown to Haaretz by the navy, which are being
made public here for the first time, shows that the differences are not great. In
fact, the military renderings continue the obfuscation trend. Beyond the
question of whether the view to the north from the German Colony will be
degraded, the new base is going to change the shoreline where Mount Carmel
meets the sea. The new structures, to be built on a large area of what is
presently the sea, will be highly visible from all the city neighborhoods that
have a sea view.
"This story will cast a giant shadow over the shoreline that has been imprinted
in our minds all our lives," says the rector of the University of Haifa, Prof.
Yossi Ben-Artzi, from the Department of Land of Israel Studies.
Underlying the architectural ambiguity is operational secrecy having to do with
the new craft that the navy will acquire. In the second half of the 1990s, the
navy received three Dolphin-class submarines that were built in Germany. In
June 2002, Haaretz quoted a Washington Post report stating that "Israel has
acquired three diesel submarines that it is arming with newly designed cruise
missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads." According to a book published
at the time by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Israel could
"have a deployment at sea of one nuclear-armed submarine at all times."
(Source: www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0615-03.htm)
Since then, contacts with Germany continued for the purchase of two more
submarines, and last July, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized their
acquisition, at a price of $400 million each. In April of this year, The Boston
Globe noted that a fleet of five submarines will ensure Israel's ability to deploy
submarines in the Persian Gulf area, though Egypt's refusal to allow the
passage of Israeli subs through the Suez Canal will force the vessels to sail
around Africa. The result will be more frequent need for maintenance, thus
apparently accounting for the huge size of the polynomial: to enable a number
of vessels to be handled simultaneously, without the enemy having information
about the number of submarines and other vessels that are at sea or in port at
any given time.
The IDF spokesman stated in response: "In the seventh decade of its existence,
Israel continues to cope with a complex security reality and is deploying to
provide a response to the challenges. The navy received authorization to
expand the military base for additional vessels that will be received in the
coming decade."
Military misrepresentation
The national goals of the polynomial and the historic connection between
Haifa and the navy have sown much confusion among the residents of Haifa,
who voted into power a joint list of the Greens and Shinui (now Kadima). "In
every normal country, the army adapts itself to the citizens,and not the other
way around," protests MK Moshe Kahlon (Likud), who until recently was the
Greens' candidate for mayor. "This is another aspect of the disparaging
treatment of Haifa. I try to imagine the reactions if there were plans to build a
similar facility on the beaches of Tel Aviv or Herzliya. There they build
marinas, but here they build facilities for submarines."
Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens
in Israel, mourns the dream that the port of Haifa will one day be a purely
civilian site. "Experts worked here for years to develop an open port for
peacetime, but apparently no one intends to make peace here. All we know
how to do is criticize organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, which operate
from civilian areas."
Prof. Ben Artzi: "By means of a clandestine security committee, all the hopes
of restoring to the city what the English took from it - the opening of the
harbor and the creation of a sea front - are being dashed." The mysterious
security committee referred to by Ben Artzi has a name: the Security
Installations Committee [SIC] of the Interior Ministry. In March 2007, Dr.
Yossi Dalal, from the office of the Haifa Municipality's legal adviser, filed an
administrative petition against the authorization of the SIC plan. In addition to
a range of complaints relating to the plan's environmental aspects, the
municipality claimed that the navy had misled it for two years and had
extracted its consent by misrepresenting the plan as being intended solely for
an anchorage, without any mention of the polynomial.
The IDF Spokesman denies this: "The promotion of the plan took three years
and was characterized by full transparency and the involvement of all the
civilian planning bodies."
The court proceedings regarding the petition were conducted behind close
doors. In the end, the IDF agreed to allow the Haifa Municipality to put its
case to the National Appeals Commission of SIC. The local media and the
green organizations knew nothing of the new reality until September 2007,
when the gag order on the case was lifted and it was announced that the
appeals commission had rejected the municipality's appeal, citing urgency in
the military timetable.
So far the wave of public protest has been blocked by the municipality itself,
which believes it can solve the problem with its own resources. In October
2007, the municipality appealed the decision of the appeals commission, this
time in the Administrative Affairs Court in Jerusalem. At the same time, the
municipality is holding contacts with the Defense Ministry on the possibility of
moving the project to the eastern port, which will soon be built, or on changes
to the original plan.
Black globe
A week ago, the green umbrella organization Life and Environment gave its
Black Globe award to the SIC for its poor environmental record. The award
was presented to the committee - in absentia - at an event in which Green
Globe awards were presented to environmentally conscious groups. SIC was
condemned for a series of secret decisions to establish security installations in
cases where secret discussions were not called for. The polynomial was
described in the ceremony as "a vast security structure that is going to be built
on the Haifa shoreline and was approved in a short, closed procedure, without
public participation and contrary to the National Master Plan" as it relates to
the Haifa coast.
The SIC bodies of the Interior Ministry operate in conjunction with the District
Planning and Building Commissions. They consist of representatives of the
Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Israel Lands Administration,
and each of them is chaired by the district planner of the Interior Ministry.
Several High Court of Justice decisions in recent years have involved SIC. One
example is a petition by the Galilee community of Hoshaya against the Defense
Ministry. Residents were stunned one day to see bulldozers leveling the ground
at the edge of their community. It turned out that the IDF planned to move the
depots of the huge Kurdani base near Haifa to the new site. The petition was
accompanied by an opinion of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense
(IUED), stating that there was no need to use SIC to approve every military
facility.
"Since the army makes use of this instrument to establish every last logistics
base, we proposed creating a filtering mechanism to limit that usage to two
criteria," says Eli Ben Ari, the IUED legal adviser. "One, in the case of a
secret installation, only in the sense that it is not visible to the eye. The second,
in the case of an urgent security need, if there is not enough time to go through
regular planning processes." The High Court of Justice ruled that since the
work had already begun and money was already spent, the Hoshaya project
could continue, but took careful note of the two criteria proposed by IUED:
urgency and secrecy.
What are the implications for the Haifa project?
Ben Ari: "In terms of the principles of secrecy and urgency, this is a plan that
probably should have gone through a regular planning procedure. Therefore,
in the last analysis, the question is how the procedure will be handled
henceforth."
Hold that protest
In the past few weeks, work has begun to dry the project area and build the
breakwater. Photographs published last week in a local Haifa weekly by the
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel did not rattle the Haifa public or
prompt the municipality to take any unusual steps.
What accounts for the fact that a project of this scale is proceeding so quietly in
environmentally-conscious Haifa?
"Already two years ago, when everything was still secret, I urged Mayor Yahav
to form a coalition of all the relevant bodies," Prof. Ben Artzi says. "He said
we should wait until the mediation and court processes concluded. Now the
work has begun and patience is running out. The municipality has to wage the
struggle with the active backing of the public. I do not know of any proposal to
stop the work that is on the agenda, and if there is one, that is a grave matter,
because it means that again, they are not bringing in the public."
In fact, so poorly informed is the public that two Haifa writers and public
activists, A.B. Yehoshua and Sami Michael, had never heard of the polynomial
plan. "In February 2007, there was this hush-hush talk at City Hall about how
there was going to be a terrible natural disaster on the stretch of beach that is
most burned into world consciousness in regard to Haifa," says Shlomo
Gilboa, a member of the municipal council in a one-person faction. "Everyone
panicked, including the mayor and his deputy, Shmuel Gelbhart, both of
whom, it later turned out, had known about the plan long before. Everyone
who knew anyone in the government rushed to Jerusalem, and I remember at
least one trip with Yahav and the municipality director general for meetings
with cabinet ministers."
According to Gilboa, after the appeal was denied, the senior officials in the
municipality were divided in their reactions, with Gelbhart, from the Greens,
accepting the decision to approve the project in return for the development of
the harbor front for the public. After the failure in the appeals commission,"
Gelbhart says, "the mayor decided to drop the whole polynomial thing . All I
can do now is write a letter to the State Comptroller's Office. It looks as though
we will not find out the implications of all this until the state comptroller's
report three years from now."
On October 2007, Gilboa launched a private campaign against the polynomial
project under the slogan, "Get the monster out of the landscape." During the
Haifa Film Festival he and his associates got 6,280 people to sign a petition
against the project, and another 12,000 people have signed via the Internet, he
says. "No one wants to help me with the financing," Gilboa says. "Yahav only
declared his support, helped me formulate the posters and allowed me to set up
stands for people to sign in the streets. On the day the film festival ended I got
a phone call from him at 7 A.M. He told me excitedly that the director general
of the Defense Ministry had called him at 2 A.M. and said, 'Stop that, but we
will help you.' Yahav asked me to stop the protest activities immediately,
because 'we are going to set up a joint committee with the army and change
the plan. You won, you did your thing, and from now on it's only me.'" Gilboa
hesitated for a moment, but agreed, "because it's the mayor who is asking, and
this whole thing also cost me a great deal of money."
Shai Cohen, director of the Haifa branch of the Nature Protection Society, was
lambasted by Yahav for expressing a lukewarm position. "Yahav called me one
day in the car and shouted over the phone," he relates. "He was angry because
I had dared to tell the press that the decision of the appeals commission was
regrettable, though it also contained positive elements. I told myself that if this
is the attitude, then I too would move to all-out opposition. Since then I have
coordinated with them, but the message I got was 'Quiet, we're talking.' As
part of the preparations for the Green Globe event, I went to photograph the
area and saw that an area of 70 meters had been dried out. It's true that the
appeals commission said the work could go ahead, but where is Yahav?"
In the two years since it learned of the plan, the municipality has not taken the
measures required in strategic struggles of this kind. There has been no public
campaign, no lobbyists hired to talk to the defense establishment or to interior
and finance ministries, no PR people to get the national press involved.
"Integrated forces and a public tailwind are perfectly fine, but not at this
stage," says the municipality director general, Shmuel Gants. "With all due
respect to those who are involved from academe and politics, they are not well
enough informed about the security details, and populist election-eve-style
headlines will not change the decision."
That is exactly the complaint against Yahav - that the municipality's protest
campaign against the polynomial is waiting for his election campaign, and in
the meantime you lost precious time and will not be able to restore the status
quo ante.
"We are ready for every possibility of reducing the damage, but I believe we
will reach a settlement. We understand that the defense establishment has to
acquire new vessels under timetable and other constraints, whereas the defense
establishment understands the municipality's concern about the blow to urban
development."
Have you abandoned the alternative of the eastern port?
"I suggest to Haaretz Magazine, too, to publish the story at a later time,
because there will soon be new agreements. And no, the eastern alternative has
not been abandoned."
The eastern option
Public activists are not the only ones who have been burnt by Yahav's style.
The negotiating teams of the IDF and the Defense Ministry were also deeply
offended by him at the personal level. (Yahav chose not to respond.) "I was
disappointed to hear Yahav inform us that he will not take into account
compromises that will not be suitable for him," the senior navy officer said this
week. From his point of view, Yahav is the bad guy who is leading opposition
to the plan. "We proposed to the municipality to be a partner in the external
design of the structure, in form and in color, and we even proposed an
architectural competition. After all, after the new port is built, it will be opened
to the public on Independence Day and will integrate into the life of the city.
Yahav wants only one thing: to kick the navy into the eastern port."
He no longer trusts you. For two years you sold him a story about an innocent
anchorage and hid the series of structures and the polynomial. Then you sent
blurred sketches. "We reject those allegations. As early as September 2004 we
invited Yahav to a meeting on the roof of the Haifa base and showed him the
plans for the dried-out area and the breakwater. He was enthusiastic, and from
his point of view, it was clear that this would advance the plan to open the
seafront. There were many more meetings, and even Gelbhart, from the
Greens, understood that the plan would make possible the opening of the
harborfront and preserve territorial continuity as far as Carmel Beach."
Since the SIC decision, there have been many planning modifications in the
area. The master plan for the eastern port was approved in principle by the
National Council for Planning and Building. The municipality accepted the
proposal of the Transportation Ministry to forgo an airport in return for
shifting the entire port eastward, into the Kishon Creek area. But the navy
rejects outright the proposal to establish the new compound in the northern
section of the eastern port and receive vast tracts of land that will become
available upon the dismantlement of the container farm and the airport.
"It looks as though navy engineers and planners have simply fallen in love
with their plan and are locked into it," says architect Har Gil.
"These are changes and plans on ice," navy sources say. "It took them 10
years to plan and build Carmel Port I, so are they going to finish the eastern
port in 16 months, as the municipality has declared? They will not manage to
bring even the material to dry the area in that time. We have to complete the
work by the end of 2011, but apart from the timetable, the eastern port is
unsuitable for the military needs of the new vessels that are on the way.
Another difficulty is to channel by land military equipment in an area that is
saturated with hazardous materials adjacent to the petrochemical plants and
the oil refineries."
The chairman of SIC and the Haifa District Planner, Adam Kulman,
consistently expressed a position different from that of the defense
establishment, taking note of the probable environmental harm. In the
discussions by the appeals commission, he recommended moving the project to
the eastern port.
"So what if he is the district planner and chairman of the committee," the
director general of the Interior Ministry, Aryeh Bar, says in response. "I am
the chairman of the National Planning and Building Council and a geographer
by profession, with 50 years of experience in planning in the Housing and
Transportation Ministries and on the Ayalon Freeway. The polynomial is
definitely not an eyesore, and Israel's security considerations take precedence
over every other consideration. With all due respect to the environmental
protection document, we have a country to run here. Can't a country build
itself military installations? Where will we build them, in Turkey?"
Le Port de Haifa
Haifa port
Haifa port
Les nouveaux quais
New docks
New docks
Photos: Shahaf Tibul
Inauguration du nouveau terminal de conteneurs
Les travaux, d’un montant d’environ 1 milliard de
shekels, ayant été achevés conformement au calendrier
établi, le nouveau terminal de conteneurs, equipe de
matériel de manutention, de systèmes d'exploitation et
des technologies les plus avancés a été inaugure
Le terminal dispose d'un quai principal de 700m et d’un
quai secondaire de 250m, d’un tirant d’eau de 15m, d'un
domaine spécialisé pour les produits dangereux, de racks
réfrigérés, de sous-stations électriques et de bâtiments
d'exploitation. Le Quai Carmel sera exploité par voie
électronique par six grues de quai ship-to-shore de 75-
mètres de haut qui auront une portee de 18 rangées de
conteneurs à travers le pont du navire. Douze transtainers
électriques (vertes) sur rails (RMG) exploiteront un parc
de stockage de conteneurs et seront adaptés pour stocker
jusqu'à 11 conteneurs de largeur et cinq conteneurs par la
hauteur entre ses supports. Ce terminal permettre au
terminal d’accueillir des navires super post-Panamax et
permettront de gerer une capacité supplémentaire
d'environ 500 000 containers par an.
Les travaux, d’un montant d’environ 1 milliard de
shekels, ayant été achevés conformement au calendrier
établi, le nouveau terminal de conteneurs, equipe de
matériel de manutention, de systèmes d'exploitation et
des technologies les plus avancés a été inaugure
Le terminal dispose d'un quai principal de 700m et d’un
quai secondaire de 250m, d’un tirant d’eau de 15m, d'un
domaine spécialisé pour les produits dangereux, de racks
réfrigérés, de sous-stations électriques et de bâtiments
d'exploitation. Le Quai Carmel sera exploité par voie
électronique par six grues de quai ship-to-shore de 75-
mètres de haut qui auront une portee de 18 rangées de
conteneurs à travers le pont du navire. Douze transtainers
électriques (vertes) sur rails (RMG) exploiteront un parc
de stockage de conteneurs et seront adaptés pour stocker
jusqu'à 11 conteneurs de largeur et cinq conteneurs par la
hauteur entre ses supports. Ce terminal permettre au
terminal d’accueillir des navires super post-Panamax et
permettront de gerer une capacité supplémentaire
d'environ 500 000 containers par an.
From Port2port
Haifa’s Carmel Container Terminal inaugurated Nov 1, 2010
The Haifa port company purchased the most advanced handling equipment,
operating systems and technologies available in the world’s ports secstor
In compliance with the timetable established, works have been completed for
the new Carmel Container Terminal in the Haifa port.
The Carmel terminal has a 700m main quay and a 250m secondary quay.
Water depth at quay stands at 15.5m. The project included the construction
of a specialized dangerous and hazardous stacking area, reefer racks,
electrical substations and operational buildings.
The Haifa port company has purchased the most advanced handling
equipment, operating systems and technologies available in the world’s ports
sector. The Carmel Quay will be operated electronically by six 75-meter high
SPP Ship-To-Shore gantry cranes, whichserve up to 18 rows of containers
across the ship’s deck. Twelve electric (green) rail mounted gantry cranes
(RMGs) will operate a container storage yard in the Carmel Terminal’s
hinterland. The RMGs will be suitable for storing up to 11 containers by
width and five containers by height between its supports.
The Carmel project was completed on-time and on-budget and was built
based on the highest international standards in order to allow the terminal to
accommodate super post-Panamax vessels.
The terminal provides an additional capacity of about 500 thousand box
moves per year.
The construction works cost NIS 1 billion ($250m)
Haifa’s Carmel Container Terminal inaugurated Nov 1, 2010
The Haifa port company purchased the most advanced handling equipment,
operating systems and technologies available in the world’s ports secstor
In compliance with the timetable established, works have been completed for
the new Carmel Container Terminal in the Haifa port.
The Carmel terminal has a 700m main quay and a 250m secondary quay.
Water depth at quay stands at 15.5m. The project included the construction
of a specialized dangerous and hazardous stacking area, reefer racks,
electrical substations and operational buildings.
The Haifa port company has purchased the most advanced handling
equipment, operating systems and technologies available in the world’s ports
sector. The Carmel Quay will be operated electronically by six 75-meter high
SPP Ship-To-Shore gantry cranes, whichserve up to 18 rows of containers
across the ship’s deck. Twelve electric (green) rail mounted gantry cranes
(RMGs) will operate a container storage yard in the Carmel Terminal’s
hinterland. The RMGs will be suitable for storing up to 11 containers by
width and five containers by height between its supports.
The Carmel project was completed on-time and on-budget and was built
based on the highest international standards in order to allow the terminal to
accommodate super post-Panamax vessels.
The terminal provides an additional capacity of about 500 thousand box
moves per year.
The construction works cost NIS 1 billion ($250m)
2010 annee record
2010 record year
TEU 1,263,552
2010 record year
TEU 1,263,552