Schoolkids in unrecognized Bedouin villages exposed to carcinogenic diesel generators
As legal advocacy organization gears up to challenge state in High Court petition, Jewish and Bedouin activists unite to show that clean, green tech is a better and viable answer
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
The muddy dirt road to the Bedouin village of Elarara was barely passable last month, thanks to a rare day of rain in the desert.
The rain did little to clear the air, though. At a kindergarten serving 140 youngsters in a village complex near the Nevatim Airforce Base in southern Israel, the smell of diesel was palpable.
Children were playing in a yard that backed onto an easily accessible tin shack containing a noisy diesel generator. A teacher who did not wish to give her name said she had spent part of the previous Saturday engulfed in smoke as she tried to repair the malfunctioning generator.
She added that seven out of the 35 children in her kindergarten class suffered from asthma.
The Elarara kindergarten complex doesn’t appear on any map. It is one of at least 46 educational institutions, mainly kindergartens and elementary schools, with around 4,600 children, where electricity is provided by such generators, according to Gil Yasur. He is co-CEO of the Shamsuna not-for-profit organization, a coalition of Jewish and Bedouin environmental activists trying to replace the generators with clean energy alternatives.
Diesel, a fossil fuel, not only pollutes the air: It causes cancer in humans, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Nevertheless, these generators are ubiquitous in schools in locations where there is no connection to the national electricity grid and buildings lack planning permits — a condition for installing solar panels.
In the coming days, the environmental advocacy organization Adam Teva V’Din will petition the High Court to try to force the state to replace the generators.
Year-round asthma problems
At a clinic near the Elarara kindergarten, Dr. Mohamad Abu Shuldum explained that the village was not connected to the electricity grid because it was not recognized by the state.
Winter, he said was “a catastrophe” as youngsters living in poorly insulated homes — some of them in tin shacks — caught colds. But asthma is a year-round problem, brought on by smoke from wood fires, dust from unpaved roads, and diesel fumes from generators during the school day.
Members of the Bedouin community, who historically led a semi-nomadic existence and lived in tents, had always suffered from asthma, he conceded, but the diesel generators have made things worse, especially in children.
“Nearly every day, I have to refer children to Soroka Hospital [in the Negev’s principal city, Beersheba], especially in winter,” he said.
“Yesterday, a Saturday, I came to work. I had 38 sick children to see. They have no heating so they get colds. In general, many of them have asthma anyway. The child that has been treated for asthma at home comes to the kindergarten and gets another attack because of the diesel.”
Government policy is to settle the Bedouin into specially built towns or recognized communities. The former were built with infrastructure such as electricity, water, sewage treatment, and trash collection. These services have been installed in only some of the recognized villages.
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 71 percent of the roughly 300,000 Bedouins — most of them living in the south — were dwelling in planned or recognized communities last year.
Unrecognized villages were built without permission or predate the 1965 Planning and Construction Law (or, as in the case of Elarara, were reportedly there before the establishment of the state). There, residents who claim land rights and refuse to move are regarded as living on state land illegally and are denied such services, although water is available for several hours each day. Most residents use solar panels unconnected to the grid for lighting. They dig pits to collect sewage.
Because every child has a right to education under the law, the Education Ministry recognizes the schools, pays teachers’ salaries, and often funds the buildings themselves. It also transfers money to the local councils to rent and operate the generators. But a ministry spokeswoman said the ministry had no idea how many diesel generators were in use because the provision of electricity at the local level was the responsibility of the local council.
The CEO of the Al-Qasoum Regional Council however denied having this responsibility, accusing the Education Ministry of “shirking its responsibilities” for schools in unrecognized Bedouin villages. These schools, said Hofit Klimovsky, were outside the council’s jurisdiction, and the council was only providing the services to schools because the ministry had “bullied” it into doing so, without any proper signed agreement.
The ministry had been forced to connect some unrecognized schools to the grid, following High Court rulings, Klimovsky stated, adding that the council had been warning the ministry for years about the dangers of the generators.
However, erecting solar panels requires a building permit and regulations for their connection to the grid. The council was unable to press for these without active Education Ministry backing, Klimovsky claimed.
A new, greener way
In the meantime, Shamsuna, an Jewish-Arab organization, is trying to create a handful of pilot projects to show how to provide a cleaner, healthier environment for children in these areas. The upcoming court petition, it hopes, will greenlight a massive scaling up of such projects with public and private sector funds.
The push came from the late Said al-Harumi, a Bedouin Knesset member who died suddenly from a heart attack in 2021, aged 49.
As part of the Ra’am Party headed by Mansour Abbas, al-Harumi entered the former government led by Naftali Bennett and was appointed head of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee.
Yossi Abramowitz, a solar entrepreneur who established Israel’s first solar field at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel’s far south, has been trying to get solar panels into the Bedouin sector for 15 years. He recalled being the first person invited to el-Harumi’s office after the latter was sworn in.
“He gave me a big hug and said, ‘Take all the plans we have for the Bedouin out of the drawer. We’re going to build 5,000 megawatts of solar energy in the Negev, provide 10,000 jobs, and bring in $5 billion of private investment,’” said Abramowitz.
“At the end of the meeting, he took me by the arm and said, ‘You know I was a teacher. Promise me you’ll get rid of the diesel generators that are poisoning the kids,’” said Abramowitz.
“A month later he was dead,” Abramowitz continued. “At the mourning tent, [head of Ra’am] Mansour Abbas said to me, ‘You made a promise, which to the Bedouin, is like a binding contract, and the only one who could release you from it is no longer here.’”
Honoring that promise gave rise to Shamsuna, which Abramowitz co-chairs with Bedouin solar activist Raid Abu-Alkian, and which is run jointly by a Jewish man, Gil Yasur, and a Bedouin woman, Amal Abu-Alkhom.
One of the many initiatives in which Shamsuna is involved is amending a government decision on developing the Negev Bedouin community, passed by the Bennett government in March 2022, so that it includes a clause obliging the Energy Ministry to examine exempting educational institutions and other public service buildings from the need for building permits for off-grid facilities such as solar panels.
At the Elarara kindergarten complex, Shamsuna is teaming up with philanthropists to install solar panels that are not connected to the electricity grid (“off-grid”) and energy storage (to provide electricity on days when the sun doesn’t shine). This will allow the four classes to operate lighting and air conditioning/heating from a clean source.
An off-grid climate technology hub
In the unrecognized village of Alfoura, which locals say also predates the state, and is located close to the Beersheba-Arad highway, the school, which serves 3,000 children from kindergarten to 12th grade, does have access — albeit insufficient — to the electric grid, thanks to a building permit awarded in 1974 to the first building erected there.
There, Fareed Mahameed of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based in the far south of Israel, is overseeing the creation of an off-grid climate technology hub. This will be operated by Musa Gaboa, a chemistry teacher and pedagogical coordinator at the complex’s high school.
Already on site is a solar-operated sewage treatment unit developed at the Arava Institute, which will replace a cesspit that, until the project began, was polluting the groundwater and regularly overflowing, posing a serious public health risk. Once the unit is operational, the recycled effluent will be used to irrigate plants and crops.
The site will also include solar panels supplying electricity to the four closest classrooms (out of 30 at the complex in total), energy storage, agro-voltaic solar panels (which are mounted over crops to facilitate crop growth while generating electricity at the same time) and a special drinking water machine.
There will also be a unit from the Israeli company HomeBiogas that transforms organic waste into cooking fuel and fertilizer liquid.
The ambitiously planned hub will be used for research by pupils and will serve as a model for other institutions wanting to establish off-grid clean technology.
Quipped the Arava Institute’s Mahameed, “We’re not connected to the grid, but we are connected to the solutions.”
