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Waterlogged
Josh Weinberg
Tel Aviv municipality says it's ready to revamp the low-lying neighborhoods now emerging from a fatally flooded winter. But residents won't sign up for the scheme that's supposedto transform their lives.
Dozens of improvised shanties, thrown together from pieces of tin, asbestos sheeting and cardboard, are squeezed into the open spaces between the haphazard rows of decaying tenements. The access roads, narrow and unpaved, are lined with junkyard piles of rusty car bodies and discarded home appliances.
In the center of this urban squalor is a man-made open ditch, the size of a basketball court. A yellow measuring stick on one of its rough-hewn sides shows that it's four meters (12 feet) deep. And at its bottom is a pool of stagnant water mixed with raw sewage.
Pardes Daka, home to more than 500 Arabs and a few dozen Jews, is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Jaffa, itself the poorer part of the city known as Tel Aviv-Jaffa. It is also one of the lowest-lying parts of town, and therefore particularly prone to flooding in rainy weather. The foul-smelling ditch, which locals claim spreads all manner of diseases, is part of the municipality's "temporary" solution to the area's rainwater and waste-disposal needs.
In Pardes Daka, now emerging from another winter, heavy rain and the absence of even the most minimal infrastructure have proved a deadly combination. In October, a 4-year-old boy, David Hadad, died here - drowned in one of the tenements. The water was flooding the family's ground floor home too fast for the three Hadad children and their mother to get out via their front door. Their windows were barred; this is a high-crime neighborhood. And as they perched, screaming for help, on their kitchen table, David slipped out of his mother's grasp, off the table and was swept under water.
Nobody was too surprised by the death. Ambulances and other emergency relief teams - army jeeps, navy personnel equipped with rubber dinghies - are on semi-permanent call in south Tel Aviv and Jaffa all winter.
"Why," asks Mahmoud Daka, scion of the Arab family that gives the area its name, "can't they do something for us before the floods come? Why, every year, do we have to live amid the sewage and the mosquitoes, waiting for the worst?"
Pardes Daka has grown steadily since Daka's kinsmen - some of the few Arabs from the area who neither fled nor were forced out in 1948 -
found themselves under Israeli rule. They were joined first by Sephardi immigrants and, more recently, by Arabs from other parts of Jaffa and further afield.
It is the worst-affected, but by no means the only neighborhood in the area that lives in fear of each winter. Hatikvah in south-east Tel Aviv, an impoverished, overwhelmingly Sephardi neighborhood of decaying apartment blocks 15-minutes away, needs a colossal investment to update its 1960s infrastructure.
Argazim, a maze of shacks another step down from adjacent Hatikvah, has no rain or waste-disposal infrastructure whatsoever. The flooding seems all the more scandalous in the light of Israel's chronic water shortage.
Public outrage after David Hadad's death, and the widespread havoc caused by the October floods, forced promises of action from city hall. Similar promises have been made and broken in the past, but this time things have begun to move. In Hatikvah, almost $10 million has been spent on what the city calls "the most acute problems;" double that sum is earmarked for work in the next two years. In all three neighborhoods, residents have been given some compensation for their property losses, and more has been promised. There's talk of constructing a $5-million drainage pipe, diameter 2.5 meters, to carry rain water from Pardes Daka and surrounding areas out to sea. But most dramatically, the city has unveiled a grand Evacuate and Rebuild program, which would likely run to tens of millions of dollars, for the entire Pardes Daka area and for all 1,500 residents of Argazim.
Trouble is that the residents aren't signing up for the program. "Evacuate and Rebuild is 100 percent serious," vows Shalom Elkayam, the deputy director general of the Tel Aviv municipality, responsible for neighborhood infrastructure. "It would transform these neighborhoods. We'll move the residents into temporary housing, demolish the existing structures and build new houses with proper drainage and sewage. But we can't go full-speed ahead until the locals sign up." Residents were invited to join after the October floods; so far, only 65 families in Argazim have done so. In Pardes Daka, where the Housing Ministry is handling registration, the response has been precisely zero.
Many residents explain that they rent, rather than own, their shoddy homes and that their landlords aren't interested in urban renewal, or that they are living here illegally, and would find themselves evicted under Evacuate and Rebuild. Even among those who do own their homes, the attitude is highly skeptical. People fear they'll give up their homes and wind up with nothing. In the case of the Arab residents, such skepticism is also driven by a concern that the plan masks a subtler effort to Judaize the area.
"It all sounds wonderful," says Yossi, a shopkeeper, Orthodox and married with one daughter, who has lived all of his 33 years in a corrugated iron shack in Argazim (the name derives from the "crates" out of which the first homes were built here in the 50s). He says the city's bulldozers did move in for a few days last December but haven't been seen since. Evacuate and Rebuild? I'll believe it when I see it."
While Yossi, needless to say, hasn't signed up, Shimon, a municipal refuse worker, has. Shimon now has to commute to Argazim for his weekly card game, having been rehoused, supposedly temporarily, while the program gathers pace. Telling his story between poker hands on the front porch of the card-game host's grimy, one-story house, Shimon, married with a new-born, motions vaguely in the direction of the asbestos shack that used to be home, and recalls quietly that, "The floods hit us very hard, so we took the first chance we saw to get out of here. This is no place to raise a baby." He sighs. "The program sounded good, but we certainly haven't seen any progress. I don't think we'll be moving back for a long time."
Indeed, the only evidence of any rebuilding program around the corner from the card players is a large empty lot, surrounded by a metal fence, with a rusting yellow bulldozer at its center. "That's been there for three months," Yossi notes. "Hasn't moved an inch."
ELKAYAM, A STRAPPING EX-airforce colonel with a lisp, acknowledges that the city's track record is far from glittering. By way of explanation, he offers a history lesson: "In Argazim and Pardes Daka, we are dealing with neighborhoods that are essentially illegal. Decades ago, the residents simply invaded abandoned Arab homes and public land, and built houses without permits of any sort. If we'd had the chance to develop those areas properly, we would have installed the proper infrastructure to keep the rain and the sewage separate and deal with them both. Because we didn't get that chance, every time it rains, the water comes up to the surface, and so does the raw sewage - filling peoples' homes, causing terrible damage."
So much for the past. "Obviously," acknowledges Elkayam, "the city has to take responsibility." To that end, he says, residents affected by this winter's floods have been paid more generous compensation than in years past - "at double the amount of the damage done," says Elkayam. And those whose homes were uninhabitable, he adds, were given hotel rooms until they could move back. The city bought the Hadads, who lost a son, a new apartment - "a proper home," says Elkayam - elsewhere in Jaffa.
Back at Pardes Daka, the locals are dismissive. The city's action so far, scoffs one resident who prefers not to give his name, "is like giving us a band-aid. We need surgery." Pointing to the boarded-up ground floor apartment where the Hadads used to live, he asserts that the council gave them special treatment "because they knew that the family could have kicked up a huge fuss. They just want to keep this quiet. But the problem won't go away. We're lucky that many more didn't die this year. What's going to happen next year?"
Like many of the Arab residents here, Yusef, 31, an unemployed former bakery worker with five children who has lived in Pardes Daka since the mid-1990s, charges that the city deliberately discriminates against the Arab families. Yes, his family recently received 14,000 shekels ($3,400) in compensation for flood damage - their two-room prefab filled up with sewage and they had to replace furniture, appliances, linens and clothes, they say. But while the city claims this sum represents a generous pay out, they insist that the real damage amounted to almost 100,000 shekels, and they also protest that it took four months for the payment to come through.
"We were pressured to sign the compensation agreement and take the money," says Yusef's wife, who declines even to give her first name. "Only later, after seeing a lawyer, did we read the fine print that said it would be a one-time payment, and that we now have no claim against the city." Together with several other families here, they have filed suit against the city for further compensation - more in hope than expectation.
Elkayam, sounding sympathetic, firmly denies the discrimination charge and says that rather than suing him, the family should sign on for Evacuate and Rebuild.
Counters Yusef: "How can I? I rent here. It's up to my landlord," he says - and declines to name him.
Property losses apart, Pardes Daka residents charge that the open ditch is a health scourge, polluting the air and causing breathing and other ailments. Suha Haroub, a neighbor of Yusef's, claims that doctors have attributed a new growth on her five-year-old son's scalp to their proximity to the raw sewage. The municipality, she says, refuses to acknowledge any responsibility.
While declining to comment on specific cases, Elkayam insists that all such problems could be alleviated were residents to embrace the Evacuate and Rebuild program. Ironically echoing the complaining residents, he says: "We can only apply band-aids, unless and until the residents realize that they need to temporarily leave the neighborhood so that we can move in and clean things up.
"If I could force everyone out I would," he adds, "but that would be illegal."
Azriel Regev, an early advocate and project supervisor of Evacuate and Rebuild, argues that the city should file suit against residents who resist the program, arguing that "their refusal prevents others from benefiting. Evacuate and Rebuild would save them all in the end," he says, "if they'd only allow us to get it off the ground."
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