Figure - available from: Natural Hazards
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Map of the Middle East, including the regional major fault systems (black lines). The regional tectonic plate configuration is presented along with the relative horizontal slip motions (black arrows). Source: Kurzon and Wetzler (2015)
Source publication
The Jordan Rift Valley is a high-risk low-occurrence zone for earthquakes, with documented incidences within the last millennium causing widespread destruction. This research examines the implications of the immediate risks for earthquake readiness. Due to data availability, we focus on Israel’s readiness for earthquakes and compare our findings wi...
Citations
... Israel serves as a case study, given its considerable exposure to seismic risk [20] alongside great diversity in building stock and levels of local authority capacity. This diversity has spatial facets reflecting a wide economic gap between the metropolitan center and the peripheries where much of the population is disadvantaged [21] and seismic risk is greater [22]. ...
... Despite the overall economic benefits of reinforcement in areas with seismic activity, the extent of residential retrofit is low [30]. A central reason for this is that home owners rarely undertake seismic reinforcement without government involvement [22,24]. Public authorities and governments therefore have a critical role in promoting seismic retrofitting. ...
... Seismic retrofitting of buildings is inherently complex [22]. Effective policy requires coordination between a wide range of stakeholders [31], including government agencies responsible for emergency response, housing and welfare, which may span across national, regional and local government jurisdictions, as well as property owners. ...
Seismic retrofitting is the most effective way to reduce casualties from earthquakes. Yet, seismic retrofitting of vulnerable residential structures faces many impediments. As no single policy measure can overcome these obstacles, seismic retrofitting requires that multiple policy measures be applied in tandem and therefore policy packages are necessary. As seismic threats are spread over multiple locales, differing in their characteristics, no single policy package is likely to fit all settings. Indeed, efforts to promote seismic retrofitting in California, New Zealand and Israel show high variability in success across different locales. Our study builds upon previous work which outlined three potential policy packages for seismic retrofitting, led by market forces, local government and central government respectively. In this study we advance an asymmetric decentralization approach to match the most appropriate policy package to local conditions. We combine this with seismic vulnerability assessment to prioritize the national allocation of retrofitting funds. The approach is applied to the Israeli case, a country that is prone to infrequent large earthquakes and in which there is a large, substandard housing stock.
... Despite the long exposure of Israeli society to security threats, Israel lacks a comprehensive emergency law and failed to implement the "cross-hazards learning approach" which stresses the importance of a "transfer of learning and lessons" across disaster types [1,50]. Rather, emergency arrangements are imbedded in various laws and governmental decisions which grant powers and allocate responsibilities to numerous governmental and local agencies, with no legal designation of a coordinating body for emergency preparedness, response and recovery [51]. The two main national agencies, largely responsible for emergency preparedness (HFC and NEMA) were established following major security crises, thus demonstrating efforts to learn from experience. ...
The ability to successfully manage disasters is a function of the extent to which lessons are learned from prior experience. We focus on the extent to which lessons from SARS/MERS have been learned and implemented during the first wave of COVID-19, and the extent to which the source affects governance learning: from a polity's own experience in previous episodes of the same disaster type; from the experience of other polities with regard to the same disaster type; or by cross-hazard learning - transferring lessons learned from experience with other types of disasters. To assess which types of governance learning occurred we analyze the experience of four EastAsian polities that were previously affected by SARS/MERS: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong-Kong. Their experience is compared with that of Israel. Having faced other emergencies but not a pandemic, Israel could have potentially learned from its experience with other emergencies, or from the experience of others with regard to pandemics before the onset of COVID-19. We find that governance learning occurred in the polities that experienced either SARS or MERS, but not cross-hazard or cross-polity learning. The consequences in the 5 polities at the end of the first six months of Covid-19, reflected by the numbers of infected and deaths, on one hand, and by the level of disruption to normal life, on the other, verifies these findings. Research insights point to the importance of modifying governance structures to establish effective emergency institutions and necessary legislation as critical preparation for future unknown emergencies.
This paper analyzes the news coverage of a nationwide Israeli plan, TAMA38. Previous studies have shown that the media support market and state power. I ask whether they can democratize planning communications and improve the representation of ordinary people. Using critical discourse analysis, I compare the media coverage to the planning system’s discourses, demonstrating that the media represented more people but were less critical of the plan. I discuss the plan and the coverage as part of actually existing neoliberalism and argue that planners should challenge the media and include the people and matters that it tends to ignore.
Purpose
This paper aims to discuss how the tourism industry is contending with the economic and interorganizational challenges wrought by the COVID-19 outbreak and heightened by a lack of communication between the government and local businesses in the state of Israel. The researchers examine the dependency of the tourism industry on the general preparation programs that were developed and are currently being deployed by the relevant national stakeholders and question whether instead, it should use the pandemic as a catalyst for formulating its own nuanced tourism-travel-and-hospitality-oriented strategies and procedures.
Design/methodology/approach
Applying an ethnographic-based mix-methods research approach, this paper draws on insights from data compiled by fusing existing theoretical and emerging practical knowledge with empirical research (qualitative and quantitative) conducted among numerous relevant macro (governmental/centralized industry) and micro (hotels, travel and tourism operators and service providers) stakeholders as well as potential consumers.
Findings
It is essential that national and local government bodies form collaborative interorganizational relationships with local stakeholders to jointly activate case-specific hospitality and travel-specific risk mitigation management strategies. Moreover, the pandemic laid bare the tentative and fragile nature of the globalized tourism industry supply and demand chains, a condition that may be remedied via a pivot toward using national or even regional supply chains and goods and service providers. Within Israel, such changes could lead to increased economic benefits that extend beyond the tourism industry to provide certain security-related benefits.
Originality/value
Relating to idiosyncratic factors relevant to an Israeli cultural context, this paper uses the ethnographic field-borne familiarity of the researchers with the tourism and travel industries in Eilat and the Dead Sea to offer applicable suggestions for leveraging certain industry resources to both meet the demands of the present-day circumstances and cultivate a multifaceted organizational web of macro and micro social, economic and environmental networks so as to foster a more diversified and therefore resilient local tourism and travel economy.
