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Since its establishment in 1948, the State of Israel has been oriented towards economic development and industrialization, with a transportation sector increasingly focused on private cars. In 1961, initial awareness of environmental risks led to the adoption of the Abatement of Nuisances Law, which served as the platform for air pollution policy for several decades, even as population growth and growth of the industrial sector, including fossil fuel power plants, led to a continuous increase in air pollution. In the early 2000s, the environmental movement in Israel criticized local air pollution policy as being out of date and started to promote a new Clean Air Law. The law, which was adopted in 2008 and came into force in 2011, was a watershed in air pollution policy in Israel. It includes ambient air quality values for 28 contaminants, emission permits for the industrial sector based on best available techniques (BAT), an enforcement system, and a unified and transparent monitoring system. This paper reviews the history of air pollution policy in Israel from 1948, through the 1961 and 2008 landmark legislations and their strengths and weaknesses, to the present. The paper ends with recommendations for future air pollution policy in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite proven advantages for the use of telemedicine in psychiatry, mental healthcare professionals have shown deep-seated mistrust and suspicion of telepsychiatry, which hinders its widespread application. The current study examines the attitudes of Israeli mental health professionals towards telepsychiatry and seeks to uncover the effects of experience and organizational affiliation on its adoption. The methodology included qualitative and thematic analysis of 27 in-depth interviews with Israeli mental health professionals, focusing on three major themes-clinical quality, economic efficiency, and the effects on the work-life balance of healthcare professionals. The attitudes of mental health professionals were found to be widely divergent and sharply dichotomized regarding different aspects of telepsychiatry and its suitability for mental healthcare services. However, there was a general consensus that telemedicine may not fulfil its promise of being a panacea to the problems of modern public medicine. In addition, attitudes were related to hierarchical position, organizational affiliation, and personal experience with telepsychiatry. Specifically, organizational affiliation influenced experience with and support for the assimilation of telepsychiatry. The study also revealed the role of organizational leadership and culture in promoting or inhibiting the proliferation and adoption of innovative technologies and services in modern medicine.

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a faceless, non-adversarial threat that endangered Israelis and Palestinians with the same ferocity. However, the capacities of the health systems to address it were not equal, with Israel more equipped for the outbreak with infrastructure, resources, manpower and later, vaccines. The pandemic demonstrated the life-saving benefits of cooperation and the self-defeating harms brought by non-cooperation. These trends are explored here by an international team of public health and environmental scholars, including those from different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article explores the importance of recognizing the Israeli and Palestinian jurisdictions as a single epidemiological unit, and illustrates how doing so is a pragmatic positioning that can serve self-interest. We demonstrate how despite political shocks precipitating non-cooperation, there has been a recurrent tendency towards limited cooperation. The paper concludes with lessons over the need for reframing public health as a potential bridge, the need for structural changes creating sustainable platforms for accelerated transboundary cooperation to enable the steady management of current and future public and environmental health crises regardless of dynamic political crises, and the importance of civil society and international organizations in forging collaboration in advance of governmental engagement.