Abstract- Israeli fisheries in the Mediterranean

Daniel Golani and Dor Edelist

Israel Archaeological evidence indicates that fishing in the Mediterranean has been an important food-supplying activity in Israel for more than 9,000 years. It has also been an important cultural activity in the Mediterranean and still is today. The central importance of fish in our ancestors' diet found expression in the Bible, in rules of Kashrut of fish as well as in the Book of Jonah. The annual national catch for Israel increased from about 2,500 tons in the late 1940s and 1950s to a record annual average of 4,153 t*y-1 in the 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, the annual catch dropped to around 3000 t*y-1 and then in the 2010s to around 2,000 t*y-1. Regarding commercial fishery management, Israeli fishery may be divided into three categories: coastal (artisanal) including standing nets and hook-and-line, purse seine fishery and trawls; there is little overlap in fish species composition between these three fishery methods. Israeli fishery is greatly influenced by the replacement of indigenous fauna by Lessepsian migrants – non-indigenous organisms (including >100 species of fish) of mainly Indo-Pacific origin. For example, the Israeli bottom trawl fishery today relies heavily on Lessepsian migrants such as the Threadfin bream Nemipterus randali, the Goldband goatfish Upeneus moluccensis and the Brushtooth lizardfish Saurida lessepsianus – all of which are also in the top 10 most common trawl fish caught in the Indian Ocean. In the last 5 years, conservation has become a major player in shaping Israel's fishing policy. A well-funded large-scale campaign by the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature has smeared the reputation of commercial fishers as pillaging the seas, mainly targeting bottom trawling, which it defined as a particularly destructive fishing method (despite the fact that the catch of trawlers is the only one that has remained steady over the years). It should be noted that the hidden goal of the recent fishery management reform is the total cessation of trawling in Israeli waters.The convinced decision makers wish to reform Israeli fisheries with a set of regulations which all but terminate commercial fishing in the Mediterranean coast of Israel. While some aspects of the reform are welcome, such as rebuffed enforcement, seasonal and spatial closures and regulations increasing minimum lengths of fishes and minimum mesh diameter in nets, other regulations and cumulative effects are too much for most fishers to bear. In 2016 the reform was officially launched, several trawlers were decommissioned by the government and cumulative regulations decreased resulted in a total fishing effort by about 40% immediately reducing national catch to about 1,200 t*y-1. Three years into the reform fish have yet to rebound and fill the nets of fishers, nonindigenous fishes are still on the rise and while this period may be too short for nature to recover, it was certainly enough for decision maker perception and resulting regulation to shift from under-regulation right into over-regulation decimating the fleet. After millennia of fishing and struggling to survive in a changing world on land and in the sea Israeli fishers, some belonging to the weakest sector of society, have now had to endure depreciation in their reputation and socio-economic status as well.