LABOR PAINS
The fanfare surrounding the creation of a new government agency seemed to be an exciting turning point for the environment, both among the pub-lic and within the government.[9] In fact, the new Ministry floundered ini-tially. It managed to win only minimal authorities because of a series of fractious political clashes. By March 1989 no governmental agency had voluntary ceded its authorities to the new Ministry, and Miloh was threat-ening a coalitional crisis. The government appointed two professors of public administration, Abraham Atzmon and Yehezkel Dror, as arbitrators to recommend the scope of the powers that should be given to a Ministry of the Environment.
It took only a few weeks for them to offer a comprehensive and thought-ful ruling. Their promptness was all the more impressive because they worked without the cooperation of either the Minister of Agriculture or the Minister of Health, who refused to appear before them.[10] Both Ministries stood to lose from the creation of a new Environmental Ministry. That, how-ever, was not the real problem: Each was run by a Minister from the Labor Party who wanted to do as little as possible to help Ronni Miloh, at the time a particularly unpopular figure among Labor circles.
The professors prefaced their recommendations with a call for restraint, that is, to grant the Ministry a critical mass of authorities, but no more. After paying this lip service they went on to propose a powerhouse Ministry. It included regulatory control in the areas of water, air, and haz-ardous and solid wastes and overseeing a range of agencies from the Nature Reserves Authority to Israel's Meteorological Service.[11] This turned out to be a futile exercise. Rather than adopt the far-reaching rec-ommendations, Prime Minister Shamir opted to file them away and let each Ministry work the matter out directly with Miloh and his staff.
And so a tedious chain of negotiations between the Ministry of the Environment and its colleagues ensued. It is not by chance that Shamir remembers resistance at the Ministry of the Interior. Ariyeh Deri was
The Ministry of Agriculture was next in line.[13] It was not enthusiastic. Prime Minister Shamir transferred the National Parks Authority from his Office to the new Ministry as a gift, but the Nature Reserve system stayed in the Ministry of Agriculture.[14] More important, it maintained its control over Israel's powerful Water Commission. Even though the Environmental Ministry would open an agroecology department, it was essentially shut out of any real influence over pesticide registration and oversight policies. The agreement with the Ministry of Health was the longest in coming and was only approved a year later by the government, on January 21, 1990. Here, the Ministry of the Environment came out ahead. It became the lead agency overseeing the Licensing of Businesses Law, except for products that were designed to “go in people's mouths” (such as food or pharmaceuticals).[15] Those remained under the Ministry of Health's purview. The Ministry of Health also divested itself of responsi-bility for hazardous materials regulation, pest control, air pollution, and other nuisances.[16] As part of the deal, Marinov and the Environmental Ministry inherited much of the same Ministry of Health technical staff with whom the EPS had bickered so consistently in past years, as well as the experienced professionalism of Dr. Shmuel Brenner, a senior govern-ment scientist, and his Tel Aviv University–based analytical laboratories.
When the dust settled, the Ministry of the Environment certainly had considerable power on paper. Formally it held authorities under thirteen dif-ferent statutes. Yet a closer look showed that it was relegated to supporting-actor status on key environmental issues such as air emissions from vehicles, drinking-water and sewage treatment, pesticide registration and usage, na-ture preservation policy, radiation, and, of course, physical planning.
From Miloh's perspective, more important than the statutory limita-tions were the financial constraints. The money allocated to the Ministry left him absolutely no room for maneuvering or initiative. Josef Tamir