THE NATURE RESERVES AUTHORITY

One of the reasons that the SPNI Arab unit has not tried to assume a more aggressive watchdog role is to distance itself from Israel's Nature Reserves Authority (now the Nature and National Parks Authority).^[74] One would imagine that Israeli Arabs would have an easy time identifying with such an ostensibly apolitical government agency. But quite the opposite is true. It is hard to grasp the depth of the hostility harbored among Israeli Arabs for the Authority. There may be a variety of reasons, but ultimately two historic areas of conflict with the Authority poison relations to this day: the tension over the Mount Meron reserve and the village of Beit Ja'an, and the activities of the Green Patrol.

Mount Meron was for many years Israel's largest nature reserve and remains the best-preserved natural woodlands in Israel if not the entire re-gion. The unique combination of high altitude, abundant precipitation (nine hundred millimeters per year, including regular winter snows), and historic isolation produces an ecological climax situation.^[75]

Druze have been living in the vicinity of the reserve for eight hundred years, mostly in and around the village of Beit Ja'an (see Figure 30).^[76] Most Israelis hear of Beit Ja'an only on the evening news, when the village is sin-gled out as the home of yet another fallen Druze soldier. No settlement in Israel, not even among the kibbutzim, has lost as many of its young men, proportionally, as Beit Ja'an—over fifty casualties in a village of 8500 residents. Environmentalists, however, know it as the most troublesome sin-gle point of friction between Israel's nature reserves and a civilian population.

The conflict is as old as the Nature Reserve system itself. When the Minister of the Interior gave General Avram Yoffe the megasanctuary he asked for, it included private tracts, tended by small farmers from the village. Many of these lands had been owned by Beit Ja'an residents for generations. The Druze landowners were not offered alternative plots for which they might trade their own lands that suffered the misfortune of ecological uniqueness. Rather, they were allowed to keep them—subject to the dra-conian limitations deemed necessary for preservation. To be sure, these in-volved a relatively small section of Beit Ja'an lands located in the most “sensitive” sections of the reserve. Agricultural cultivation was not prohib-ited altogether, but heavy, earth-disturbing mechanical equipment was banned. Forced to till their families' age-old plots with donkeys rather than modern equipment, many farmers found the policy degrading.^[77] The real bone of contention was limitations on road construction in the area, which hampered the farmers' access to their fields. The problem was never solved to the satisfaction of the local residents, and so it flared up time and again.

The events of the 1987 round were typical. In standard Israeli partisan fashion, Druze leaders pressured then Minister of Agriculture Arik Nehamkin to cancel all limitations on the lands inside the reserve and order the Nature Reserves Authority to desist in its inspection duties. With elec-tions in the air and the Druze vote hanging in the balance, he acquiesced. The SPNI called the agreement illegal, and the Supreme Court concurred. But the Druze were not happy with the verdict, and the SPNI never suc-ceeded in establishing a real dialogue with them about the full dimensions of their complaint.^[78] The sides were back in court once again a decade later.

Beit Ja'an certainly had other problems, but it would be wrong to dismiss the Druze view about the Meron Reserve as simply cynical tactics. It did not expect special treatment, but a village that had contributed so significantly to Israel's security justifiably counted on sensitivity to the needs of its citizens. Beit Ja'an's residents felt that the Nature Reserve was suffocating them. The Nature Reserves Authority was tuned in to the complaints of the residents and tried to present the reserve as an economic resource with the potential for ecotourism. To help with the problem of unemployment and to give the village a stake in the reserve, the Authority hired a large number of Druze veterans to work as NRA rangers. Because of the sincerity of their efforts at accommodation, NRA leaders remain bewildered when their anti-Arab rep-utation is raised. Lands for the Meron nature reserve, after all, really were se-lected according to strict ecological criteria.^[79] Yet although they understand that conflicting interests must learn to coexist, Arab environmentalists per-ceived the NRA's limitations as overzealous and paternalistic.

Things came to a head in the summer of 1997, when the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel renewed a Supreme Court petition to enjoin road expansion by the residents. Beit Ja'an residents received the news of the Court's agreement with outrage, staging a violent demonstration in Jerusalem in which twenty-five people were hurt.^[80] Beit Ja'an's mayor told the Court that he could not promise that his constituents would abide by the ruling. He explained to the press, “Only in the covenant of death do they remember us. What about the covenant of life?”^[81] In the face of such a violent confrontation, the Nature Reserves Authority, under the prag-matic leadership of its new director, Aaron Vardi, forged a compromise.

Under the March 11, 1998, agreement, the SPNI agreed to cancel its Supreme Court action, and the Authority agreed to allow the route from Beit Ja'an to Chorpish to be redesignated as an agricultural road with the asphalting of certain steep sections. Landowners would be allowed to utilize heavy mechanical equipment in their agricultural work, and limitations on tree cutting and planting on private tracts would be removed.^[82] Beit Ja'an agreed to forgo future claims and even agreed to launch a nature preserva-tion education and public awareness campaign among its residents.

Local leaders in Beit Ja'an were satisfied with the agreement, asserting that hiking and love of nature are key elements in Druze heritage: “We are a law-abiding people as long as the law is fair and serves the public inter-est. But we couldn't accept a policy in which plants were deemed to be more important than people,” explained Asad Dabur, the deputy head of the Local Council.^[83] But scientists in the Authority did not share this ro-mantic perception of traditional stewardship practices. Former chief scien-tist Aviva Rabinovich argued that aerial photographs of Beit Ja'an from the Mandate period are devoid of tree cover. All had been cut down except for a few groves that were deemed holy.^[84] “Preservation was never an integral part of their culture,” she claims.

This condescension is not lost on Israeli Arabs, who interpret preserva-tion policies as driven by chauvinism rather than ecology. While Beit Ja'an residents may temporarily be satisfied with their agreement, decades of enmity are not easily erased.