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MIDDLE AGE

Danny Rabinowitz brought home a dream when he returned in 1982 from studying in London. The terms of his fellowship committed him to work-ing for the SPNI, and after his years in the field he was happy to be sta-tioned at the Tel Aviv headquarters. Yet he turned down Yoav Sagi's lucra-tive offer to run the Nature Protection Department. A gifted writer, Rabinowitz wished to transform the SPNI's modest printing department into an environmental publishing house à la Sierra Club Books in America. Things did not work out as he hoped. After the intimacy of a Sinai field school, Rabinowitz found the general atmosphere at headquar-ters stifling and was surprised by the rather impersonal relations among


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SPNI leaders; for instance, the staff did not really socialize after hours. He also became frustrated professionally by the lack of support and the petty territorial thinking. “All my ideas were squelched by the head of the eco-nomics department,” he recalls ruefully. “When my time was up, I moved on.”[86] Today Rabinowitz is a tenured professor at Tel Aviv University.

The SPNI in the 1980s and 1990s had little in common with the loose band of volunteers that Amotz Zahavi conscripted. Naturally, the organi-zational culture changed, and not always with his approval. “I hate the conferences today where they bring in singers and create a ‘happening.’ If I were the Director, it wouldn't happen. In my day gatherings were simple. Nature was enough.”[87]

But there are far more profound differences than just the evening enter-tainment at educational conferences. The SPNI's main offices near Tel Aviv's old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv are vast, housing the administration needed to run a company with hundreds of employees. The directors' “thumbnail” synopsis of annual activities runs to sixty pages. Departments include student, youth, and school-age education; thirteen information and scientific research centers about caves, mammals, amphibians, plants, birds, and reptiles; museums; local branches; Arab affairs; publications; computers; construction; historic preservation; membership; security and safety; trail marking; domestic and international tours; insurance; vehicles; and the SPNI's own rabbi.[88] On the third floor of the building across the street from headquarters, on the other hand, sits the SPNI Environment and Nature Protection Department with a nationwide staff that has never exceeded fif-teen people.[89]

This organizational sprawl can be traced in part to a well-meaning openness to fresh initiatives. The organization has always tried to modify and broaden its orientation as new issues emerged. For instance, in 1984 it lobbied the Knesset to established a Public Council for the Preservation of Monuments and Sites.[90] When the Knesset came back and asked the SPNI to place it under its aegis, the leadership was receptive.[91]

One key area into which the organization did not successfully expand was “the environment.” In SPNI lingo, this generic term connotes urban or pollution problems. Azariah Alon tried to push the organization's agenda in this direction, and in 1988 the SPNI executive secretariat for-mally decided to dedicate more resources to environmental issues.[92] The interest in urban problems was to some extent a response to the growing number of SPNI branches that attached greater priority to their own im-mediate environmental health problems than to those of wolf populations


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in the Golan Heights. Indeed many of the grassroots groups that sprung up in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s were the work of citizens who had either left the SPNI or established parallel frameworks.[93]

Yet to address pollution issues effectively required training different from that of typical SPNI activists. Besides biologists, the only in-house professionals the SPNI retained were regional planners, who naturally came back to issues involving land use and conservation. Frequently the SPNI lacked the technical literacy to understand, much less participate in, national debates about pollution and environmental health, rendering the organization irrelevant.

Azariah Alon points out that only in the area of biological sciences can the SPNI depend on serious professional assistance from volunteers. Otherwise, it has to buy consulting expertise,[94] and this has drawbacks. The fact that the SPNI's legal advisers remain external and charge per case cannot help but temper organizational eagerness for initiating litigation.

During his tenure as chairman, Yoav Sagi was straightforward about the SPNI's insular organizational strategy, which eschewed the import-ing of senior staff from outside the organization. Leaders needed to be groomed from within, he believed.[95] Eitan Gidalizon may be the best example of this model. Gidalizon led the organization for most of the 1990s as either Deputy Director or Director. (As a sign of the times, dur-ing the 1990s the SPNI's “Secretary” became the “Director.”) A person-able kibbutznik who commuted to work in Tel Aviv by plane from the Galilee, Gidalizon had a long history in the organization and was among the legendary team in the Sinai field schools during the 1970s. But he was also a trained urban and regional planner whose master's thesis on the qualitative ranking of open spaces has been influential in profes-sional circles.

Planning was perhaps the one area where the SPNI made a major com-mitment to capacity building and personnel. Sagi invested heavily in de-veloping in-house expertise through the DESHE framework he set up and runs (the name is an acronym for the Hebrew phrase “the image of the land”). DESHE is “a think tank for integrating construction and preserva-tion of open landscape values.” The group attempts to bring influential planners together from academia and government to devise sustainable strategies on a range of physical planning issues.[96] In retrospect these ef-forts succeeded in changing the paradigms among both government and NGO environmentalists, convincing them of the paramount importance of open spaces on the national agenda.


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The idea of open spaces, however, remains an amorphous geographi-cal concept, not an activist agenda. In selecting its initiatives, the SPNI has occasionally allowed aesthetics to trump ecological considerations. For example, the organization actually opposed the mandatory installa-tion of solar-water panels on all new buildings and the proposed installation of streetlights on the Jerusalem highway, because they were ugly.[97] SPNI conservation strategies have been criticized for focusing on the at-traction that a given site holds for hikers rather than on the biodiversity it supports.[98]

With so many competing constituencies, it is not surprising that some factions became disenchanted with the organization's specific priorities. Left unresolved, disagreements could mushroom into major political con-troversies. So it was that Tel Aviv's plush Cinerama auditorium became the scene of the most intense internal showdown in SPNI history. The seeds for the controversy had been sown twenty years earlier. In 1978 the Uri Maimon Association, a small network of high-school nature field groups named after a young nature enthusiast from Haifa killed in the Yom Kippur War, joined ranks with the SPNI. They immediately became the organization's elite educational corps. But the “match made in heaven” turned sour. The field groups resented their perceived status as second-class citizens within the organization and demanded more funding. In 1996 the Association left the SPNI en masse, returning to its original independent status.[99] The SPNI responded by creating rival scouting groups and had a thousand kids signed up within six months. Association leaders were dissatisfied with the divorce and sought to seize control from SPNI management.[100]

Unable to contain the acrimony within the family, the SPNI aired its dirty laundry in the newspapers, making SPNI elections a hot item.[101] The SPNI old guard and management claimed that the organization was fighting for its life and soul to stop a hostile takeover by developers. Dror Hoter-Yishai, the founding chair of the Uri Maimon Association and at the time head of the Israel Bar Association, was an unabashedly aggressive developer. Yet the Uri Maimon Association flatly denied Hoter-Yishai's involvement in the elections. Rather, the scouting groups countered that the SPNI had become corrupt, stagnant, and out of touch with its original mission.[102]

The controversy proved to be a remarkable excuse for a membership drive. Amotz Zahavi came out of “retirement” to lead the campaign, which brought thousands back into the fold to give a vote of confidence to SPNI management. On January 13, 1998, chartered buses from kibbutzim in the


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Galilee and from the Arava poured into the heart of southern Tel Aviv as twelve thousand SPNI members rejected the challengers.[103] But the great victory celebration by the SPNI management rang hollow; there are no real winners in civil wars. The campaign revealed an organization that was increasingly divided into separate fiefdoms, with little collective sense of a common mission. Most of the scouting groups' substantive complaints about excessive salaries, commercialization, nondemocratic organizational culture, and a diminished relevance to youth were not refuted. Rather, there were promises that change was on the way.


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