“NEW DEAL” FOR NATURE
In 1994 Minister of the Environment Yossi Sarid went to talk with the Prime Minister about the Nature Reserves Authority. “There's no logic in having two separate agencies for parks and for reserves any more,” he told him. “No one can tell the difference anyway.” “You're right,” Yitzhak Rabin replied. “But what Minister would be willing to cede departments under his control?” Indeed, bureaucratic reshuffling has traditionally hap-pened in Israel only as part of coalition agreements and elections. But Sarid did the unthinkable. He went to talk to Minister of Agriculture Yaakov Zur and simply put the case before him. Zur listened and on the spot responded: “You're right.”[191]
It would take almost four years and a change in government before these changes received the Knesset's statutory blessing.[192] The amendment finally passed the Knesset in January 1998. By then, the Ministry of Agriculture was no longer the powerful agency it had been in 1962. Agriculture in Israel was in decline, increasingly irrelevant to the country's high-tech economy. So after thirty-five years, the Nature Reserves and the National Parks systems were merged, just as Yan Yanai first proposed, only under the auspices of a Minister of the Environment. It is not yet clear whether the new institutional supervision bodes well for nature. Dan Perry believes that historically there were clear advantages to being associated with the Ministry of Agriculture in spite of the undeniable conflicts of in-terest, from chemical poisonings to water allocation contests.
Although it would be unreasonable to expect today's heirs to the NRA legacy to be as ambitious as Yoffe, many observers have sensed a gradual enervation in the vigilance and scope of the NRA's agenda. Perhaps this change is just a sign that new institutions like the Environmental Ministry are now on the scene. The Authority may not need to go as far afield as it used to, doing battle against pesticide abuse and oil spills. Still, there is a growing perception that to maintain an image of moderation, directors subconsciously (or sometimes openly) build concessions into their opening bargaining positions.
This is altogether different from honest mistakes, which are inevitable. For instance, when Israel was leaving the Sinai during the early 1980s, the Authority's management focused its attention on the military redeploy-ment going on in the Negev. Precious little effort went into confining the
In other crucial battles, however, rather than standing up for nature, the Authority has maintained a reticence. For example, Highway 6 will have a devastating effect on Israel's wildlife, yet the NRA has done little to bol-ster opposition efforts. It is hard to imagine Avraham Yoffe sitting on the sidelines in a matter of such importance. In the Jordan River case, the NRA's conciliatory position undermined the efforts of the SPNI and other environmentalists who fought for preservation. A gap between the field staff, for whom it is relatively easy to hold uncompromising opinions, and central management in Jerusalem, who face political constraints, is un-avoidable. Yet recently it seems to have grown.
Part of the problem with the Authority is the dilemma created by its quasi-independent status. The Ministry of Finance has come to expect the NRA to generate much of its own budget, even though it is a government entity. This creates an excruciating dilemma for management, which desper-ately needs revenues to continue the Authority's many activities but which must often pay a price. Yet, in 2001, when a new Minister of the Environment, Tzachi ha-Negbi, attempted to funnel the Authority's budget through his Ministry, nature advocates, including Uzi Paz, called foul and at-tacked the Minister as undermining the agency's traditional independence.[195]
Ultimately the ministerial home of the Authority is less important than the quality of its leadership. After a lackluster performance by Shaika Erez, a former general, Aaron Vardi was appointed as the first Director of the combined Nature and National Parks Authority. He too was a senior military man. A personable kibbutznik, Vardi had been an effective Director General at the Ministry of the Environment. After the 1996 elec-tions, Rafael Eitan, the new Minister, immediately replaced him, only to remember that he actually knew and liked Vardi from the army. So he gave him the tedious, eight-month-long task of merging two beauracracies that had competed for decades.
To be sure, by the 1990s, the institutional divisions between the two agencies seemed wasteful and anachronistic. As more nature reserves charged entrance fees and national parks came to hold increasingly large tracts of unmanaged lands around their historical attractions,[196] it was often unclear whether there were any salient differences. Creating a shared identity and common sense of purpose, however, was hardly an overnight phenomenon. The combined forces of six hundred workers (350 and 250 respectively) offered a formidable team to preserve the country's