TOWARD A NATURE RESERVE AUTHORITY

In 1962 Moshe Dayan was appointed Minister of Agriculture. On the whole, his attitude toward the intrigues and nuances surrounding nature preservation policy can best be characterized as indifference. “When we first approached Dayan, he didn't know what we wanted from him,” recalls Uzi Paz. “But he was practical enough to appoint a committee. He assigned the job to the head of the Israel Lands Authority, Yosef Weitz. Weitz, in turn, appointed Nachman Alexandron to head the forum.”^[40]

The Alexandron Committee began to sift through seventy different proposals, trying to reach a consensus among its very diverse members. But Yan Yanai and his Landscape Improvement Department would not wait for them to reach conclusions. Frustrated by six years of improvisa-tional initiatives without real statutory authority, Yanai may have sensed the growing influence of Paz and the preservationists on the Alexandron Committee. Preempting the Alexandron process, Yanai lobbied for passage of a National Parks Law that had been collecting dust since its preparation in 1956 at the Ministry of the Interior.^[41] With the continued hesitation of the Minister of the Interior, Moshe Haim Shapiro, Yanai took his case straight to his boss, the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion decided to submit the proposed law on behalf of the entire government.

The bill created a single National Parks and Nature Reserves Authority. It established two ruling bodies—a broad Council to recommend to the Minister of the Interior which lands should become parks and a more nar-row overseeing Authority. Both were composed primarily of government representatives. The brief, three-paragraph explanation of the law clarified its orientation. It was not nature preservation.^[42]

It was at this time that JNF strongman Yosef Weitz became concerned that his laissez-faire approach to the new bureaucracy might have been

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mistaken. He launched a last-minute bid to bring the entire subject under the auspices of the JNF.^[43] Had he taken this view from the outset, he could probably have steered Dayan and his cronies in the government in this di-rection. But he was too late. Knesset members, who had grown increas-ingly resentful of his dictatorial status in the JNF, were not interested in granting him even greater authority.^[44]

Three times during December 1962 the Knesset would deliberate the bill. The speeches constitute the most profound discussion about the human relationship with the land of Israel in the country's legislative his-tory. Their topics, ranging from Jerusalem building codes to the National Water Carrier's impact on aquatic habitats, offer a rare snapshot of the ex-tent and form of ecological awareness during that period.