Pollution in a Promised Land "ss1.53"

SMILANSKY'S SOLOMONIC COMPROMISE

With the proposed law passed, the Alexandron Committee appointed by Dayan to consider the issue was in danger of becoming irrelevant. After its slow start, it was forced to reach conclusions swiftly. Discussions focused on the scope and boundaries of the possible nature reserve system. The

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committee eventually recommended that ninety-three sites be set aside, covering 120,000 dunams from Beer Sheva to the Galilee.^[51] No less important was the demand submitted to the Water Commissioner to guar-antee “water to the landscape of Israel.” This would ensure a continuing supply to areas such as the Huleh, as well as the Ahmud and Kziv streams.

Zahavi and Paz were fearful that under the proposed bureaucratic framework, nature preservation would be co-opted by Yadin and Yanai's vision of grassy archaeological parks and swimming areas with fences and admission fees. The two Knesset committees served as arbiters between the competing bureaucratic perspectives of Yan Yanai from the Prime Minister's office and Uzi Paz from the Ministry of Agriculture. Yanai en-joyed the advantage of being able to highlight the popular new park sys-tem in demonstrating the advantages of his approach.^[52] When feelings ran high in committee, Paz became concerned that the Knesset would send the bill back to the overseeing ministers to work things out.

As a tactical response, the nature lobby called for a formal distinction between “parks” and “reserves.” Under the two-tier system that MK Smilansky and other parliamentary allies pushed through the joint com-mittee, the Nature Reserves Authority and the National Parks Authority would be run entirely independently. Nature reserves were to be left alone, whereas national parks were to be developed. God's commission to Adam about the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15) is sometimes invoked to clarify the difference between the two entities: “to work” (parks) and “to protect” (reserves). The distinction creates confusion, because the term “National Parks” in countries like the United States has come to mean something much closer to Israel's “Nature Reserves.”

The other issue that troubled Paz and Zahavi was the absence of any provision that extended nature protection beyond the limited boundaries of the reserves themselves. From an ecological perspective, Israel is a tiny country, and most of the nature reserves envisioned by the Alexandron Committee were miniature in their dimensions. Plants and animals needed broader protection. Yet the concept of “protected natural assets” did not appear in the proposed law and was mentioned only in passing during the Knesset debate, by Rachel Zabari.^[53]

Despite the wall-to-wall support for the concept, discussions over details in the joint committee bogged down. In the summer of 1963, Israel's Knesset decided to disband once again for early elections. The adjournment threatened to erase the considerable parliamentary progress that had been made. At the last minute, the law was rushed through committee, and an entire section about natural protected assets

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was inconspicuously inserted. In August 1963, just prior to the recess, the Knesset passed the law.

In the general haste surrounding the vote, the text came out ragged. The legislative experts at the Ministry of Justice forgot to include a prohi-bition on sales of “protected natural assets” that was to have been part of the package.^[54] But the revised law, with its provision of parallel bureaucra-cies for parks and reserves, passed. (The system survived until 1998, when the two authorities were finally merged.) For nature preservation in Israel, the Knesset vote was a triumph.