Why do so many of the greatest lovers of the Land have no fondness for the Society for the Protection of Nature or the Nature Reserves Authority?
Why do so many of my good friends — the ones who know every flower and every ruin and walk for days on end along every goat path and trail — see the Society or the Authority as their enemy, instead of being its partners?
On the face of it the answer is simple: lovers of the open spaces and the unmarked trails don’t get along with those perceived as the “police” of the countryside, the ones who shrink the wide-open Land down to the designated trail and the fenced-in pool…
But to my mind there is something deeper here.
The “Society for the Protection of Nature” was supposed to be the body that connects the people to its land — its nature and its heritage — and draws the young closer to love of the Land. But the semantics matter: they replaced the word “Land” with the word “nature.”
The word “land” is a word of belonging. It is mine. This is my land and these are my landscapes and I feel close to it. “Nature,” by contrast, is a general word that says: the story here is part of global nature; we are all part of one big “National Geographic.” And that may be factually true — but educationally it is wrong.
Because to create love you must create belonging and closeness.
The vulture, the sabra cactus, the hyssop and the ruin are all part of my story.
And there is a feeling today that those authorities have lost the simple love of the Land.
When I was a child, the Society for the Protection of Nature ran a huge marketing campaign under the headline “Go out to the landscape, but don’t pick!” The campaign succeeded, and many anemones were indeed saved from extinction. That approach protected nature, but it also protected us from nature. It educated toward a museum-nature, external to the human soul. The stream pools we bathed in as children were fenced off, and bathing in them was forbidden. The rock cliffs that had been a refuge from our troubles were netted so that we would not touch them. Nature turned from a multi-sensory experience of touch, smell, sound and sight into a museum-like national park that is all distant observation, like a man gazing at a landscape postcard.
Take the Banias reserve, for example. It truly is beautiful today, with the hanging bridge and everything, but once the Banias had smell and touch and freezing water and crabs and slippery stones and a waterfall that pounds your back — and today the Banias looks like a postcard of itself: beautiful, but it belongs to me about as much as a postcard of the Swiss Alps.
When I hike with my children or with the mechina, I encourage them to touch, to feel, to come close. And so I say: go out to the landscape, and if it isn’t protected — pick: crush the hyssop and wild savory bushes between your fingers until their scent drives your nostrils wild; turn over stones (carefully!), for beneath them hides a wondrous world of the Land’s tiny creatures you never dreamed existed; drink from the clear rock pools and drink deep of their intoxicating taste; and walk barefoot through the stubble fields until your feet get pricked. Leah Goldberg wrote “and they may be touched,” and only out of that: “and they may be loved.”
And today the distance between the people of nature and the people of the Land grows sharper still, with the Society’s immediate opposition to the founding of new communities in the Land of Israel, in the Negev and the Galilee — and the Zionist enterprise of love of the Land is being blocked in many places precisely by the body that was supposed to bring the young generation closer to its land.
I have many friends in the Society for the Protection of Nature and in the Nature Reserves Authority, and they do amazing work. My friends from the Authority and the Society — you are wonderful, every single one of you. But my quarrel with you is not about you catching me sleeping in an unmarked campground. Fine — let the fine be my donation to the state. The quarrel is over a change of conception:
Instead of the defensive-sounding name “Society for the Protection of Nature,” I would change it to “the Society for the Love of the Land.” Educate people to protect the ibex, the gazelle and the agama lizard — and alongside that, support young people with a spark in their eyes who want to found a new community in the Negev, and help them do it while protecting nature and out of connection to heritage. Allow, and even initiate, walks in forgotten places. And when you see a man with a big backpack and a soot-blackened finjan on an unmarked trail in a Judean Desert nature reserve, hug him and tell him: you are the model of who we would like to see.
