FROM POVERTY TO MIDDLE CLASS

In perhaps his greatest achievement as Minister, Sarid translated his pop-ularity into money. In 1992 the Ministry of the Environment budget was twenty-six million shekels. By 1996 it reached 231 million. The increase was partly due to Yisrael Peleg's long-time political connections in the rul-ing Labor Party with Beige Shochat, the Minister of Finance. Riding Sarid's momentum, Peleg managed to initiate a four-hundred-million shekel multiyear cost-sharing fund to help Israeli industries pay for pol-lution control equipment.^[76] (Under Sarid, 120 million were immediately utilized.) The quantum leap in funding was most immediately reflected in the spiffy new Ministry offices. No longer the unwanted stepchild at the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry dedicated its modern complex on the eve of Passover 1995.^[77] Appropriately, it was located at “On Wings of an Eagle Street” overlooking the Angel Bakery. Not long before the move, Sarid had signed a personal decree that led to dramatic reductions in emis-sions at the bakery, a perennial Jerusalem air polluter.

Part of the reason for Sarid's budgetary success was his unique relation-ship with the Prime Minister (see Figure 26). The two men were not close politically or personally prior to Sarid's tenure. Indeed, Sarid had chastised Yitzhak Rabin when, as Minister of Defense, he called for “breaking Arab bones” in response to the Intifada.^[78] But something clicked between the two soon after Sarid joined the Cabinet. Rabin never became an environmen-talist, but he did give Sarid and his Ministry unusual latitude.

Sarid was never bogged down in the day-to-day minutiae of running a government Ministry. Yisrael Peleg was content to fill this role, happily operating under Sarid's shadow and overseeing budgetary details. It was Peleg who pushed for a comprehensive administrative restructuring. He claimed that despite the professed commitment to decentralized manage-ment,^[79] when Marinov was Director General, in addition to his six re-gional coordinators, twenty-nine people were directly responsible to him. Peleg found this to be a managerial disaster and moved to appoint Deputy Directors to control different sectors. Peleg's most important contribution, however, was initiating the Year of the Environment in 1994.^[80]