AN UNPOPULAR BOSS

The Labor Party victory of 1992 put an end to the orphan period at the Ministry of the Environment. However, the staff quickly came to miss the carefree days when they worked without the heavy hand of a Ministerial parent. In this case, the oppressive mother was Ora Namir. Mordechai Namir, her husband, had been the Mapai (Labor Party) mayor of Tel Aviv during the 1960s, giving Namir access to top-level politicians. After his

---

death, she embarked on her own political career and was elected as a Knesset representative in 1973. Namir made a name for herself there as a defender of the disenfranchised, particularly in the area of labor reforms and women's issues.^[58] She felt snubbed by her former political patron, Yitzhak Rabin, and in 1992 decided to run against him and Shimon Peres in the Labor primaries, where she came in a distant fourth place. It did not improve her standing with Rabin. When the Prime Minister handed out the Cabinet jobs, he kept the Minister of Labor post she so coveted open in the hope of attracting ultraorthodox parties to the government. Namir had to settle for the Ministry of the Environment. Environmentalists were delighted when such a high-profile politician got the job, but they found that her humanitarian public image was a far cry from her private personality.

The first thing she did was fire Uri Marinov out of “managerial” and not personal or professional considerations.^[59] It is not unusual for Ministers to appoint Directors from among their political cronies. Still, there was some surprise at the speed and callousness of Marinov's dis-missal. His replacement was Yisrael Peleg, a former head of the Government Press Office.^[60] With a doctorate in communications, he had hoped to be appointed head of the National Broadcast Authority, but nev-ertheless jumped at Namir's offer.^[61]

In their first impression of Namir in the Ministry, most environmen-talists remember her as being superficial and supercilious. Marinov recalls a post-election meeting. Namir asked what the key environmen-tal problems were. “West Bank sewage” was the immediate response. A few days later Namir returned and charged nastily, “You all misled me. I spoke with a senior military officer, and he claims that the sewage prob-lem has been completely taken care of there.” The group was a bit stunned at her vociferous attack. With nothing to lose, Marinov pointed out that the Ministry of the Environment generally believed that putting waste into pipes was not enough—that there should be treatment at the end of the line.^[62]

In her early interviews, Namir actually identified sewage as her top pri-ority, but she did not put together a serious Ministerial strategy to con-front the issue. She returned from a trip to America enthused about trash incineration and was convinced that the private sector would buy a multi-million-dollar technological solution to Israel's garbage problem. Although a number of important regulations were finally passed during her tenure and she seemed to be working hard, Namir is remembered mostly because she managed to alienate people. The Society for the

---

Protection of Nature in Israel was furious when she chose “employment” over her professional staff's negative position toward the Voice of America. After Adam Teva V'din filed a Supreme Court action against her Ministry, it found that the once-friendly Namir held grudges. She took umbrage easily.

Her staff suffered most of all. Many of the senior officials at first grum-bled at what a bad listener she was. After suffering a few of her legendary temper tantrums, they started to look for alternative employment. Namir seemed to enjoy humiliating her subordinates in public. It went beyond contradicting and insulting them—she went as far as to force them to pick up trash from the floor in front of visitors. When her termagant ways were leaked to the press, her fury reached new heights. Morale in the Environmental Ministry was at an all-time low in October 1993, when Prime Minister Rabin reshuffled his Cabinet.