THE MEDIA DARLING

It soon became clear that as chief eco-crusader, Sarid was having the time of his life. He managed to get the press interested in environmental issues that activists had long forgotten. In one of the most bizarre photo oppor-tunities of the period, he took the press with him to inspect the cleanliness

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in gas station bathrooms, a pet peeve of the Minister's; he even issued a few fines.^[69] When there were rumors about high radiation levels in the Small Crater^[70] coming from the nearby Dimona nuclear reactor, Sarid took a group of reporters with him to measure radioactivity. They found only normal levels,^[71] but later Sarid acknowledged that there had been a leak-age of nuclear wastes on August 2, 1992, that was hushed up by authori-ties, including Minister of the Environment Ora Namir.^[72]

One four-page newspaper profile of the Minister opened:

Since Yossi Sarid has entered the government, suddenly one hears about the Ministry of the Environment. More precisely, one never stops hearing about it. The hourly news and the newspaper headlines report with an impressive frequency about nuclear waste disposal, sewage treatment facilities, and the Hiriyah garbage dump. Environmental problems that in the past were relegated to bottom priority today are squarely on the public agenda, and Sarid sees to it that they stay there.^[73]

The environment ultimately proved too narrow to engage all of Sarid's energies and imagination, and the press followed him to foreign lands as well. Disturbed by the images of starving children in Rwanda, Sarid called Prime Minister Rabin and received his permission to lead a humanitarian medical delegation to the refugee camps in Zaire. Sarid also launched an initiative to save Muslims in Bosnia and bring them to Israel. What really interested Sarid, however, was the peace process. Rabin and Peres passed over loyal Laborites to add Sarid to the inside negotiation team that forged agreements with the Palestinians and the Jordanians.

Some environmentalists muttered that Sarid was really only a half-time Environmental Minister.^[74] Sarid dismissed the criticism, explaining that his sixteen-hour-a-day routine allowed him time for everything, and pointed out that the foreign travel log of Ministerial junkets has him among the Rabin government's least frequent fliers. His capacity for work was indeed enormous, and early in his term he was hospitalized with cardiac problems. Still, it often seemed that he canceled as many speaking engagements as he actually attended, because of this or that pressing political exigency.

For the first time, Sarid made ecology a mainstream issue. The envi-ronment seemed a more common Cabinet subject than security, and there was a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes, mostly starring an exasper-ated Prime Minister Rabin, who in each would succumb to yet another Sarid-led subterfuge.^[75] If nothing else, Sarid can be credited with provid-ing employment for Green journalists. By the end of his tenure, almost every newspaper had a reporter with a part-time environmental beat.