Israel's Case of the Chickenpox

When I was five years old, two days before my sixth birthday, I came down with the chickenpox, ruining the party that was planned. Something similar has happened this week to Israel. A fine 60th birthday present the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, and his police investigators have given it! Just when the country was dutifully trying to forget its troubles and gearing up to celebrate six decades of Jewish independence next Thursday, it was notified in rapid succession that:

• Its prime minister had been questioned summarily by police investigators on yet another corruption charge (that was last Friday).

• The suspicions against Mr. Olmert, this time, were "extremely grave" and could lead to a rapid indictment and his forced resignation (over the weekend).

• The police had obtained a court order forbidding any public disclosure of the nature of these charges (over the weekend again).

• A "dramatic development" would take place on Tuesday, throwing light on the whole mysterious affair.

Writing these lines on Monday night in Israel, therefore, Tuesday's columnist can't help feeling foolish. Sometime tomorrow, you, my readers, will probably know things that I can't even imagine at the moment.

Mysterious isn't the word. Israel has been preparing for its 60th independence celebration for a long time. Festive events have been planned, guests have been invited, the president of America is due to drop by later this month.

Surely the police knew that they would be casting a pall over the entire celebration, just as they knew that, by blacking out all news reports of it, they would be subjecting the nation to unbearable suspense.

What could they have discovered of such urgency that pursuing it couldn't have been postponed another week?

And if the latest case against the prime minister was really such that any delay in following up on it might have jeopardized it, what need was there to announce that Mr. Olmert was being questioned? Why couldn't, at the very least, the news of this have been put off until after Independence Day? The prime minister himself, it seems safe to assume, would have been only too happy to spare himself the embarrassment of spoiling the festivities.

And even if the news of Mr. Olmert's questioning couldn't have been put off, why was a blackout imposed on it? To prevent the prime minister and others under suspicion from destroying evidence or coordinating alibis? But it's unimaginable that those under suspicion, whatever they were suspected of, would need the press to tell them what evidence to destroy or what alibis to concoct.

It doesn't make any sense. I wish I could put off writing this column until tomorrow. Of course, I could simply have ignored the whole thing. I had been planning to sit down tonight and write about Israel's first 60 years. Perhaps I should have gone ahead and written it as if nothing had happened. After all, whatever it is that has happened, I am, like everyone else in Israel, being kept in the dark about it.

What would I have written? Something, I suppose, about taking the long view. About the need, when thinking about Israel, to put the obfuscating details aside and concentrate on the larger picture. About how one day in the future, when the history books have to summarize Israel's first 60 years, they will skip over all the disappointments and failures and stress the glorious chapter in human history that the return of the Jewish people to its land after long centuries of exile constitutes. About …

But who can concentrate on the larger picture? All I can think about is what Mr. Olmert has done that I'm not being told about. Siphon off the national budget into his bank account? Speculate on the shekel with inside information? Secretly sell the Western Wall to the Saudis?

But suppose he has? What difference would that make in the perspective of history, of the three-millenia drama of the world's oldest people?

The mind wanders. Could it be a simple case of bribery? Of nepotism? Could Mr. Olmert, perhaps back in the days when he was minister of industry and commerce, have awarded sinecures, sold jobs to the highest bidder, appointed his office manager's nephew to be deputy director of a government corporation? Do the police finally have the goods on him?

And if they do, what happens now? He'll have to resign, of course. Who will take over the reins? Foreign Minister Livni? Mr. Olmert's Kadima party will probably rally around her. But does she have what it takes to hold it together? To keep both Labor and Shas in her coalition? To avoid having to call for new elections?

New elections! The story isn't that. It's 60 years of remarkable development, of economic growth, of millions Jews gathered from the four corners of the earth, of a small democratic state fighting off its enemies.

And if there are elections, who will be the winner in them? Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud? And what happens then? Do we invade Gaza? Bomb Iran? How is Mr. Netanyahu going to get along with a new Democratic administration in Washington that will not be sympathetically disposed to him?

On the day I was six, I lay in bed and itched and wished I could scratch and felt sorry for myself that my birthday had been spoiled. If a whole country could come down with the chickenpox, that's what Israel has gone and done now.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.