The decision by the Israeli police to recommend indictments against Prime Minister Olmert comes as a startling, even shocking development to those of us who have thrilled to the idealism of the Jewish state. It’s not that the news arrived out of the blue. Less than two months ago, Mr. Olmert decided to resign, declaring that he would not contest his party’s primary election of a new party leader. Mr. Olmert’s agreement to hold that vote, scheduled for September 17, was itself a sign of his eroding position.

His July 30 resignation preempted Sunday’s news that the police had concluded that “an apparent basis of evidence has been consolidated against [the] prime minister” on charges that include bribery, breach of public trust, and money laundering. Police are taking a further look at accusations that in the years immediately preceding his accidental emergence as prime minister, Mr. Olmert double billed his travel expenses.

By American standards, the amounts concerned are relatively small. As one wag said in 1977 when Yitzhak Rabin was forced to resign his first prime ministership over a $5,000 account in an American bank, Mr. Olmert has “slipped on a banana peel.” What is emerging is the sense that Israel is moving from a banana peel to, if not a banana republic, at least a banana peel republic. Gone are the austere revolutionary lifestyles of the first generation of political leadership from both left and right. Golda Meir and Menachem Begin both lived in small apartments. David Ben Gurion retired to a desert kibbutz.

This week’s developments do not prove Mr. Olmert’s guilt. If the attorney general decides to indict, Mr. Olmert will still, in American terms, be considered innocent. But these developments do effectively cripple Mr. Olmert’s leadership, ending his political career. An accidental prime minister, Mr. Olmert assumed the office following Prime Minister Sharon’s stroke and just before the 2006 elections.

If Mr. Olmert stood for anything it was for the proposition that Israelis were weary of the barricades and eager to live a “normal” life at a European standard. Mr. Olmert never recovered from the indecisive conclusion to the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza during the summer of 2006. By then his main issue, disengagement, lay in ruins. The disengagement policy was a defeat of idealism by pragmatism, or, disengagement’s defenders would argue, a form of Israeli “realism.”

It would be a shame, however, for anyone outside of Israel to make too much of all this. One of the great things about Israel is that it is a democracy in which its historic themes can be thrashed out. It has an independent judiciary before which the accusations can be made and justice meted out. All the more reason for Americans to look beyond these scandals to the virtues of the Jewish state and its democracy, on which America has placed its bet.