Imagine the following happening in Country X:

A woman, a former secretary in the office of the country’s president, files a complaint of sexual abuse against him with the police. The president, made aware of this, files a counter-complaint accusing the woman of trying to blackmail him. A number of other women, who have also worked for the president in secretarial and administrative capacities, some of them long ago when he was a cabinet minister, hear of the proceedings and tell the police that they too were sexually abused by him.

The police take all of these complaints seriously. They do not belittle the women or seek to shield the president. They launch a full investigation, question the president exhaustively, and repeatedly cross-check his testimony against that of the women.

After many months, during which the media reports on the story on a daily basis and the president is publicly flagellated, the country’s attorney general, who is also its chief prosecutor, announces that there is sufficient evidence to indict the president for rape, but that before doing so he will give him the opportunity to explain himself at a special hearing, as is mandated by Country X’s legal system.

The press, numerous public figures, and various citizens’ organizations demand the president’s resignation. The president protests his innocence and claims that he is the victim of a plot, but agrees in the end to suspend himself temporarily from his position and moves ignominiously out of the president’s mansion.

The special hearing is held. At it the president’s lawyers succeed in convincing the attorney general and his staff that one of the two main witnesses for the prosecution, on whose veracity the rape charge mainly rests, has given contradictory and unreliable testimony.

Several more weeks pass and the attorney general announces his decision. Faced with the possibility that the accusation of rape may not be provable in a trial and may thus result in an acquittal, he has decided to accept the offer of the president’s lawyers to have him plead guilty to lesser sexual offenses that will earn him a suspended prison sentence. In return, the president agrees to resign in disgrace from office — true, his term is soon to end anyway — to confess in court to criminal conduct, and to be saddled with a criminal record.

And now, which of the following two reactions would you say would be more likely?

A) The press and much of the public of Country X hail what has happened as a significant victory for justice, women’s rights, and the ordinary citizen’s ability to challenge the abuses of high power.

B) The press and much of the public of Country X decry what has happened as a stinging defeat for justice, women’s rights, and the ordinary citizen’s ability to challenge the abuses of high power. In numerous newspaper columns, editorials, radio and TV talk shows, and demonstrations, they demand that the president be tried for rape anyway, since otherwise he will have gotten away scot-free and have successfully thumbed his nose at his fellow countrymen, and in particular, at his fellow countrywomen.

Oddly enough, Country X being Israel, the correct answer turned out last week to be B. Causing President Katzav to be publicly humiliated — as he indeed deserved to be — and forcing him to resign and to plead guilty to most of the things he was accused of, did not seem enough to a large part of the Israeli public. Unless convicted of rapes that he might not have committed and sent to jail for them, so the public mood went, not only would he have gone unpunished, the message would have been delivered to Israel’s women that there was no point in protesting male abuse, since they would never be listened to.

Clearly, there is something absurd about this. As if it were not punishment for a country’s president to have to resign from office as a legally labeled sex offender. As if it were not a victory for the women who accused him to have brought this about, or encouragement for other women who have suffered male sexual abuse to seek similar legal redress. What accounts for such a reaction in Israel? And especially, what accounts for it when just several months ago, in the case of former justice minister Haim Ramon, public opinion was in Mr. Ramon’s favor after he was convicted of a sexual abuse charge that was widely considered to be unfair?

One reason is the no doubt accurate perception that Mr. Katzav, unlike Mr. Ramon, was indeed a chronic sexual predator, irregardless of the precise form his predation took.

But there is another factor at work, too, I think. Mr. Katzav is also serving as a symbolic substitute for something and someone else — the something being the failure of Israel’s ruling party, Kadima, to pay a price for last summer’s botched Lebanese war and its consequences, and the someone being Kadima’s head and Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

The Israeli public’s frustration with what it has wrongly taken to be a cover-up in the Katzav case is in part, that is, a displaced reaction to what it rightly takes to be Mr. Olmert’s cover-up for last summer’s events, and its own powerlessness to force him from office despite his abysmally low standing in the public opinion polls. It is this sense of powerlessness that it is projecting onto the Katzav case, which if anything is an example of the opposite — of how a few ordinary Israeli women, acting courageously and conscientiously, were able to expose and publicly disgrace their country’s leading citizen. Israelis who want to change things should take heart from this, not be disheartened by it.

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