If there is anything encouraging about the silly trial and last week’s conviction by a Jerusalem court of Israel’s former minister of justice, Haim Ramon, for committing “an indecent act” in his office last July, it has been the reaction of the Israeli public. Israelis, it turns out, are a lot more sensible than is their judicial system.

For those readers of the Sun who have not been following l’affaire Ramon, its bare details are as follows:

The 56-year-old Mr. Ramon, a personable and well-liked politician and divorced father of two, was long a dominant figure in the Labor Party and a contender for its leadership. He left it over a year ago to join Ariel Sharon’s new Kadima Party and was appointed minister of justice after Kadima’s electoral victory. A friend and confidant of Prime Minister Olmert, and a linchpin in the Olmert government, he was forced to leave office last summer when a young woman soldier posted in the Knesset, and identified only as “H.,” filed a complaint that he had kissed her, sticking his tongue into her mouth, against her will.

In his defense, Mr. Ramon didn’t deny that he had kissed H. Rather, he claimed that she had initiated the kiss, and that she had flirted with him that day, given him her telephone number, and teasingly invited him to join her on a trip abroad after her coming discharge from the army. He also displayed a photograph she had asked to have taken with him, showing her smilingly facing the camera with her arms clasped around him, and brought witnesses who testified that she had spoken to them about being sexually attracted to him.

H., for her part, denied having made such remarks, and while admitting the telephone number and mention of a trip abroad, claimed they were innocent acts that did not constitute an invitation to be kissed. The court, composed of two women judges and one man, found H.’s testimony more reliable than that of the defendant or his witnesses; accused Mr. Ramon of adding insult to the injury of his original infraction by seeking to besmirch H.’s character, and put off his sentence — which could be up to a three-year prison term — to a future date.

Mr. Ramon will appeal and is unlikely to go to prison in any case. Yet his political career has been ruined by a single kiss that, when all the evidence is weighed, would seem to have been more a matter of insensitivity and misunderstanding than of sexual predation. There is no doubt that H. did act seductively.

It also seems clear that she was not looking for a sexual relationship with Mr. Ramon. If the latter was guilty of anything, it was of self-centeredly misinterpreting a high-spirited young woman’s natural flirtatiousness — not a sign of great acumen on his part, but nothing to be forced to drop out of politics for, either.

The court’s verdict against Mr. Ramon was harsh and vindictive. It is hard to escape the impression that motivating it was in part an American-style sexual political correctness, a recent import to Israel, and in part the growing trend here toward a judicial activism that considers it the courts’ business to regulate as much of public and private life as they can. Both of these things are pernicious.

It is not that the sexual harassment of women has not been a problem in Israel, as it has been in many other societies, or that laws are not needed to curb it and give legal recourse to its victims. But what Israeli society, which has always been life-loving and relaxed about sexual matters, does not need is the New Puritanism that has overtaken much of America, where it now reigns side-by-side with the New Permissiveness, so that many Americans who think that homosexuals should be allowed to marry also seem to agree that heterosexuals should be legally penalized for making a casual pass or innuendo.

Happily, the Israeli response to the Jerusalem court’s verdict has been heavily in Mr. Ramon’s favor — in favor, that is, not of what he did, or even of how he conducted himself after doing it, but of the argument that he should never have had to stand trial when a slap in the face, literal or figurative, would have been quite enough to put him in his place.

Everywhere — in the press, in the living room, in the street — this has been the tenor of the reaction, not only among men, but among most women as well. H., the great majority of Israelis feel, had better alternatives than filing a legal complaint — which, in all fairness to her, she did not originally want to do and was talked into by the law-enforcement authorities. In fact, many women felt that the court’s verdict was demeaning to them in its assumption that they were helpless to defend themselves against nonviolent philanderers like Mr. Ramon and needed police protection.

There are societies that suffer from lawlessness. But there are others — today’s America is perhaps an example — that suffer from a surfeit of law. Israel has never been a utopia, and its critics can say, with some justice, that the rule of law in it has often not gone far enough, but one of the nice things about it is that it is a country in which personal relationships, and the ability to maneuver sensibly in them, have always been understood to be a better way of solving problems than litigation, whether civil or criminal. The reaction to the Ramon case is a sign that most Israelis would like to keep it that way.

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