Lewinsky Time In Israel

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

To judge by the newspaper headlines, Israel is afflicted these days by a veritable plague of public corruption and immorality. Its president, Moshe Katsav, is facing charges of sexual harassment and possibly rape. Its recently resigned minister of justice, Haim Ramon, is about to stand trial on charges of sexual misconduct as well. Prime Minister Olmert is accused of profiting from real estate deals with contractors when he was mayor of Jerusalem. Former minister of the environment, Tsachi Hanegbi, is about to be tried for illegally handing out jobs to party cronies. Mr. Olmert’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, was under investigation for years for gross financial improprieties. Mr. Katzav’s predecessor, Ezer Weizman, resigned six years ago under the shadow of financial improprieties. Various Knesset members are now under investigation for corruption. Former Shas Party head Aryeh Deri finished serving a jail sentence for it several years ago.

Sin country!

Is it as bad as all that? Not really. It’s not pretty, but there’s a bright side to it, too.

It’s probably true that, taken all in all, Israel’s current generation of politicians has lower standards of personal behavior than did the generations that came before it. In its early decades Israel had ideologically committed leaders who lived Spartan, even puritanical lives. David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin were men and women of simple tastes and material needs. They never dreamed of using their power for personal gain, and it is safe to say that most lesser politicians of their age were influenced to at least some extent by their example.

But if by corruption we also mean the illegitimate use of power for public ends, Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was in some ways a more corrupt society than it is today. In the heyday of socialist Zionism, under the hegemonic rule of Mapai, as the main party on the left was called, the line between political and public interests was far more blurred than it is today.What was good for Mapai was considered good for the country, and what kept Mapai in power was considered necessary for the country. Political patronage of the sort

that Mr. Hanegbi is about to go on trial for was ubiquitous. Not for nothing did Labor politician Binyamin Ben-Eliezer recently remark to Mr. Hanegbi, “If they send you to prison, there are a lot of us who should have been hung.” Ben-Gurion’s Mapai ran Israel as Tammany Hall once ran New York.

Perhaps the epitome of this system was Pinchas Sapir, a leading Mapai politician and Israel’s minister of finance from 1963 to 1974. Sapir was an indefatigable worker and a capable administrator, but the Finance Ministry in his day was his personal fiefdom and had about as much transparency as a steel door. Although he never took a penny for himself, Sapir was notorious for juggling public funds, appropriating large sums for economic projects on the basis of his own whims and judgments, and regularly circumventing accepted bureaucratic procedures. In a politically cleaner environment, he would have ended up in court himself.

Even on a purely personal level, politicians could once get away with things in Israel that today would be unthinkable. As minister of defense, for example, Moshe Dayan was known to be a repeated pillager of architectural digs who carried off from them, for his own private collection, antique items of value. In the end, Dayan gave up the habit, not because he was threatened with legal action, but because he was nearly buried when a dig collapsed on him. In the Israel of 2006, he almost certainly would have gone to jail.

All of which is to say that if Israeli politicians are indeed more corrupt than they once were, corruption is also being treated far less leniently than it once was by Israel’s police and judicial system. Six years ago, for instance, the police investigated Prime Minister Netanyahu and recommended indicting him for keeping a small number of not particularly costly official gifts that were legally the property of the state. (In the end, the attorney general quashed the indictment.) In Dayan’s day, this never would have happened.

The same is true of sexual misconduct, which — although it was not regarded as such in those days — was once endemic in Israel, in both the army and in public life. Military officers once routinely had affairs with women soldiers under their command that today would cost them their positions. Back then, no Israeli president would ever have been indicted on the charges that Mr. Katsav is now facing. Had any of his female staff complained about him, the matter would have been hushed up at once. At the most, a discreet message would have been sent to the offender to change his behavior before it became a national embarrassment.

In this as in other respects, Israel has gone the same way that other Western democracies have. Standards of behavior have risen everywhere.The Mark Foley affair notwithstanding, John F. Kennedy could do things in the White House that Bill Clinton could not, and subjects that the American media once shied away from are now battled over for scoops. In Israel, too, the private lives and affairs of politicians are today subjected to a degree of scrutiny that they never were exposed to before. More corruption is visible, in part, because more corruption is being rooted out.The picture isn’t all black.

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

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use