Between the unsuccessful war against Hezbollah, daily disclosures in the press of the misplanning and misjudgments with which this war was fought, and a rash of breaking scandals involving high public figures, Israel might be compared to a man who has been in a car crash and doesn’t know what to be more upset about.

Should it be about the driver of the car’s having had too many drinks before getting behind the wheel? The vehicle itself having been in a state of mechanical disrepair that caused it to skid? The insurance not having been renewed, so that there is no coverage for damage? Or should it be about the fact that the insurance agent has turned out to be a swindler and the chief mechanic at the garage has been exposed as a bigamist? And how about the official at the motor vehicle bureau who was taking bribes, and the appraiser who has been padding his damage reports in return for money under the table?

If there is such a thing as an embarrassment of riches, this country now has an embarrassment of embarrassments. Not only did its army perform badly, its political leadership manage the war ineptly, and its home front prove to be unprepared for five weeks of Hezbollah rockets, but its prime minister now stands accused of shady dealings with a building contractor, its chief of staff has been caught selling his stock portfolio on the morning the hostilities were about to commence, its minister of justice is about to stand trial on charges of sexual harassment, its president is facing a similar and possibly even worse fate, and we aren’t at the bottom of the list yet. Israel is bruised all over and can’t decide what to say “ouch!” over first.

The opinion has been widely voiced that we need to have a sense of proportion and to distinguish between the important and the trivial. An army that goes to war ill-equipped and without a coherent battle plan, we are told, is far more worrisome than a chief of staff whose first thought is for his personal finances, a prime minister who cannot make up his mind what orders to give his generals is a greater danger to a nation than a prime minister who gets an expensive house on the cheap because he has done the builders a favor. Let’s concentrate on what matters more and not be distracted by what matters less.

The flaw in this reasoning is that it fails to see that what “matters more” and what “matters less” are connected, in public affairs as in private ones. Of course faulty brakes in an uninsured car are a more serious threat to a car owner than a shady insurance agent or a mechanic with multiple wives, but isn’t it possible that it is because the insurance agent was corrupt and the mechanic was busy running back and forth between two families that the insurance policy was never issued and the brakes went unchecked? And isn’t it also possible that a chief of staff who worries about his own pocket when the fate of the nation is at stake, or a head of state who breaks laws for personal gain, are more likely to cut corners in preparing for wars and situations of crisis and then to mismanage them when they come along?

A sense of proportion is indeed necessary. And it should tell Israelis that they are dealing with a single syndrome, which the political commentator Ari Shavit, in a much read and discussed article written immediately after the war’s end, called a “failure of Israel’s elites.”

Ari Shavit is right. The standards of Israel’s military and political establishments have declined sadly over the years. This isn’t a question of a past utopia versus a sinful present. There was plenty of sinning in the past, too. But if there was once a time when Israeli politics were on the whole known to be among the cleanest and most idealistic in the democratic world, and the Israel Defense Force had the reputation of being the toughest and smartest army there was, that time is long gone. Corruption and cronyism have become norms of Israeli political life, just as careerism and covering one’s rear have become of military life. The results have been the same in both government and the army: Too much mediocrity and mutual backslapping at the top, and too little critical thinking and taking of responsibility.

Israelis were surprised by how Hezbollah was able to fight their army to a standstill, but they weren’t totally startled by it; already in the 1973 Yom Kippur War this country was forced to rethink its previously dismissive appraisals of the Arab soldier. The real shock in the five weeks of fighting Hezbollah was not that the latter sometimes outfought the IDF, but that it consistently outthought it. It had planned far better for the hostilities and it was far more successful in implementing its plans. Hezbollah made Israel fight the war that it wanted to fight, and it anticipated Israel’s moves at every step.

It is certainly not unconnected to this that Hezbollah, like other jihadist organizations, has a reputation for probity and devotion to its cause that no Arab government has ever had. For Israel, this is the truly scary thing about the second Lebanese war: The realization that the old maxim that said that, no matter how great the Arabs’ quantitative edge over Israel, Israel would always have the qualitative edge, may no longer be true. This is the real wake-up call that the guns of July and August have sounded.

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