Israel's Winter of Discontent

...1 want journalists to report, not to determine the norms...

...The main focus is on the work and favors done for the couple by a Jerusalem mover and cleaning contractor, Avner Amedi, over a period of four years that started while Netanyahu was a private citizen...

...You know the law is bad...

...Draconian laws introduced in 1993 forbid all donations from abroad, and from corporations and most types of organizations...

...and resulted in a series of court battles...

...So what are we to make of the spate of scandals (and I haven't even dealt with the recent indictment of former Likud Minister of Justice Tzachi Hanegbi on such charges as fraud and breach of trust...

...In Europe, in the United States, the corporations have disproportionate power...

...Suspended talks with the Palestinians are resuming at a lower level, while Syrian rhetoric seems to leave no room for compromise...

...This time, though, Rubinstein independently decided to open a criminal investigation because of evidence that One Israel attempted to hide its NPO connections by delivering false information to the Elections Commission...

...The explanation may be that the country has been stupefied since the fall by a series of stunning scandals involving the President, both the current Prime Minister and his predecessor, a former Minister of Justice, a former chief aide to the late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, and the publisher of the country's second biggest newspaper, OferNimrodi, who sits in jail pending trial on attempted murder and a host of lesser offenses...

...Most commentators think that Barak has built an effective enough firewall around himself and his government will survive the investigation, even if some of his associates do not...

...We could expect a high level of ethics...

...It took hold with the Court's agreeing to hear (and ultimately rejecting) an appeal of Rubinstein's decision not to prosecute the Prime Minister for his earlier highly suspect and unsuccessful attempt to appoint Roni Bar-On, a Jerusalem lawyer, as Attorney General...

...Two years ago, having exhausted all other legal avenues, he copped a plea: He admitted to wiretapping and had various charges of tampering with justice dropped or reduced...

...As for the peace process, at least at the moment things look grim...

...When the latest indictment against him was handed down at year's end, though, it included only the charge of plotting to kill Tzur...

...Philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel, of the Hebrew University and the New School in New York, is convinced that "big money controls politics from behind the scenes...

...Meanwhile, the Knesset has sent him its own message with the preliminary approval of a bill that would make it virtually impossible for a referendum on a transfer to pass—backed by three parties in Barak's coalition...

...The defendant, she said, "had turned to police officials starting with the Commissioner, down through major generals, brigadier generals—all the way to the investigators in [the division] that was in charge of his interrogation...

...or of Rabin's one-time Director General, Shimon Sheves, now on trial for influence-peddling...

...A month later Nimrodi remarried...

...Not that there is much competition left today besides Ma 'ariv and the more serious Ha 'aretz...

...Currently in his second term in the largely ceremonial presidential post, he has spent his entire adult life in public service...

...Once independent journalist Yoav Yitzchak announced his bombshell about the Saroussi gifts last December 30, she says, Weizman "wasn't given a minute to find his bearings...

...Halbertal calls the 75-year-old President "a symbol of the passage of Israeli society from before 1967 to after...

...After the election State Comptroller Eliezer Goldberg, a former Supreme Court justice, began to look into the matter...

...In her request that the court have him kept under arrest until the end of his trial, the prosecuting attorney said the eight counts of his indictment had "no parallel in the State of Israel...

...Netanyahu is still on the defensive...

...All of this was done with the goal of extracting details and information on the investigation and to interfere with it...

...Long before the balloting, members of Netanyahu's Likud Party were charging that candidate Barak's campaign was drawing funds from a network of ad hoc nonprofit organizations (NPOs), and that some of them received their money from overseas...

...Among the intellectuals I have talked with, nearly all seem more troubled about certain sea changes in the society than reports of this or that politician being on the take...

...Weizman, nephew of the country's first President, Chaim Weizmann, and a former Air Force commander, is a blunt-talking, iconoclastic man whom many Israelis love for his insistence on following his instincts and his disdaining political correctness...

...Determined to save Ma 'ariv from near-certain extinction, he poured himself into the task of rebuilding what had once been the country's biggest-selling daily by remodeling it after Yediot Acharonot, a tabloid that sells more copies than all of its competition combined...

...sold to Tehran in the Iran-contra affair in the mid- 1980s...

...Journalist Ari Shavit has written in Ha 'aretz of "the hegemony of the 100 families," a reference to the small sliver of Israeli society whose members control the banks, insurance companies, communications empires, industry, and arms trade...

...In the 1980s, Saroussi also funded a short-lived political party headed by Weizman...

...The worst offender by far was Barak's One Israel Party (a coalition whose largest member is Labor), and Goldberg fined it $3.34 million—four times the amount said to have been raised illegally...

...Individual gifts may not exceed 1,700 shekels ($425...

...Why he accepted over $450,000 between 1988 and 1993 from a retiring French businessman named Edward Saroussi remains unclear...

...That was in 1994...

...When the collective ethos fell to the wayside, it wasn't replaced by anything else...

...And since we haven't gotten used to obeying the law, we certainly aren't used to something weaker than the law, namely ethics...

...Since last fall he and his wife, Sara, have been under police investigation in a case that looks increasingly petty as each new scandal unravels...

...Instead, this has turned out to be the winter of Israel's discontent...

...There was an old Israeli directness typified by Ben-Gurion, that was very powerful...

...Interestingly, following the 1996 election, when it became clear Netanyahu's campaign had used foreign money, the then State Comptroller said she would withhold punishment because the system was new, but if the same thing happened again severe penalties would be invoked...

...Unemployment is up to 9.5 per cent (that the economy showed strong signs of growth in the secondhalfofl999 only underscored the growing gap between haves and havenots), and teachers, claiming the Treasury had reneged on a pay-raise agreement, struck in January, closing the country's elementary schools for two weeks...

...Citing as examples its hearing "petitions on whether the government can close Orient House [the PLO "embassy" in Jerusalem], or on the legality of coalition agreements or Army appointments," he says: "This is the wrong path to take...

...The '93 laws were not applicable, it argued, because they were written three years before the country started to elect the Prime Minister directly...

...The preSix Day War ethos was very ascetic, and the forms of corruption were power-related, not money-related...

...Be that as it may, Ruth Gavison, who was until recently chairperson of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, is disturbed by the public trial and sentencing of Weizman in the press...

...Kasher is not suggesting that the scandals aren't real...

...David B. Green, a previous contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...

...But everyone agrees that the campaign funding laws have to be revised to unambiguously take the new situation into account...

...But we have a legal porridge...

...Within weeks, two young Barak activists were picked up for questioning about the NPOs they ran...

...In some respects, Israel has become no different than Germany, France, Japan, or the United States in the insidious influence that big money is having on politics...

...Why must the country pay the price of a bad law...

...It decided that Weizman has to go home...

...Together the Nimrodis, the Mozeses (Yediot), the Schockens (Ha 'aretz) and Eliezer Fishman own not only the country's remaining Hebrew papers but the cable TV networks, the commercial TV channel, book publishers, record companies, long-distance telephone services, and Internet access...

...But Israel is a tiny country, its social fabric delicate, its young democracy especially vulnerable...

...I don't want to get rid of a person who is President by simply throwing mud at him...

...she asked me rhetorically...

...Both of them have been separately interrogated more than half a dozen times, with some sessions lasting as long as 10 hours...

...That is why Hebrew University lawprofessor Ruth Gavison questions the wisdom of the criminal investigation...

...Now, it's merely vulgar...

...Are public figures taking greater liberties than they took in the past, or has the public's tolerance for greed and impropriety declined...

...He is bound to be preoccupied and politically weakened by the ordeal, though, which is likely to drag on for months...

...the guests included Barak, Netanyahu and Weizman...

...It faces a frightening, ongoing process of the concentration of wealth in an increasingly small number of hands...

...To different degrees, the same families have industrial and real estate interests...

...But he has been involved, apparently legally, in a number of business ventures on the side, and his permanent home is in one of the country's most exclusive communities, seaside Caesarea...

...The Attorney General, she says, should be "responsive to the needs of government...

...Barak's personal response was that he "didn't know," leading to speculation that he would let his top election aides—including his now Cabinet Secretary Yitzchak Herzog, son of the late President Chaim Herzog— take the rap...

...Many here soon learned a new English word, "lacuna," as One Israel sought to wriggle out of the hefty fine through a loophole...

...While speaking of the way "a retired general became hooked on foreign Jewish money and the lifestyle of a swimming pool in Caesarea," Halbertal also comes close to describing Bibi Netanyahu, who ensconces himself and his family during the warm months poolside at Jerusalem's King David Hotel...

...Gavison is echoed by Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher, who resents "the press acting as if it's the boss...

...Gavison is critical of the growing tendency to criminalize everything...

...Nimrodi was a bit overzealous in his effort to make Ma 'ariv Number One...

...The most serious scandal, in terms of its implications for the nation's governance, is the Barak campaign-funding affair...

...That made me wonder if the scandals weren't providing the public with a tabloidish diversion from confronting more serious problems...

...You need to enable that person to defend himself...

...On the Syrian front, the sudden resumption of talks in Washington last December had led to predictions all around that a treaty— paving the way to peace with the whole Arab world—could be hammered out after a short, tough series of negotiations...

...Compared to the gifts President Ezer Weizman has acknowledged taking in the 1980s, Netanyahu's alleged transgressions are minor...

...Is the media's aggressive pursuit of scandal stories an example of democracy's watchdog doing its job, or as Asa Kasher put it, is the Israeli press' idea of being a watchdog "finding something to bite and taking a piece out of it...

...But that's not acceptable...

...He declined...

...We don't have a constitution or a bill of rights...

...Campaigns here are largely publicly financed...

...Pridan claimed, for instance, that his wiretapping partner, Ya'akov Tzur, who turned state's evidence during the first investigation, was marked for death by Nimrodi...

...The publishers of Yediot and Ha 'aretz, known to be not merely rivals but his bitter enemies, were said to be similarly marked...

...At a November hearing on Nimrodi's continued detention, the head of the police investigation declared that the press mogul had tried to buy off his entire unit...

...If we had legal stability, we could say: This is the framework, what do we have to do...

...Shortly afterward, he once more faced trouble: Rafi Pridan, the private investigator Nimrodi hired to carry out the wiretaps, was offering the Tel Aviv prosecutor all kinds of material incriminating his ex-employer in a desperate attempt to have his own prison term reduced...

...His report, issued January 27, named five parties, among them Likud, as having taken funds illicitly...

...Once it became apparent that he might not win a second term, Amedi suddenly presented the Prime Minister's Office with a bill for over $100,000...

...As if the case were not troubling enough, it has underlined the fact that the country's major media outlets are owned by a small group of families...

...Many members of Israel's "engaged" press corps called for the President to resign, or at the minimum to take a leave of absence until the investigation was complete...

...More to the point for many, regardless of whether he did or did not know, Barak has shown himself to be a politics-as-usual type of guy...

...If the name Nimrodi sounds familiar, the reason may be that his father, Ya'akov, is the man who supplied the arms the U.S...

...Surely the most bizarre of the season's scandals, and perhaps the most ominous, with as many layers as an onion, has revolved around Ofer Nimrodi, director of the Israel Land Development Corporation, a holding company that deals in real estate, insurance and publishing...

...His victory over incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu last May by a stunning 12 percentage points in large part reflected the electorate's belief that he could be trusted to make good on his promises to reduce unemployment, reallocate scarce resources to a neglected public education system and, most important, bring back a degree of integrity and credibility to the office...

...Nimrodi was finally arrested again in November...

...What we have now is a situation where it is easier [for him] to open the criminal track than not to...

...Otherwise, she notes, on controversial issues someone can always be expected to petition the Supreme Court...

...Yet, aside from the war intensifying in Lebanon—which clearly shook up the Israelis as they watched the funerals of seven soldiers from the start of the year to mid-February—little of the bad news seemed to register very profoundly with the public...

...Even those Israelis who only two months ago accepted that a treaty would inevitably require withdrawal from the Golan Heights today wonder aloud, who needs a deal with Hafez al-Assad anyway when we can have a big, safe backyard like the Golan...

...He notes that 44 per cent of the shares traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange are controlled by five business groups...

...In particular, he commissioned wiretaps of top people at Yediot, of some of his own journalists, and of a variety of leading figures in Israeli society...

...Netanyahu's aides got Amedi to knock down his charges to $ 12,500, and then attempted to have the state pay the reduced amount...

...Domestically, too, Prime Minister Ehud Barak inspired high hopes...

...Ofer, 43, is a Harvard MBA and a lawyer who once clerked at Israel's Supreme Court, but his moral compass seemed to go a little haywire when he took over the family company in the early '90s...

...Rather he sees them as arising out of the fact that Israel is "still a state-in-the-making...

...But even if Weizman did nothing illegal there was something unseemly, at best, about a leading politician receiving regular cash gifts from a sugar daddy...

...You know you should reform it...

...As Shavit points out, "the idea of 'It's not done' hasn't caught on here...

...But if you allow them still more than they already have with their lobbies and their PR by letting them give money to bring politicians to power—even if that giving is transparent—it turns the democracy into a capital oligarchy...

...He is editor-in-chief and publisher of the country's second largest newspaper, Ma 'ariv, as well...

...In mid-February, while the police were still investigating Weizman's gifts, chief State Prosecutor Edna Arbel said it was unlikely the President would be indicted...

...The couple is also said to have kept a large number of gifts given to the Prime Minister, although by law these belong to the state...

...Sometimes they do business together and sometimes they feud, aligning and realigning themselves so that the consumer can never be sure how credible their coverage is...

...All that's left," he laments, "are profit and greed...

...Subsequently, Labor twice tried to persuade newly appointed Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein—a highly respected nonpartisan chosen by Likud in 1997 whom Labor has kept on—that the law should be applied to the prime ministerial race...

...He refused on the grounds that it was debatable whether criminal penalties could be extended to civil violations...

...Like Gavison, political philosopher Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University and Jerusalem's Hartman Institute questions the prudence of the Supreme Court involving itself in political decisions...

...It makes decisions, but doesn't have to take responsibility for them...

...The pattern of citizens turning to the Supreme Court for relief when frustrated by the political system set in during the Netanyahu years...

...An eight-month prison sentence that was cut by a third for good behavior, ended a year ago...

...By now, Israel and the Palestinians were to have signed a preliminary agreement that ironed out the major issues still dividing them, setting the groundwork for a final peace treaty next September...

...In fact, the pressure to resign appeared to make the unapologetic Weizman more determined to stay put...