Israeli politics in grip of a 'Roman' decay

Israeli soldiers carry a blindfolded Palestinian, detained in a military operation in the Gaza Strip, onto a truck. Photo: Reuters

• Jason Koutsoukis
• June 7, 2008
• Page 1 of 2 | Single Page View

A SHAWARMA vendor in Jerusalem's busy Ben-Yehuda shopping mall seemed as good a person as any to ask about the wretched state of Israeli politics.

"I am disgusted!" shouted a sweaty Avi Meir, slicing with added vigour into a massive roll of roasting chicken meat.

"Up there in the Knesset," Meir said, pointing his carving knife towards the Israeli Parliament, "it's like a Roman orgy. When I was a kid I had heroes for politicians. Now I have criminals."

Sixty years into its turbulent history, many Israelis fear that unless the state undertakes major political reforms it won't make it to 100.

Read through the list of recent scandals and Meir's nod to the decadence of imperial Rome sounds more like understatement than hyperbole. Here's just a sample:

■In July last year, Israel's eighth president, Moshe Katsav, was forced to resign after 10 women accused the career politician of various degrees of sexual assault ranging from rape to harassment.

■Katsav's predecessor, Ezer Weizman, was booted out after it was revealed he had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in "gifts" from a French millionaire while serving as an MP.

■In January last year, former Israeli justice minister Haim Ramon was found guilty of sexual assault after molesting a woman soldier at a ministerial soiree where he forcibly French-kissed her. He has since been reappointed to cabinet as vice-premier and minister in the Prime Minister's Office with responsibility for state policy.

■Tzachi Hanegbi is still a member of the Knesset but had to resign as minister for internal security in 2006 when he was indicted on charges of fraud, bribery and lying under oath. His trial is ongoing.

■Omri Sharon, the son of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, was briefly a member of the Knesset until he was imprisoned in 2006 for corruption and perjury offences.

On Wednesday, this list grew when a Tel Aviv court charged former finance minister Avraham Hirschson — a protege of the current Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert — with crimes including aggravated theft, fraud, embezzlement and obstruction of justice.

Which leads to Olmert himself, who since assuming the prime ministership in January 2006 has been the subject of five investigations.

The latest centres on allegations that from the time he was elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993 to when he was a senior minister in the Sharon government, he accepted up to $520,000 in illegal campaign contributions and bribes from New York businessman Moshe Talansky, much of it supposedly delivered in brown paper bags.

In lurid testimony at the Jerusalem District Court, Talansky described how Olmert would tap him for money to pay for his bar tab, luxury holidays in Italy, or first-class air tickets to the United States.

Judging from the pictures of Olmert seated with American President George Bush in the Oval Office this week, waving happily to the voters back home, he seems oblivious to the damage his tenure is causing.

Since the latest scandal broke a month ago, Olmert has put handing over the Golan Heights back on the table in high-level talks with Syria, and been behind active efforts to broker a truce with the Islamist political movement Hamas.

In his weekly column in The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, Isi Leibler, the founder of Australia's Jetset Travel who emigrated to Israel a decade ago, said that while most Israelis would welcome Olmert's departure, the problems would not end there.

"Let us not delude ourselves," Leibler wrote. "The rot extends far beyond the person of the Prime Minister. Leaders of both Labor and Likud, either directly or via their acolytes, have brazenly indulged in illegal fund-raising. Accepting 'personal gifts' from both wealthy diaspora Jews and Israelis has become the accepted norm."

So where to now? According to Amotz Asa-El, adjunct professor at the Shalem Centre, a privately funded research institute, Israel must abandon its system of extreme proportional representation, where MPs are accountable only to the party bosses who select their position on national voting lists and where small, special interest parties end up holding the balance of power in fragile coalitions, often subverting the national interest for their own.

"We have a very serious and alarming crisis of political leadership in this country," Asa-El told The Age. "The problem at its heart is the electoral system, and unless we change it, the state of deterioration we are suffering now will only get worse."

Asa-El says the only way out is to adopt a system where at least half Israel's MPs are directly elected from residential districts. "But first we have to convince the politicians to change a system that suits them. It's not going to be easy."

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