The indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is confirmation, were any needed, that Israel has come down with the American disease. Clinically, the disease is defined in the handbook of political medicine maintained by the Sun as “an infection of the democratic process by criminal law.” It can bring down even the most heroic politicians. It may yet prove fatal to great nations.
Mr. Netanyahu was formally accused Thursday in three cases. The crimes are bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The charges are being levied at a moment of political deadlock, when Israel is trying to decide whether to hold a third election in little more than a year. It strikes us an an ideal moment for the police to stay out of politics, but the American disease has a way of affecting the judgment of public officials.
Our first twinges of concern over this go back to 1977, when newspapers discovered that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife had two bank accounts in America. They’d been established legally when he was Israel’s ambassador in Washington but weren’t, as the law required, closed within six months of his return to Israel. Rabin quit, and Israel elected, in Menachem Begin, its first rightist, premier.
Even though we favored Begin, we were shocked that Rabin would step down as premier over this kind of penny ante infraction (the two bank accounts totaled something like ten grand). That, though, is how the American disease presents. It disorients those involved, victim and pursuer, causing them to lose perspective. Labor, Rabin’s party, should have been outraged — and should have remained so forever.
Instead, the virus of criminal prosecutions has spread to the point where Mr. Netanyahu is being pursued by his own government. The head of the police, Roni Alsheikh, and the Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, are both from the right. They’ve dragged the investigation out noisily for years. Mr. Mandelbit sprang the indictment at a moment calculated for maximum political result.
We understand there are those who take the charges seriously. There are also, though, serious critics who reckon it’s not serious. Case 1,000, as the first is known, involves small gifts like wine and cigars and, supposedly in return, services of the kind that politicians do for constituents. There’s been some terrific coverage of the point in Tablet Magazine by a law professor, Avi Bell.
Professor Bell quotes Alan Dershowitz as noting that Israel law has no clear definition of when accepting small gifts becomes illegal. Which is, in our view, exactly the kind of opening through which the American disease infects a polity. Cases 2000 and 4000, Mr. Bell reckons, are even worse, owing to the way the premises on which they rest threaten the open democracy for which Israel is famous.
“In both cases,” Mr. Bell writes, Mr. Netanyahu “is charged with crimes for seeking more favorable coverage from traditionally hostile media outlets in exchange for lawful regulatory action.” Both cases, he writes, “depend on the idea that positive media coverage of public officials is a currency, like coin, that can turn into bribery when in exchange for policies or decisions.”
If there is a law that does that in Israel, one could call it the Editorial Writer Abatement Act. The idea that a politician is forbidden to do things that would please the press is mind-boggling. If the case against Mr. Netanayhu prospers, Professor Bell warns, “a considerable part of the democratic life of Israel will have to pass through police interrogation rooms.”
The point is underscored by Mr. Mandelblit’s timing, coming as it does as the Knesset is desperately trying to form a government. The indictments were handed up on the first day of a 21-day period in which any member of the Knesset can form a government. It practically invites a political coup against Mr. Netanyahu from within his own party.
Columnist Caroline Glick reckons it’s reached the point where “voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected attorneys who run the country.” It’s a classic symptom of the American disease, compounded by the fact that Israel is a country in which the powers granted the government are not separated. So the American disease could yet prove to be existential for the only real democracy in the Middle East.
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