Israel’s Legal System and Corruption: White Knight or Black?

Yitzhak Klein

The Olmert government has acquired a reputation as one of the most overtly corrupt in Israel’s history. A former Finance Minister is on trial for peculation. A former Justice Minister was convicted of sexual harassment (but, in an odd ruling, not of felonious conduct). The head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee is on trial for making illegal appointments when a Cabinet minister. To crown it all, Morris Talansky has testified to handing the Prime Minister envelopes of cash.

At the same time, the Olmert government has mounted one of the most sustained attacks ever on the authority of the legal system. Originally, Olmert appointed Haim Ramon, a man with a reputation as a political hatchet man, as Justice Minister with a brief to reform the Ministry (Ramon is the man who was accused of sexual harassment).In his place came Professor Daniel Friedmann, who has proposed much legislation designed to curb the court’s power and authority.

The multiple indictments leveled at persons in the Olmert government (notably excepting, so far, Ehud Olmert himself) have allowed representatives of Israel’s legal establishment, notably the current and former Chief Justices, Dorrit Beinish and Aharon Barak, and the Attorney General, Menahem Mazuz, to defend the power of that establishment by portraying it as the last bulwark of Israel’s democracy against corruption. According to this narrative, Daniel Friedmann, honest but misguided, is Ehud Olmert’s agent in a conspiracy to render the courts contemptible and the laws unenforceable in Israel.

This argument cannot be accepted at face value. It implies that Israel’s legal system merits public support because it has been a consistent combatant against corruption. This, unfortunately, is a misrepresentation. Israel’s legal system operates with significant political bias. Whether a politician gets indicted depends more on who his friends are and what his declared policies are than on anything he has done. This has especially been the case since the appointment of Menahem Mazuz as Attorney General, a weak man with flawed judgment which he has exercised too often in the interests of his friends and his personal political convictions.

Menahem Mazuz’ Record

Mazuz was originally appointed to office under Ariel Sharon, while the latter was under investigation for various alleged acts of corruption, on the strength of an article he published alleging that a prosecutor should not indict a senior politician unless the case against him was open-and-shut. Mazuz duly refused to indict Sharon, leading the Austrian justice minister (some of the evidence against Sharon had been obtained from Austria) to remark that corruption laws were enforced rather differently in Israel than in his own country (itself not known for Teutonic fanaticism for clean government). Sharon’s son, Omri, took the rap for his father and has just completed a four-month prison sentence.

Soon after Mazuz’ appointment Atty. Yehezkel Beinish, husband of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and chairman of the board of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, was investigated for authorizing the nonpayment of payroll tax for the symphony’s employees. In an astounding ruling, overturning years of precedent, Mazuz ruled that Beinish’s actions were not criminal. Since then failure to pay payroll taxes has become a serious public problem.

Mazuz next bungled the indictment of former President Moshe Katzav. On the strength of the testimony of Katzav’s accusers, Mazuz told the press that Katzav would be indicted for rape. Later, when Katzav’s lawyers presented him with evidence that relations between Katzav and his accusers had been consensual, Mazuz had to agree to a much more lenient plea bargain. His decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld it.

Despite his past record, Mazuz exhibited no hesitation in indicting Justice Minister Haim Ramon for kissing a female officer stationed in the Prime Minister’s office. In Ramon’s trial it emerged that police and prosecutors had engaged in gross improprieties and violated Ramon’s due-process rights. Mazuz refuses to punish the prosecutors and police responsible. When the government responded to Mazuz’ refusal by appointing an official committee of inquiry, the past and present Chief Justices defended Mazuz in public, claiming that the criminals were investigating the cops. Neither chose to treat the violation of an elected official’s rights by an interested Justice Ministry bureaucracy as a threat to democratic government.

Last year it was revealed that President Shimon Peres received $320,000 in illegal gifts. Eight years ago the then-incumbent President, Ezer Weizmann, was forced to resign over a similar offense. For Peres, however, Mazuz devised a singular ruling: The money had been given to Peres in his character as a symbol of peace and not in his character as a politician. In effect, Mazuz destroyed the law prohibiting gifts to politicians. For this reason it is not anticipated that Mazuz will indict Ehud Olmert for receiving illegal gifts; after all, Olmert has the Peres precedent to fall back upon.

Several of Mazuz’ rulings were appealed to the Supreme Court but no appellant against one of Mazuz’ “political” decisions received succor from the Court. In some of the most blatant cases of political bias, that of Yehezkel Beinish and that regarding Shimon Peres, it was clear that there was no point in attempting to appeal Mazuz’ decisions to the Beinish court.

Black Pots and Kettles

The sad facts are that Israel’s legal system is unworthy of the public confidence it claims. Too many of its decisions bend the law in favor of its political and personal biases. It is simply the case that, as the legal system is empowered to interpret and apply the law, there is nobody in Israel with the power to check or balance its prerogative and denounce politically motivated misapplications of the law for what they are.

In Israeli public life, personal and institutional interests as well as political bias have long ridden roughshod over the objective, impersonal application of the law. That is as true of the appointed bureaucracy of legal officials in the judiciary and state prosecution as it is in the murky world of electoral politics. It represents a deep-seated failure of public morals. The current bickering between elected and appointed abusers of the law only serves to underline the deep-seated need for moral reform of public life in Israel.