Why is Olmert different from Sharon?

It’s pretty well accepted in Israel’s political scene that Olmert is finished. By Israeli law civil servants, including elected ones, may not receive gifts. Taking bribes is a felony carrying a 7-year sentence and by past Israeli caselaw, one doesn’t need to prove that the target of bribery actually did something for his money. It’s enough to establish that the money was given and received.

The police and state prosecution have been devoting a lot of effort to Olmert’s case since November last year, when the State Comptroller, Micha Lindenstrauss, seized computer files from the Ministry of Trade, where Olmert served as minister in 2005. By law, material in the State Comptroller’s hands cannot be used as evidence in a trial, so the Comptroller returned the materials to the ministry and told the State Prosecutor, Moshe Lador, “go have a look.” Lador and the Attorney General, Menahem Mazuz authorized the police to take out a warrant for Olmert’s files from the Ministry. The rest is history.

The real question is, why is Olmert being treated differently from Ariel Sharon?

This question has aroused a lot of conspiracy theories. In Sharon’s case, the Israeli legal system simply couldn’t bring itself to stop the corrupt Messiah of disengagement. Why isn’t Olmert considered as holy? Surely there must be some deep reason why “they” want Olmert out and so have given “instructions” to topple him.

I think the conspiracy theory is subtly off the mark. A ruling elite cannot function without morale. At its height, this morale is expressed in the belief that what’s good for the elite is what’s good for society. Fifty years ago Communist parties used to believe this. Anything that increased their power was good for “the revolution,” and that justified everything.

Many years before Communism collapsed for good, doubt set in. Good Communists did not doubt the goal of Communism, but they began to doubt that the Communist Party actually served that goal. For many middle-level Communist bureaucrats (such as a young district Communist leader named Mikhail Gorbachev), it became important that the party actually act in accordance with principle, even when doing so led to the weakening of its own political position. Before long, it became evident that doing good implied the opposite of shoring up Communist rule. At that point Communist parties began to tear themselves apart, riven by conflict between those who were motivated by the good of the party and those motivated by the good of society. What took their place had nothing whatever to do with the Communism.

Something like that is starting to happen in Israel today. In Israel, the ruling ideology is not Communism but peace and post-Zionism. The elite hasn’t stopped believing in its core values, but its more sensitive members are beset by doubts. Disengagement has gone badly wrong, as its opponents predicted. The public no longer believes in peace. For that matter, it no longer believes in the elites, in Israeli political institutions, in the elite’s views of democracy and the rule of law, because the elites have betrayed those values in pursuit of the Messiah of peace. Increasingly, some members of the elite wonder if the public’s view of them isn’t justified.
The business of Olmert, Sharon and Attorney General Menahem Mazuz is a case in point. Mazuz was appointed to his job in 2004 to get Ariel Sharon off the hook. He delivered the goods, refusing to indict Sharon in two corruption cases that seemed open-and-shut (in one case, Sharon’s son was convicted and now doing time, based on evidence that should have put Sharon pere behind bars as well). In the last two years, other decisions of Mazuz—first to prepare a severe indictment against former President Katzav and then be forced to accept a plea-bargain with him, then to indict Haim Ramon, only to have a court declare there was no moral turpitude in Ramon’s kissing a young officer stationed in the Prime Minister’s office—have contributed to a precipitious decline in the legal system’s reputation. Today, Mazuz has no choice but to indict Olmert if the evidence warrants it. The entire legal system expects him to. If it fails to deliver on Olmert, it will have lost its raison d’etre in its own eyes.

Which is the point. At this point, Israel’s ruling elite can only justify its existence by harming its ideological goals and its grip on power. As the elite continues to lose self-confidence, it will increasingly lose the ability to implement its policies no matter what the cost. It is in fact on skids. Its greatest good fortune is that there is not yet any effective, incisive faith-based alternative to challenge it for control of public opinion and public policy. And that’s our fault.