Lynching the state

[bemildred]

There was a time when public figures were ashamed of being suspected of crimes and summoned for questioning. Two leading Mapai members facing interrogation in the days when Aharon Barak was attorney general committed suicide. Israel's housing minister, Avraham Ofer, and Bank Hapoalim chief executive Yaakov Levinson, a candidate for finance minister, shot themselves.

Friends of Ofer and Levinson say they committed suicide for the same reason: They couldn't bear the humiliation of a police investigation. It was a time when the law-enforcement authorities fought corruption associated with "doing for the party," but in practice, the authorities swooped down on crime in any form. Those were the days when Asher Yadlin was questioned, arrested and sent to jail on the eve of his appointment as governor of the Bank of Israel. He said he was raising money for the party. Those were the days when Michael Tsur, managing director of the Israel Corporation and a loyal Mapainik, was arrested and spent years in prison for embezzling millions. This decision by the law-enforcement authorities that belonging to the government or the ruling party did not confer immunity was a contributing factor in Mapai's downfall in 1977.

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Olmert knows that he's done for, but he is dragging things out in an attempt to save his own skin and settle accounts. So what if he has a country to run. The surveys show that he has hit rock bottom in the eyes of the public. Israel's citizens have lost faith in him, both as an honest person and a functioning prime minister.

When Olmert sheds those crocodile tears about being lynched, he's got it backwards. He is the one who is lynching the State of Israel.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1006388.html