Corruption is a worldwide phenomenon found in every country, but at various levels. Politicians who rent their conscience to the higher bidder may sell out the national interest and sometimes national security, for a material gain. This is the worst kind of political prostitution. Corruption in governments retards economic growth and when it reaches extreme levels, lawlessness fills the gap, leading to the very demise of a political state. Many nation-states have suffered because of extreme corruption.
In order to nip the bud of corruption, law-enforcement agencies in Israel are now targeting very high-profile cases in which, high-ranking Israeli leaders are being indicted and sentenced to jail. Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was sentenced in 2011 to seven years in jail for molesting a number of females working in his office. Also, former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, was recently sentenced to eight months in jail for accepting bribes in return for political favours. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his wife are now under two separate investigations related to corruption.
In another major incident that has alarmed the Israeli public, a corruption case has come to light in the tax authority, where some officials were accused of bribery. The authority’s head, Jackie Matza, and other officials were apprehended and later indicted.
The octopus of corruption in Israel has extended its tentacles to even the military establishment, the security agencies and the religious sector. Some Rabbis from the extreme religious right were not only involved in the molestation of young boys and girls in their custody, but even branched out money-laundering activities and were also involved with the drug cartel in Colombia. The Rabbis indicted were receiving cash in millions from drugs sold on the streets of cities in the Latin American country, which were declared as funds for charity from members, to be sent to Israel. Israeli banks even wired those funds from drug cartels to various accounts for an 8% commission!
Many Israeli researchers and observers are looking to find out the reason behind so many Israeli leaders and common people falling neck-deep into the pit of corruption.
Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir — who, while working as a school teacher in the United States, had collected millions of dollars in cash in the 1940s — used to transport funds in her personal luggage to Palestine without even a single dollar ever reported to have gone missing. Her predecessor, Ben Gurion, had collected more than $600 million (Dh2.20 billion) in cash from Jewish millionaires to build the Israeli atomic bomb, without misappropriating a single dollar in the process. He died in a Kibbutz (a farm) without a dollar to his name.
Israelis are asking: What happened between then and now? Well, the answer is clear, but everyone is either in denial or sticking his or her head in the sand to avoid confronting the ugly reality of the present Zionist state. The BIG difference between then and now is that the Zionist project has deteriorated to the extent that it is no longer related to the original one of its founding fathers. The early Zionists were not religious and were extremely hated by some of the religious-minded people, who considered Zionism as a blasphemy against God because they felt that “only the Messiah is the one who is ordained to establish the State of Israel” — not Zionism. The early Zionists emptied Judaism from all its religious rituals and made it into a secular national identity. They were more socialist than even the Communists and totally shunned the hoarding of personal wealth. They established collective farms, the Kibbutzim with factories that belonged to the community, not to any individual. The early pioneers worked as farmers and factory workers for the common good of all, and even as soldiers, in a very selfless manner. They were true to what former US president John F. Kennedy had once said: “Ask not what your country would do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”
The Israeli victory of 1967 has aggrandised the super ego of “the chosen people of God” and within ten years, Kibbutzim was privatised — a move that was followed by the migration of one-and-a-half million Russians who hated the very notion of socialism. With the ascent of Likud as the ruling party, religious schools of the extreme right took over the education of Israeli youths, instilling in their minds the hatred and vile of the Talmud towards non-Jews, spawning the Israeli version of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Yehuda Weinstein, the Attorney General of Israel, has promised the public recently “to drain out the stagnant swamp breeding the mosquito of corruption”. The place where he should start with are the religious schools that are now corrupting the souls of Israeli youths.
The corruption of the human spirit will spell disaster, which always ends with the very demise of the state. It is normal to prosecute high officials for lining their pockets with bribes, but the very survival of any state depends on the morality of its population. Israel is now producing a new generation that is racist and colonial, hell bent on making Israel “a pure Jewish state” — even by firebombing Palestinian homes in the middle of the night, killing babies in their cribs.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
