 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Weizman's chutzpah
"I do not intend to resign. I repeat, I do not intend to resign," Ezer Weizman intoned before a prime-time television audience on January 23th. It was Weizman's typically pugnacious way of quelling fervid speculation as to his future following the attorney general's announcement last week that a fully-fledged criminal investigation would be launched into his "business links" during his tenure as a Member of the Knesset, then a minister and now the president of Israel. There are some in the Israeli public who will only admire Weizman's determination to stick out the ordeal until the bitter end. But for those members who belong to the same exclusive political and military club as himself the investigation is likely to herald less a trial of the man than of a political system that is not so much tainted by corruption as engulfed by it, Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem.Israel's latest scandal broke three weeks ago. Investigative journalist, Yoav Yitzak, revealed that between 1988 and 1993 Weizman had received $453,000 in monthly instalments from a French Jewish millionaire of Sudanese origin, Edouard Saroussi. The President's Office did not deny the payments but insisted that they were "gifts" from a "personal friend" who had neither business interests in Israel nor expected "political favours" in return. Even then, Weizman's protestations of innocence smacked of what in Hebrew is known as chutzpah, a posture roughly translated as a mixture of cheek, arrogance and insolence. But it became downright untenable the deeper the Israeli press dredged the depths of the Weizman-Saroussi "friendship".
Among the various treasures unearthed were reports that Saroussi had donated $6 million for Weizman to establish a new political party in 1984 and been involved in certain shady business deals with unsavoury regimes in Latin America and Africa. On 15 January, Reuters reported that Weizman had once used his good offices to "rescue Sarouss" from a nasty end at the hands of "international terrorists" (i.e. Palestinians) in Costa Rica in 1984. The Attorney General's discovery of "apparent links of a business nature between President Weizman and Mr Saroussi" simply added grist to what was already an enormous rumour mill.
So did the timing of the disclosures. And here the Israeli press has furnished two possible explanations, neither of which is especially complimentary about the political culture of the power elite that rules Israel. The first is that Weizman has been the target of a sting operation by Ofer Nimrodi, publisher of Israel's second largest selling newspaper, Maariv. Nimrodi is currently indicted for phone-tapping rival media moguls and faces a slew of other charges, including conspiracy to murder a state witness and suborning the testimony of police officers.
According to Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 7 January, Weizman had been approached three months ago by Nimrodi's father about issuing a presidential pardon for his son, then up for the phone-tapping charge. Cognisant no doubt of Nimrodi junior's enormous political muscle, Weizman, reportedly, was inclined to grant one. But the president was warned away by Israel's National Chief of Police, who quietly informed him that tapping phones was merely the tip of a possible mountain of malfeasance. Snubbed by Weizman -- so the theory goes -- Nimrodi exacted revenge by spilling the beans through the "investigative" reporter, Yitzak -- on the president's "relationship" with Saroussi.
The other theory -- speculative, but nonetheless aired -- is that the scandal was hatched by Weizman's political opponents. Just prior to Yitzak's scoop, Weizman outraged Israel's settler movements and the right generally by declaring that he would stand down should his people vote against peace with Syria and Lebanon in any referendum on a withdrawal from the Golan Heights and South Lebanon. Tarnishing Weizman's reputation was thus seen as a way of discrediting the cause he espouses.
But whatever the minutiae of his case, the Weizman imbroglio has again thrown into relief the whole question of corruption in Israeli politics. It comes on top of a series of other high-profile criminal "investigations", including those of suspected theft and bribery against former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Tzahi Hanegbi as well as the actual conviction for extortion of former Interior Minister Aryeh Deri.
Nor is the stench confined to Israel's right wing. Last week, Israel's present Prime Minister Ehud Barak, faced questions from Israel's State Comptroller about the legality of the funds his One Israel bloc received during the 1999 elections. And on 22 January the indefatigable Yitzak alleged that Shimon Peres -- widely tipped to step into Weizman's shoes should the latter be prised out of them -- had paid an undeclared salary to a media advisor following his election defeat in 1996.
Nor is this plague of apparent venality new, as admitted by the Israeli columnist, Zeev Chafets, in Israel's Jerusalem Report magazine on 17 January. "In the '50s and '60s", he wrote, "the ruling Mapai Party (today's Labour Party) passed out choice parcels of land and other goodies to its stalwarts (and not a few senior journalists). Moshe Dayan, Weizman's late brother-in-law, brazenly stole archaeological treasures [from the Gaza Strip among other conquered places] and 'bought' others with checks he understood would never be cashed. In the mid-'70s, a candidate for governor of the Bank of Israel went to prison, the minister of housing blew his brains out while under investigation and Yitzak Rabin had to resign as prime minister over an illegal foreign bank account."
Given such a genealogy, Weizman's latest misdemeanours are less a "disgrace" to the position of presidency than wholly at one with the Israeli political oligarchy it symbolically heads. For this has long viewed the state and the powers and resources invested therein as its by divine right with barely a nod to notions of probity, justice or law. The same chutzpah is even more displayed by Israel's attitudes, control and actions over the various Arab territories and peoples it occupies -- though there, of course, Weizman, Rabin and Netanyahu et al were always safe from the probes of criminal investigations.
