Ethics Newsline®

JERUSALEM
A series of ethics scandals has roiled Israel, with the latest incident — allegations that president Moshe Katsav is a rapist — punctuating what some observers say is a climate of moral decline.

Christian Science Monitor reporter Ilene Prushner writes: “A slew of civilian and military leaders here are under investigation for various types of wrongdoing, and the nation’s regard for its top elected official is at an all-time low, with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert garnering approval ratings as low as 14 percent. And although Israelis have been showing increasingly less regard for their once-venerated institutions over the past decade, this new slide in public confidence coincides with a range of indicators pointing in the direction of change.”

Olmert is under investigation for alleged wrongdoing in a banking sale, according to the Monitor, with former Justice minister Haim Ramon facing charges of sexual misconduct and Tzahi Hanegbi, a former environmental minister, charged with making illegal appointments.

But the Katsav case is the most demoralizing, with the Israeli attorney general planning to indict the president on charges of rape and other incidents of sexual misconduct involving four women he supervised when he was tourism minister in the late 1990s or after he became president in 2000, the New York Times reports.

Katsav last week decided to suspend himself pending the outcome of the indictment, an action approved by a Knesset committee by a narrow margin after a heated debate in which four female members argued vehemently that Katsav should either resign or be removed.

One member of the Knesset, Gideon Sa’ar, said the parliamentary body “missed an opportunity to make a moral decision that would somewhat rehabilitate the public’s confidence in the government apparatus,” reports the Jerusalem-based newspaper Haaretz.

Vice premier Shimon Peres, who opposed Katsav in the 2000 election, said the scandal surrounding the presidency, which is largely a symbolic position but nonetheless a highly visible one, “looks bad…. They’re making fun of us all over the world,” according to a report from the Jerusalem Post.