Israeli leaders Scandals…..فضائح قادة إسرائيل
Israeli leaders Scandals…..فضائح قادة إسرائيل
Israeli Leaders Hit With Wave Of ScandalsVita Bekker | Fri. Aug 25, 2006
TEL AVIV — With Israelis already angry over their government’s handling of the crisis in Lebanon, Israel has been hit by a wave of scandals involving several top government and military officials.
Justice Minister Haim Ramon, an architect of the ruling Kadima party, resigned Sunday after being indicted for allegedly having kissed an 18-year-old female soldier against her will.
Tzahi Hanegbi, another Kadima member and chair of the Knesset’s influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, was informed last week by the office of the attorney general that he would be charged with fraud, bribery and perjury relating to appointments that he made during his term as environment minister between 2001 and 2003.
President Moshe Katsav and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could find themselves in legal trouble, as well. Katsav reportedly was summoned this week for questioning in a sexual harassment probe after police seized computers and documents in a late-night raid on his official residence.
It was also reported recently that Olmert is being investigated by the state comptroller for allegedly purchasing a Jerusalem property for hundreds of thousands of dollars below market price.
“Along with this war, there is a sense in Israel that the whole political arena is rotten from its foundation,” said Daniel Kayros, director of fiscal litigation with the watchdog organization The Movement for Quality Government in Israel. “There is a sense that people are waiting for a good leadership,” he said.
According to Kayros, about 12 members in the last Knesset — a tenth of the Israeli parliament — faced some sort of police investigation.
In the previous Knesset, the Likud Party’s Michael Eitan established an inquiry committee to probe government graft. However, he suspended the committee ahead of the March elections to avoid interpretation of its activities as politically motivated.
http://www.forward.com/articles/isra...e-of-scandals/
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Last week, the UN adopted a resolution that put an end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah resistance fighters, after over 1,000 innocent people have died. The 1701 Resolution also authorized up to 15,000 UN peacekeepers to help 15,000 Lebanese troops take control of south Lebanon when Israel withdraws its forces from the region.
But since the cessation of hostilities took effect at 0500 GMT on Monday, Israeli media shifted its focus on the series of scandals that hit Israel’s most senior political figures including the President, Moshe Katzav, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
“The president is locked in a sex scandal, the justice minister is quitting over a purported stolen kiss, and the prime minister is haunted by a property deal,” stated an editorial on Scotsman.
The Israelis began to question their leaders’ conduct of a costly month-long fighting in Lebanon.
The Israeli President has been dogged by accusations of sexual harassment in a scandal that has pushed Israel’s war in Lebanon off the front pages. But perhaps it gave the Israelis something more titillating to consider, after a month of discussing casualties and the army’s defeat by Hezbollah.
Five women accused religiously traditional Katzav of acting in a highly non-presidential manner, according to Israel Insider. Some writers said he acted in the traditions of certain American Presidents, apparently referring to the former U.S. President Bill Clinton who has been involved in a famous sex scandal
21 August 2006 http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=12302
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Friday January 23, 2004
Sharon scandal: Pundits predict bribery allegation may be Israel leader's undoing
by leslie susser
jta
jerusalem | As with President Nixon in the Watergate affair, tapes and an attempted cover-up could be the undoing of Israel’s scandal-haunted leader.
After audiotapes and videotapes that aired on prime-time television last week suggested Ariel Sharon knew more than he has admitted about illegal fund-raising during his 1999 bid for Likud Party leader, pundits and politicians say the prime minister won’t see out the year in office.
Sharon says he isn’t worried and has no intention of resigning. But the race for succession is gathering pace in the Likud, with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister, well in the lead.
The tapes released by David Spector, a political consultant who worked for Sharon, show Sharon’s close advisers unabashedly contemplating illegal campaign funding.
In one tape, Uri Shani, then the Likud’s director general, tells Sharon’s son Omri that he could transfer Likud funds to the campaign coffers in a way that would be untraceable.
In a taped telephone conversation with Spector, Ariel Sharon asks about U.S. and European donations to what is believed to be an election fund, suggesting that he followed the wider illegal donation process in great detail.
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-...playstory.html
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A Scandal Embarrasses Israeli Party
As political scandals go, this one has everything: money changing hands for votes, shady underworld figures, professional escorts, a hotel that is inevitably described, in almost every news account, as ''posh.''
What the scandal has not yet done is change the course of the Israeli general elections, slated for Jan. 28, although Prime Minister Ariel Sharon seemed concerned enough about the possibility on Tuesday that he responded for the first time to the corruption allegations against his party, the Likud.
''Whoever will be found as conducting unseemly acts, I will make sure he will be expelled from the Likud,'' Mr. Sharon said in a television interview. ''I will take care of this myself.''
Over the last two weeks, so many juicy charges have spilled into view that it has been hard for an already jaded public to keep track. But the central allegation is that powerful members of the Likud's central committee forced candidates for Parliament to pay to be placed in a favorable spot to win a seat.
Under Israeli election law, voters cast ballots not for individual candidates but for the party, and it is the party that decides after the election, based on how many seats it won, who takes office. The order in which seats are filled is determined in an internal party primary by the 2,900 members of the Likud central committee.
''It seems more blatant, more corrupt, more cynical,'' said Hirsh Goodman, a columnist and political analyst at the Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies.
The attorney general has ordered an investigation, but the more pressing political question is whether Labor will be able to use the scandal to win general elections in late January. Most analysts note that the scandal has not touched the popular Mr. Sharon himself, and thus seems unlikely to decide the outcome.
Labor leaders have promised not to run a negative campaign, but the new Labor leader, Amram Mitzna, has not neglected the issue.
''The main problem in these elections is that organized crime has gotten into Likud,'' Mr. Mitzna said in a television interview on Tuesday. ''People bought votes with cash.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A9649C8B63
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Israel's scandal-prone leaders
AFP
October 16, 2006
JERUSALEM -- Possible charges of rape, sexual assault, and wire-tapping facing Israeli President Moshe Katsav are the most serious in a long string of allegations to be leveled against the nation's leaders.
Here is a list of other top politicians to have faced scandals in recent years:
- Former justice minister Haim Ramon, a rising political star and divorced father-of-two, resigned in late August after accusations that he forcibly kissed a woman soldier on the mouth at a Tel Aviv party in July, as Israel went to war in Lebanon. He has since been charged with sexually harassing her.
- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under investigation for possible corruption involving several property deals in Jerusalem. No charges have been filed. A similar investigation earlier in the year was closed due to lack of evidence.
- Tzahi Hanegbi, a senior member of Olmert's Kadima party and chairman of parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, was indicted in September over unlawful appointments allegedly made while a government minister.
- Omri Sharon, son of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, was sentenced to nine months in prison in February on corruption charges for financing his father's campaign for the leadership of the Likud party in 1999. The scandal threatened to embroil Ariel Sharon as well, but no charges were filed against the premier, who has been in a coma since suffering a stroke in early January. His son has yet to serve his prison sentence.
- Former chief of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, Arieh Deri, was sentenced in 2001 to three years in prison for corruption and breach of trust.
- Yitzhak Mordechai's promising public career was cut short in 2000, when he resigned as transport minister after he was charged with sexually assaulting a female employee. In 2001, he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence.
- Former president, the late Ezer Weizman, resigned in July 2000 after revelations that he received around $450,000 as "gifts" from French millionaire Edouard Saroussi in the 1980s, when Weizman was an MP and minister.
- Current chief of the rightwing Likud party and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was investigated in 1999 on allegations that he wanted to use public funds to pay for work done on his private residence and with attempting to keep gifts received while premier. Charges were never filed for lack of evidence
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php...6-080021-5903r
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Sex Scandals in Israel
JPN Commentary: In this probing piece on the underlying, structural causes behind recent sexual scandals in Israel, Arthur Neslen takes readers far beyond "the usual suspects". He points out the largely overlooked links between militarized society and sexualized violence, offering varied evidence for the process of internal brutalization that is taking place within the Israeli "safe haven for Jews". Neslen's selection of data offers sound support for a view of gendered violence as systemic, rather than coincidental, in Israel's culture of soldiers, also demonstrating that it is apparently on the rise. Recognizing this reality could seriously threaten perceptions of the military as the hallowed protector of "women-and-children". Consequently, according to Neslen, the public discourse around recent sexual scandals consistently avoids these "elephants in the hallway".
Listing the first of these "elephants" as "[rising] domestic violence" and "sexual violence in the military" Neslen goes on to list a third unspoken, unrecognized social phenomenon: "sexual violence against Arabs", which he admits is "one of the most difficult areas to investigate". While not a statistical sample, my own personal experience, working with Israeli and Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights in 1992-4, included handling a case of the rape in custody—by a military prison guard—of a teenage Palestinian detainee.
Finally, Neslen links these sexist and racist forms of sexualized brutalization with additional manifestations of deep-running racism in Israeli society. He touches on the embedded discrimination against Jews of color, "Mizrachim (or 'Orientals')", severely exacerbated over recent years by the implementation of "an accelerated neo-liberal economic programme that has removed … safety nets for Israel's poor". It might be added that the same process has benefitted Israel's rich enormously, making the dividing gaps wider than ever before and among some of the widest in the western world. As annual defense budgets continue to grow in Israel, the defense sector is among the direct beneficiaries of this process.
Neslen's article offers important insights into the extremely destructive forces that are currently tearing apart the fabric of Israeli Jewish society. RM]
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/p...icle_746.shtml
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Israeli police chief quits after scandal
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Police Chief Moshe Karadi resigned on Sunday after a government inquiry recommended he steps down in a scandal that linked his department to the underworld.
The resignation follows several scandals that have increased public criticism of Israeli leaders, including probes of suspected corruption involving Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and allegations of rape against President Moshe Katsav.
The government-appointed commission said Karadi should quit over his failure to ensure that police thoroughly investigated a 1999 murder of a suspected crime lord by a uniformed policeman with criminal ties.
http://www.reuters.com/article/world...13239320070218
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Israeli Economy Shrugs Off Scandals
An unprecedented wave of scandals and corruption involving senior public officials is shaking Israel's political establishment. Police are investigating President Moshe Katsav, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, two cabinet ministers, the police commissioner, and the Income Tax Authority director, on allegations ranging from rape and sexual harassment to breach of trust and political cronyism. (Both the tax director and police commissioner have stepped down.) The latest scandal to hit the headlines concerns Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson, who is suspected of involvement in an embezzlement case.
The political turmoil doesn't yet appear to be affecting Israel's four-year-long economic expansion. Fueled by a solid flow of foreign investment, which hit a record $22.5 billion last year, the economy continues to thrive. Indeed, on Mar. 20, the same day Hirchson was grilled for the first time by the police fraud unit, the Bank of Israel raised its 2007 economic forecast to 5% growth. The only negatives cited by the central bank were fears about a slower-than-expected recovery in Israeli tourism and moderating U.S. economic growth. There was no mention of the local political situation.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...tm?chan=search
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Israeli sex scandal draws differing views
The rape charges faced by Israeli President Moshe Katsav are the latest, and most serious, in a string of scandals to embroil the nation's politicians, signalling the erosion of honest government to some, proof of a thriving democracy to others.
"Today, more and more, civil servants have the notion that anything can be done as along as you're not caught," says Sullam Eli, director general of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel.
"In Hebrew, we don't have any word for accountability and there is a reason for that," he says.
But others counter that the fact that the head of state could be charged with serious offences -- the attorney general must now decide whether to follow police recommendations that Katsav be indicted on charges including rape -- proves that no official is above the law
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx...international/
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