I kept a daily journal of my trip to Israel last month, and a few days after my return I summarized my “final impressions” of the visit. First on the list was this:

The degree to which the Israelis that I talked to, including a Christian man born and raised in the Old City, are uniformly disgusted with the present government is striking. This is as true for those who voted in the elections last year for Kadima’s Ehud Olmert as it is for those who voted against him. And the revulsion doesn’t end with the PM’s office. A number of people believe the level of corruption and even criminal activity among members of the Knesset (MKs), the military high echelon, law enforcement, charitable organization officials, and civil service bureaucrats is endemic and as a result these people are completely turned off by politics.

A series of two recent columns in The Jerusalem Post entitled The Blight of Corrosive Corruption shed light on the problem and illustrate the demoralizing effect corruption has on the Israeli body politic, the Israeli citizen and even on Israel’s credibility and moral standing in the world.

Isi Liebler, the veteran Jewish internationalist and chair of the Diaspora-Israel Relations Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, believes that the level of corruption in Israeli life poses a greater threat to the survival of the State than even its Arab enemies, and if left unchecked will destroy the Zionist dream. Rabbi Emmanuel Feldman, for nearly 50 years the de facto leader of Atlanta’s Orthodox Jews, and now a full-time resident of Jerusalem, writes that the sheer amount of sleaze in Israeli officialdom—“moral flabbiness” as he calls it—threatens not just Israel’s physical well-being but her soul as well.

Liebler argues that level of corruption stems from leaders “willing to forego ethical norms and decency in the selfish pursuit of personal agendas,” and presents as Exhibit “A” the stunning news of last week that senior bureaucrats of the Taxation Authority were charged with accepting bribes and other fraudulent conduct, and that Olmert’s bureau chief was put under house arrest in the matter. Exhibits “B” through “E” are the criminal accusations of sexual misconduct against Israeli President Katsav, the alleged criminal activity of Ariel Sharon and his sons, the numerous investigations and convictions of MKs and other officials, and even the stench coming from the PM’s office smelling like bribes and political patronage concerning Olmert himself.

According to Liebler, while public corruption has been with the State since before its founding, it seems to have hit a nadir in the Oslo and post-Oslo Accord era, as both Likud and Labor officials (and now Kadima officials) have used patronage and feather-bedding in order to achieve not just their political objectives but for personal gain. The result is that political parties once guided by ideology and moral vision are now in the business of how best to divide or re-divide the spoils of power.

Rabbi Feldman takes a decidedly more theological approach, as one might expect from a rabbi. He begins his column with a quote from the Book of Isaiah that could have been written with today’s headlines in mind: “Your leaders have become plunderers, associates of thieves, lovers of bribery, pursuers of payoffs (1:23).” The only consolation the Bible gives us, in this case at least, is “the knowledge that we today did not invent corruption.” Feldman laments that if the mission of the Jewish people is to strive to transcend our natural inclination towards greed and selfishness, the endless reports of official misdeeds and dysfunction suggest that in this struggle we have a long way to go.

Far from viewing this merely as a matter of “good governance,” Rabbi Feldman emphasizes the toll this conduct takes on the personal ethics of every Israeli citizen: “If everyone is cutting ethical corners, why should I be a sucker.” The result is a society in which every interest group—religious, non-religious and ultra-religious alike-- has its hand out without regard to the welfare of other communities, other citizens or the nation at large.

Liebler and Feldman each have their villains. To Liebler, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got the trend rolling by using bribes and political patronage to convince the opposition party to approve the Oslo Accords in the 90s, and it accelerated when the Likud Central Committee was expanded to include hundreds of new members, many of whom were cynical at best and criminal at worst. To Feldman, the fault lies in the secular underpinnings of the State in which the desire to be a “normal country” trumps the moral and ethical imperatives of Jewish history for the citizens of the Jewish state to strive to be a light unto the nations. By imitating all the worst attributes of the West, secular Israel has embraced a culture of instant gratification, pleasure-seeking and nihilism instead of spiritual values and a connection to Jewish history.

Both writers imagine a solution in which the citizens of Israel come to their senses and rise up in a demonstration of collective dismay. Liebler believes that popular outrage will embolden law enforcement to take their jobs seriously, confront corruption aggressively and pursue officials suspected of breaking the law (without leaking overmuch to the press about this or that investigation). This will pave the way for a new government to make the elimination of public corruption job one. Wishful thinking perhaps, but appropriately hopeful nonetheless.

Rabbi Feldman urges people who yearn for truth and meaning to speak out and let their public officials know how disgusted they are with the status quo, thereby giving hope that some other words of the prophet Isaiah will ring true: “Your judges will I reestablish as of old and your counselors as at the beginning. Zion will be redeemed with justice and her returnees with righteousness.”

* * *