June 25, 2018: Listening to the 'other'

On reading the fulsome praise for Isaac Herzog, the apparent new chairman of the Jewish Agency (“United Jews”, June 24), it seems we have all been afflicted with acute national amnesia. 

Doesn’t anyone remember the scandal in the 1999 elections, when Herzog was accused of streaming funds from a Canadian charitable trust to amutot created to support the campaign of Ehud Barak? Herzog was able to stymie a criminal investigation into violation of campaign financing laws by invoking his right to silence. It was widely reported that other witnesses, most of whom were out of the country, refused to testify, and so the case was closed. Since then, his career has had a positive trajectory.

Barely three and a half years ago, in connection with the charges against Faina Kirschenbaum, who also remained silent but resigned from the government, the Jerusalem Post published an excellent editorial suggesting that the right of silence should be applied more stringently for public officials accused of malfeasance in their public duties than for ordinary citizens (“Right of Silence,” January 17, 2015):

“To erase any doubt, the Knesset would do well to legislate special rules for holders of public office.

“Meanwhile, in the absence of clear legal guidelines, it must be said in Kirschenbaum’s favor that she understood the particular problematics of her position and quickly withdrew from politics. In a sense, by quitting public life, she had put herself in the same category as any ordinary member of the public.

“She did what some of our politicians – among them very prominent ones such as prime-ministerial aspirant Isaac Herzog of Labor – had failed to do. Herzog famously kept conspicuously silent in a case incomparably weightier than the one now facing Kirschenbaum.

“Dubbed by then-state comptroller Eliezer Goldberg the “greatest election scam ever,” it was spawned by the comptroller’s 2000 report that revealed a shocking, unprecedented network of nonprofit organizations – some falsely masquerading as charities – deliberately set up to funnel illicit funds into Labor’s 1999 campaign coffers.

“Herzog, a higher-up in Ehud Barak’s campaign, stayed as silent as Kirschenbaum now does, but he got away with it. For one thing, the eagerness evinced by the prosecution in other high-profile probes was notably missing in Labor’s case although all suspects demonstratively refused to cooperate with the investigation.

“Herzog wiggled out just barely because funding restrictions applied to parties in Knesset contests. He argued that the prime-ministerial races were exempt. An artificial distinction was thus drawn between the campaign of the party and that of the candidate it fielded – between closely interconnected campaigns.

“It is not solely a matter of double standards and possible political bias. The critical danger is that the citizenry will lose faith in the system and assume that the law is not quite as blind as it ought to be. It is such impressions that in the end do most to undermine the rule of law. “

Let’s hope there will be some acknowledgement by the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency that they considered this issue before confirming Herzog.