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Politics
Who will guard the guardians?
By Moshe Negbi
Tags: Israel news 

Hagvardia hashehora (The Blackguard), by Yaron Zelekha; Zmora-Bitan (Hebrew), 332 pages, NIS 94

According to former accountant general Yaron Zelekha, two years ago, on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5767, then-state prosecutor Eran Shendar added a very unusual compliment to his routine "Happy New Year" phone call: "I wanted to tell you that you have balls of lead, and I greatly admire your behavior." Anyone reading Zelekha's fascinating but depressing book will be convinced that "balls of lead" are indeed essential for success in the fight against government corruption, and that their scarcity among our senior civil service officials in general, and the enforcement authorities in particular, make this struggle futile.

The book jacket promises readers that the volume will reveal "everything we are not supposed to know about the sacking of the public coffers." The word "everything" may be overly ambitious, but Zelekha really does document, with an accountant's precision, a long series of incidents from the four years he served as accountant general in the Finance Ministry, during which government officials tried to exploit their power to enrich wealthy businessmen close to them with huge amounts of state assets and public funds.
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He accuses them, for example, of being willing to pay huge sums to the Ofer brothers, billionaire owners of the Israel Corporation and Zim Lines, among other things, despite the conditions accepted by the Ofers in their bid to build the power stations in the Negev; he claims, among other things, that senior government officials insisted on purchasing banking services without soliciting a bid from Bank Yahav, which enjoyed a de-facto monopoly in supplying certain services to government employees, and that only his success in forcing them take bids led to a savings of hundreds of millions of shekels for the state treasury.

Zelekha also tells how, among other things, he prevented a political directive, which he says came from the office of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, to purchase 60 apartments in a residential tower in Ashkelon for evacuees from the Gaza disengagement, without solicitation of bids, and at a price 50 percent higher than the government assessor's estimate.

The notorious affair of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's intervention in the auction for the sale of Bank Leumi is of course a central issue in the book, as is the dangerous initiative to amend (and in effect to neutralize) the law in a manner that would enable government ministries (and the politicians in charge of them) to waive tender requirements more easily.

A fighter's fate

The book's main importance, however, lies not in its documentation of corruption, the main points of which we are already overly familiar with from newspaper headlines, but in the description of the fate of someone who is determined, like Zelekha, to fight it to the bitter end, and in its illustration of the heavy - perhaps even intolerable - burden placed on his shoulders. In his case, Finance Minister Roni Bar-On terminated Zelekha's term of service before he could complete all his reforms.

Corrupt people among the elite - from both government and the business sector - enjoy tremendous power, whether political, executive or economic. If they are not deterred from making criminal use of this power to steal the country's resources for their own private benefit, we can assume that they will certainly not be deterred from using it to prevent the exposure and condemnation of their crimes. Civil servants with the power and authority to expose corruption at the top are usually dependent on one or another corrupt politician to advance their careers, and occasionally even for their very livelihood; therefore they are also very vulnerable to pressure. That same politician and his partners in crime among the wealthy aristocracy have a huge arsenal of juicy carrots, and mainly sharpened sticks, which they can wave before the eyes of a civil servant so as to deter him from confronting them.

Zelekha tells, for example, how at the height of his struggle against unscrupulous behavior in the matter of the privatization and sale of Bank Leumi, he was exposed not only to threats from very senior ministers to oust him from his public position, but also from business moguls and their emissaries who threatened to block him from working in the business sector. Those same businessmen also tried, he says, to silence him with warnings of libel suits, just as is now being done to prevent the distribution of the film "Shitat Hashakshuka" ("The Shakshuka System" - a documentary expose of capital-government corruption). At the same time, Zelekha was offered the low-key and well-paid job of chairman of the Israel Electric Corporation after he finished his term at the treasury.

Under these circumstances, it is easy to believe Zelekha when he says that he and his colleagues needed not only honesty and integrity, but also extraordinary emotional and moral strength to carry on with their struggle, and as he demonstrates, not all his colleagues were graced with this strength. But it is not only the concrete danger to one's livelihood that requires emotional fortitude on the part of anyone trying to expose and prevent corruption at the top; it is contending with the rotten norms of Israeli society as well. These norms are responsible for the fact that anyone who exposes and battles government corruption cannot expect gratitude for his courage and his crucial contribution to public ethics. On the contrary: He can expect a barrage of insults, including being criticized as a headline-chasing megalomaniac, and even as a bizarre and obsessive type, not to mention a psychopath.

Only recently, in a Rosh Hashana interview in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, resigning Prime Minister Ehud Olmert referred to Zelekha, as "a crazy accountant general, who suffers, according to some people, from serious clinical disturbances." As we recall, similar slanderous "diagnoses" were recently published about State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss.

For anyone who has forgotten, without the painstaking work of the "bizarre and megalomaniacal" team of Zelekha-Lindenstrauss and their staffs, and without their "obsessive pursuit of headlines," Morris Talansky and his envelopes of cash would not have come to the knowledge of the police, the State Prosecutor's Office or the citizens of Israel.

It may be natural and self evident that a politician caught in the act will try to disparage the person who exposed him, and thus take revenge against him and silence him, but in the case of Zelekha, even the colleagues of the man who exposed the corruption excluded and avoided him, thus assisting the corrupt "boss" in his campaign of revenge and silencing. Several of Zelekha's Finance Ministry colleagues willingly joined the slanderous campaign waged against him by the political leadership, and convened a dramatic press conference in which they actually portrayed the accountant general - rather than the political corruption that he wanted to stop - as a threat and a danger to the Israeli economy.

That embarrassing and disgraceful press conference with senior treasury officials reminded me of the well-organized meetings that took place in the industrial plants of Stalinist Russia, during which workers would rise and pillory a "deviant" colleague for betraying the values of the revolution and the party.

And here may lay the source of the evil. As the late Prof. Ehud Sprinzak demonstrated in his research, Israeli society sees civil service workers who expose corruption as traitors worthy of condemnation rather than appreciation. "Shtinkerim" (stool pigeons) was the word used by the late Israeli president Ezer Weizman to describe whistle-blowers, when he refused to award certificates of appreciation to staffers whose warnings about government corruption had been corroborated by the State Comptroller's Office reports. And when senior attorney Liora Glatt-Berkowitz brought suspicions of corruption on the part of prime minister Sharon to public attention, through a leak to Haaretz, her colleagues in the top echelons of the State Prosecutor's Office accused her, not Sharon, of "breach of confidence," and she paid a very high personal price.

In properly run democracies, society is grateful when corruption is exposed, because it has thoroughly internalized the statement of the legendary U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." In Israel, however, the washing of dirty laundry in public is seen as "snitching," and a disgraceful betrayal, and when this is the prevailing view among the public and the media, we should not be surprised that most civil servants become inured, and prefer to turn a blind eye, to the corruption of their superiors.

It may be that Zelekha exaggerates when he condemns as "corrupt" all the officials and legal advisers who abandoned him in his struggle against corrupt politicians and business moguls. Perhaps it is not fair to brand a person as "corrupt" only because he is cowardly and does not have "balls of lead." But even if the cowardice of all those who follow the herd is not tantamount to corruption, it is corrupting and malignant. After all, the test of a law-abiding country is not necessarily in the total absence of these corrupt ties, but in the existence of gatekeepers with the power and the will to find them, stop them, condemn them and punish their partners as well.

Not the first

Fascinating as Zelekha's book is, it is also depressing and even exasperating. That is because it demonstrates that even when the gatekeeper does his job, his success in the war against corruption and the corrupt is at most temporary, because the politicians will exploit their power to replace him at the earliest opportunity. Zelekha was neither the first nor the only one to whom this happened. Among some particularly egregious examples of recent decades are the dismissals of attorney general Yitzhak Zamir, police commissioner Herzl Shafir, civil service commissioner Yitzhak Gal-Noor, and the head of the police investigation department, Major General Moshe Mizrahi. The four of them, like Zelekha, were replaced not because they were negligent and "fell asleep on the job," but precisely because they were too alert and diligent.

It turns out that "balls of lead" really are essential for the success of the gatekeeper who fights corruption, but not a sufficient one. What is also necessary is legislation that will deny the politicians the exclusive power to replace him arbitrarily, and that will permit such replacement only if someone independent of the politicians has determined that there is a practical and justified reason for it.

A committee headed by former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar recommended such legislation more than a decade ago, in connection with the replacement of an attorney general, but the Knesset refrained from passing such a law. Not only that, Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann has proposed legislation with just the opposite purpose, which would specifically authorize the government to oust the attorney general at any time, when it has profound differences of opinion with him. When this is the atmosphere in the political establishment, the chances of a constitutional guarantee of the independence of the attorney general, and certainly that of the other gatekeepers, seems to be virtually nil.

Not only Dr. Yaron Zelekha - who today is involved in developing high-tech enterprises intended to provide employment to Israeli Arab citizens - should regret that, but so should anyone to whom the rule of law in Israel is important. The inevitable outcome of the weakening of the gatekeepers is that the government is able to trample the law undisturbed. The price of this trampling is not only a mortal blow to ethical behavior, but also social injustices that are liable to cause direct harm to tens and even hundreds of thousands of citizens. And in fact the book demonstrates, for example, how the weakness of the gatekeepers has led to a situation whereby the authorities not only betrayed their duty to enforce the labor laws and the basic social rights guaranteed them vis-a-vis the private sector, but the government itself (including the Justice Ministry!) began to employ contract workers from temp agencies in slavery-like conditions, in violation of the above-mentioned laws.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," warned British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. Zelekha's book, like the stories of Zamir, Shafir, Gal-Noor and Mizrahi before him, certainly will not encourage good people in the Civil Service to break their silence and to shout and warn of the evil; nor will it encourage them to remain in the public sector, or to choose to work in it in the first place. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote, in another connection, that, "silence is filth." The ousting of Zelekha has undoubtedly contributed to silence in the top echelons of the treasury, but there is a great fear that under the cover of this silence the filth is thickening and spreading undisturbed.

Moshe Negbi is legal commentator for Israel Radio, and a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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