The verdict in the trial of Haim Ramon marks the beginning of a new age, and not necessarily a better one, regarding the attitude of the justice system to sexual offenses. On the one hand, the Ramon verdict will make it easier for a woman to lodge a complaint in cases that until now were considered borderline. On the other hand, defining Haim Ramon as a sex offender and a non-consensual kiss as a sexual crime opens too wide a door and may blur the boundaries between real sexual crimes and inappropriate behavior. To a great extent, detached from the sexual permissiveness and freedom in society, the judges ruled that "a kiss on the mouth with the tongue that is non-consensual is clearly a sexual offense that needs no proof. We are not dealing with sexual harassment, not with a gray area... but rather with an intrusive, damaging and humiliating act... a kiss that is non-consensual arouses repulsion, disgust, revulsion." These statements appear detached from the times and cultural context, as if they were written in a different society.

Ramon's conduct as described in the verdict is the vulgar and unacceptable behavior of a man in authority, who according to the judges did not think he needed the soldier's consent for the kiss. The fact that he lied in court is itself serious. However, it is a long road from this to criminal conviction. It seems that from the moment the soldier was persuaded to register a complaint, and the appropriate clause in the law was found, and from the moment the attorney general decided to issue the indictment, the road to conviction was paved, perhaps too smoothly.

The question is not whether Haim Ramon kissed the soldier against her will and whether this behavior is to be tolerated when it comes to a government minister, but rather whether the court is the appropriate place to discuss behavioral norms and whether the ease with which Ramon is defined as a sexual offender does not hold some risk of confusion between real criminals and those whose behavior is intolerable.

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Israeli society seems to have come a long way from the total disparagement of cases of sexual harassment to strictness in this regard, which sometimes, as in this case, itself borders on harassment.

The offenses of which President Moshe Katsav is suspected are clearly sexual, and have components of long-term coercion, aggression and humiliation, and secretiveness, while the case of Ramon touches more on relationships between men and women, on a misunderstanding, on the boundaries of flirtation, matters that it is difficult for the court to rule on, if at all. The strict attitude taken with Ramon and the defining him as a sex offender might engender a sense of persecution and contempt for the concepts of sexual attack in general.

Criminal law should have absented itself from this case, and bringing it to court involves treatment by the investigative and prosecutory authorities that is too energetic and pressured, even in the opinion of the judges. This is another aspect of the transformation of Israeli society into a litigious one ad nauseum, and the giving over of issues of morals and behavior to judges, as if their opinion on the question of what is disgusting and repulsive is more important than that of any other person.