A scandalous request

Israel's Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister is not conversant with the workings of democracy or the rule of law. As someone who grew up in a party run by an autocratic rabbi, Eli Yishai believes this is how the state should be run as well. There is no other way to explain his scandalous letter to President Shimon Peres, in which he asked the president to pardon former cabinet minister Shlomo Benizri, who was convicted of corruption and sentenced to four years imprisonment.

This is the second time in a matter of weeks that Yishai has attempted to blur the distinction between the authorities, a touchstone of every democracy. The first time involved the case of a yeshiva student, Itamar Biton, who was accused of running over a woman; Yishai appealed to the judge not to convict him. That time, too, the accused was a person close to Shas.

Benizri was found guilty by two courts and the Supreme Court even meted out a more severe sentence for him. Now it has come time for him to serve that sentence. When Benizri's colleague, the former finance minister Abraham Hirchson was convicted, no one from his party appealed to the president with a request for clemency. And, as if that is not enough, Yishai has not made do with a personal request but even chose to mention the fact that Benizri is a member of "Edot Hamizrah" (the Oriental Jewish communities), as an excuse for the need to free him from a jail sentence.

"I do not wish to graze in foreign pastures," Yishai wrote to the president, "or to mention the feeling of discrimination, of the 'Second Israel,' the feeling of persecution and the open social wound."

Indeed, there is an open social wound, even if it is on the way to being healed - but there is absolutely no connection between that and the fact that Benizri was convicted. The attempt to use it to bring about the cancelation of a sentence handed down by the Supreme Court is a cynical move - in the spirit of Shas - of taking care of close associates and nothing more. If indeed Yishai's request for a pardon is met, there will indeed be a case of discrimination.

"I feel sorry for the minister [Benizri] whose high and influential status has declined to so low an abyss," wrote Justice Edmond Levy in his ruling. Eli Yishai also must feel sorry, as should the entire public. But now it is time for Benizri to serve his sentence, like any other convicted criminal; and his party and its leader must once again ask themselves how it happened that Shas, the very party that espouses social issues, is the one that has nurtured so many delinquents.