The End of Taboos, The Beginning of Rebuilding

Once upon a time in Israeli politics, there were taboos. When politicians broke those taboos, they paid a political price. For some, it meant their political careers ended, for others, even prison terms were in the cards. That’s not to say that our politics were for only the pure of heart and good intentions. No one is that naive.
And then there was’ acceptable’ which was supposedly for national interests. For example, imported rugs were heavily taxed. Why specifically imported carpets? Mk Avraham Shapira was a very influential and powerful member of Knesset, and he was also the founder and owner of Carmel carpets. Through this tax law, Carmel carpets was a virtual monopoly. Similar high taxes were placed on imported lamb. Imported lamb and other meats were heavily taxed in Israel to protect local farmers from cheap foreign competition and support domestic agricultural production. It just so happened that Arik Sharon had the largest lamb farm in Israel. This style of collective corruption was, in their view, protecting local industry even though it was actually encouraging monopolies owned by politicians or senior military personnel.
Despite the politically approved corruption for the “national good”, exposed personal corruption was not accepted, not by the collective political bodies and not by the public.
Many politicians took responsibility or were forced to take responsibility by their peers. For example, Yitzhak Rabin in his first term as prime minister resigned after taking responsibility for his wife maintaining a bank account in the US after his time as Israel’s ambassador to the US. At the time, it was illegal for Israelis to hold foreign bank accounts.
Ehud Olmert said that if he was charged with a crime, he would resign and fight the charges as a citizen and not as prime minister. He was found guilty and served prison time. (Netanyahu, then in the opposition demanded this of Olmert stating that anyone in that position, charged with crimes, could no longer continue as PM. For himself, he ignores his own loud and clear demands).
Menahem Begin took personal responsibility for the actions of his defense minister, Arik Sharon for not preventing the massacres of the refugee camps Sabra and Shatil’s by the Lebanese Christian phalangists. Even though he maintained that his cabinet had no reason to foresee the massacre when allowing the militia into the area, he understood that Sharon was clearly aware and this further broke him. He grew politically isolated and resigned from office later that year.
None of this personal responsibility or peer pressured responsibly exists anymore in Israel’s leadership. Nor are there any taboos whatsoever. Actions that would have destroyed political careers in the past are ignored, explained away, rationalized, deemed acceptable, or not even acknowledged as problematic.
These deviations initially become acceptable norms by the political peers of the corrupt politicians but then becomes publicly acceptable and ignored as corruption by the citizen followers who choose allegiance to their corrupt leader instead of allegiance to the rule of law and acceptable behavior.
This hopefully last Netanyahu government will go into the annals of Israel’s history as the most corrupt ever. Initially, with each revelation of corruption, the response was disbelief, not of the action itself, but more by the fact that the entire coalition supported and’s enabled it. As time went by, the disbelief turned into the question of how low can they go. And that turned into amazement that there is no end to the depths they were willing to take the nation. We became numbed to the outright criminality of their actions and the laws they passed or tried to pass because they numbed us by everything else that was and is going on around us.
This criminally corrupt government used the never ending war to obfuscate literally everything they were doing: the judicial overthrow that had originally brought about the largest and longest lasting protests in Israel, the deliberate prevention of a state commission of inquiry, the continued attempts to grant all of the Haredim permanent legal draft dodger status and give them benefits far beyond anything that a non-Haredi army serving citizen could ever hope to receive, the neutering of the position of the attorney general, the constant increase of taxes on the middle and lower economic population and many more laws to both corrupt democracy and guarantee only extreme right wing governments.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court still retains the necessary power to strike down illegitimate laws and those brought to voters by illegal means. This government is trying its hardest to prevent the courts abilities to do this and to become the top level of governance that cannot be overridden.
These actions by a government would have been considered completely taboo just a short time ago. Although Netanyahu is the more established politician, he is a dedicated student and follower of Trump who ignores every possible taboo and does whatever he wants until he is stopped.
Taboos based on morality of the time change, adapt or disappear. Taboos that protect equality, democracy, ethics, civil and human rights, and the welfare of the population from the weakest to the strong equally are the taboos that must be protected and those seeking to destroy them for their parochial interests must be prevented from doing so.
More reasons that this government must be relegated to the history books and placed in the section of history not to be repeated. A new government and new leaders are the imperatives of the day.
To sum up:
Israeli politics once demanded that leaders pay a price for breaking faith – resignations, prison terms, and political graves were the wages of transgression. Today, that moral ledger lies shredded, replaced by a ruling class that treats every taboo as a hurdle to clear and every national crisis as a smokescreen for dismantling democracy from within. We have grown numb, but we are not defeated. The Supreme Court still casts a long shadow, and the voting booth still holds the ultimate veto. To relegate this government to history’s dustbin is not enough; we must actively excavate the ideals it buried – equality, justice, and collective responsibility – and build anew. The Israel we cherish is no fantasy, but it will remain one if we stay passive. The rot has lingered long enough. Show up, cast your vote, and let this election be the great reckoning that restores our nation to itself.