A.B. Yehoshua’s Tisha B’Av lament
Photo by Daniel Sieradski
Israeli literary giant A.B. Yehoshua writes that he is stupefied by the scale of today's corruption and multiplying investigations in Israel.
In his lament, published in the U.K. Guardian on Tisha B'Av, Yehoshua writes that the corruption points to unprecedented moral decay in Israeli society and government:
Police investigations, commissions of inquiry examining the errors committed during the Lebanon war of 2006, repugnance at former president Moshe Katsav's alleged sex crimes, and now prime minister Ehud Olmert's announcement that, with charges of corruption swirling about him, he will resign in September: all of this suggests profound wounds in Israel's moral tissue.Old Israelis like myself are stupefied by the scope and scale of today's corruption and the multiplying investigations. Is corruption something that has always existed here but was somehow hidden until now? Are we learning of it because our prosecutor and police are bolder and better equipped nowadays?
I do not believe that corruption is coming to light just because law enforcement is somehow better, or because citizens, like the presidential staff who accused President Katsav of sexual crimes and harassment, are more courageous. What is coming to light is a much deeper evil, a loss of values within Israeli society and its government, such as never existed before.
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Yehoshua wrote a jeremiad from a distorted ideological perspective. No Jew would have run down his country like the leftist elites now do, often to maintain their credentials with Euro-socialists who form their reference group. The Israeli judiciary is post or even anti-Zionist. The elites are miffed that their “brilliance” is spurned by the masses who use common sense in forming opinions. Israel is no more corrupt than other countries and Yehoshua knows that. Corruption has nothing to do with the “occupation” and everything to do with Yehoshua’s corrupt ideology. Israel is badly in need of leaders who are guided by Zionist ideals and not Eurabian distortions.
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Gena
08/11/08 06:15 PM
utter nonsense
the simple cause of all those inquiries is that the admin in the general prosecutor office has become hostile to Israeli way of life. So now they drag up all the tiny little things that wouldn’t have worried previous prosecutors.