What Olmert’s Conviction Means for Peace
Image by Getty Images
Getty Images
The Israeli legal system just got its teeth back.
Much has been written about the conviction this week of Israel’s Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a bribery trial. The reverberations of the ruling are felt far and wide.
In the political sphere, this seems to be the end of the dream which continued to linger among some Israelis that Olmert would make a political comeback soon and complete the peace deal with the Palestinians, which some say was tantalizingly close when scandal forced him from office.
But one of the most important ramifications is in the legal, not political, realm. Israel’s state prosecution was humiliated at the end of last year, when it lost its much-anticipated corruption case against politician Avigdor Lieberman.
He was acquitted after a decade and a half of investigations against him for various alleged crimes. Among these was the claim that he had illicitly received hundreds of millions of dollars from businessmen, laundered through straw companies headquartered abroad.
But the state prosecution decided to drop its main case and pursue Lieberman on an incidental charge, which it thought was a safe bet, instead. It gambled and lost, leaving a feeling in legal circles that it had lost its ability to deal with corruption. Legal experts discussed this with the Forward at the time.
In the Olmert case that was decided yesterday, the state prosecution did not only get the conviction that it wanted, but it successfully negotiated the last-minute plea bargain with Olmert’s former bureau chief Shula Zaken, who had defended him to the hilt until then to secure it. The Olmert conviction is a strong antidote to the skepticism about Israel’s corruption-fighting ability.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
