Last week the wife of prime minister Netanyahu was allowed to make a deal in a long-standing legal case against her. Though leaks in the case that were reported in the press throughout the years that the investigation and the case dragged on suggested that it showed criminal corruption on the part of Sarah Netanyahu, the nature of the deal finally reached was typical of cases in which the infraction was minor.
The media has been hounding Netanyahu and his family, and they were not happy with that resolution. A columnist for the newspaper Ha'aretz compared this case to another case in which the wife of a prime minister was involved in a crime. The wife of prime minister Rabin was found to have held an account in dollars in America, at a time when this was highly illegal. (Israel had a shortage of foreign currency and the central bank maintained strict controls on the activities of Israelis to mitigate the situation.)
According to the columnist, the Rabin couple behaved in a more dignified manner when, as the columnist described it, the Israeli Attorney General "decided to prosecute Mrs Rabin for the technical crime of holding foreign currency." The incident took place in 1977, when the media reported that Mrs Rabin had a dollar account in the US, which was categorically forbidden in those days. The court fined the Rabins, and Yitzchak Rabin, who was prime minister in a transitional government after the previous government fell, announced that he would resign in favor of Shimon Peres who began his losing career in the subsequent elections by losing to Menachem Begin.
The Rabin family, according to the columnist, did the dignified thing by resigning, in contrast to the Netanyahus. Of course, the columnist, along with all those of his ilk, has been extremely eager to see Netanyahu go.
The Israeli embassy in Washington DC
However Chanan Amior reviewed the full facts of the Rabin case, and they were not as benign as the Ha'aretz columnist painted them. Prime minister Rabin, who was a full partner in the account, had been warned for six months that maintaining the account was a serious crime. Rabin ignored the warnings. Moreover, the money, in fact, was illicit private payments made to Rabin for patronage he gave when he served as Israeli ambassador to the US. He had no right to accept such payments, and of course they were not reported to any tax authorities either in Israel or the US.
Rabin did not resign because the Attorney General "decided to bring charges against his wife," but because the Attorney General told him in no uncertain terms that Rabin himself would be charged if he did not immediately resign. Mrs Rabin had also lied to the tax authorities about the money, and she deliberately destroyed incriminating documents.
This does not mean that the Netanyahus are completely blameless, but the charge of "taking advantage of the mistake of someone else in a non-fraudulent way," which Mrs Netanyahu admitted, was quite a bit less than the crimes of the Rabins.
