Other Scandals: All in the Family

The founding fathers of Israel, Knesset Member Shlomo Lorincz reminded his parliamentary colleagues, used to joke that when their state became a full-fledged nation, it would even have "Jewish crooks." Well, Lorincz added caustically, referring to the scandals that have rocked Yitzhak Rabin's government, "we are more than a nation. We are a superpower."

Like Lorincz, a member of the Agudat Israel Party, most Israelis are appalled and ashamed by the recent epidemic of white-collar corruption in the Jewish state. A few cynically shrug it off as the predictable result of Israel's gradual shift away from the zealous Utopian socialism of its founders. No one, however, is ignoring the crimes and the accusations of crimes, which range from bribes of refrigerators and TV sets slipped to government workers to the outright theft of millions of dollars. Psychiatrist Hillel Klein argues that the shock of the scandals is particularly hard on a small nation like Israel, where public officials are so well known they are virtually members of the family.

Among the most dramatic recent charges of corruption in Israel:

> Asher Yadlin, 53, was abruptly dropped last October as governor of the Bank of Israel seven weeks after Rabin appointed him to the job that is roughly equivalent to Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Yadlin was arrested for fraud and bribery, and is currently awaiting trial. The most serious charge against him is that three years ago he allegedly accepted a $30,000 bribe in return for an engineering contract; at that time he was head of the nation's largest medical-insurance organization.

> David Peled, 60, director of Customs and Excise, was arrested a year ago and suspended from his post, accused of accepting a number of bribes, including one for $35,000. He is also charged with maintaining a foreign currency account in a Swiss bank, which is a violation of Israeli law. Peled is free on bail awaiting trial.

> Michael Tzur, 53, former director-general of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1975 after pleading guilty to fraud, bribery, illegal currency transactions and the embezzlement of $3 million from a government holding company for tourism and industry that he headed.

> Yitzhak Rubin, 40, a middle-level Defense Ministry official, was sentenced to a two-year prison term for accepting bribes from businessmen dealing with the ministry. Four lesser employees received one-or two-year sentences on the same charges. Three of the bribe-givers were also convicted.

> Mordechai Rubenstein, 40, and Giora Rubenstein, 31, who with their father Aharon operate one of Israel's biggest construction companies, were arrested last month on suspicion of income tax evasion. The Rubenstein firm is a major government housing contractor.

Israel was founded on idealism and raised on a selfless morality. Why then has it suddenly become infected by materialistic scandals similar to those in larger and older nations from which less purity of purpose is expected? The theories range from the cupidity that is inevitable in a long-entrenched government to Israel's "clan mentality" that blurs the dividing line between public purse and private pocket. Knesset Member Shmuel Tamir also points out, "We have people in charge of budgets with hundreds of thousands of Israeli pounds who receive very small salaries, hardly enough for the average man to live on. You can't expect a whole society to be watertight, idealistic and dedicated."

Perhaps the most intriguing explanation is that offered by Biblical Scholar Shemaryahu Talmon, 56, dean of Hebrew University's Faculty of Humanities. Israel, Talmon argues, was born in desperate times that called for unorthodox methods if it was to survive. But, he says, "because we missed a beat in the growing-up process," the country has not made an orderly transition from frontier state to mature nation. "There are still traces of unorthodoxy," Talmon maintains, "and people have problems defining the boundary between what is permissible and what is not. In a society where you have unconventional feats such as Entebbe, it is hard to apply very definite rules in other fields of life." Such rules were not necessary in the past, he adds, because Israel's idealistic founders paid little attention to private benefits. In an affluent society, their successors obviously do.

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