Diplomatic briefing: Down, but not out

Acquitted MK Tzachi Hanegbi is free to run for the next elections and to bid for a ministerial appointment.

By EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON
Tzachi Hanegi 521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Tzachi Hanegi 521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
ON NOVEMBER 9, THE JERUSALEM MAGISTRATE’S Court found that MK Tzachi Hanegbi, leading member of the Kadima party, chairman of the prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and erstwhile political kingmaker, acted with moral turpitude when, under oath, he gave false testimony to the chairman of the central election committee.
Hanegbi, 48, had been giving testimony in an investigation of what ultimately led to his indictment for 72 political appointments of Likud Central Committee members or their relatives and associates to positions in the Environmental Protection Ministry between 2001 and 2003. He was also charged with election bribery and attempting to influence voters.
In July 2010, the Court acquitted Hanegbi of all charges except the charge of perjury. Finding him guilty of moral turpitude led to Hanegbi’s immediate suspension from the Knesset. His Knesset seat has been filled by Nino Abesadze, a Georgian-born journalist.
Because he was not sentenced to any jail time, Hanegbi is free to run for Knesset in the next elections. And he’s already made it clear that he may be temporarily down, but he has no intention of being out.
Hanegbi came to politics with a pedigree, the son of hawkish firebrand Geula Cohen, a member of the Lehi, an extreme right-wing underground militia during the British Mandate. She was elected to the Knesset on the Likud slate in 1973 and later joined the nowdefunct Tehiya. His father, Immanuel Hanegbi, was operations officer for the Lehi.
Hebrew University students from the late 1970s remember Hanegbi as a long-haired, chain-slinging demonstrator against Arabs and purported leftists. In 1980, he received a six-month suspended sentence for attacks on Arabs. In 1982, he chained himself to a monument to protest the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip city of Yamit, as part of the Israel-Egypt peace accords.
Hanegbi was first elected to the Knesset in 1988, part of the Likud’s attempt to project a younger, more radical activist image to the public. Over the years, his wild activism morphed into shrewd political calculations. By 2001, Hanegbi, as Environmental Protection minister, had enthusiastically adopted the then-prevailing Likud ethos of political expediency and self-interested cronyism.
Through the investigations, indictments and trial, over a period of eight years, Hanegbi seemed to morph again, turning into a consummate, well-spoken politician, with an almost statesman-like demeanor.
Unlike other politicians also on trial at the same time – most notably former prime minister Ehud Olmert, former justice minister Haim Ramon, former president Moshe Katzav and former finance minister Avraham Hirchson – Hanegbi refrained from blaming the press and the prosecution for his legal troubles, seeming to be contrite and chastened by what he viewed as the “new rules” of political behavior.
In the last Kadima race for leadership, he finished a close second to party leader Tzipi Livni. Hanegbi model 2010 is almost universally respected, even by the MKs he abandoned in 2005 when he defected from the Likud to Ariel Sharon’s newly-founded Kadima party. He has held six ministerial positions and numerous Knesset committee chairmanships.
He is often called on for political negotiating and is trusted by political associates and opponents alike. In the negotiations with Benjamin Netanyahu following the 2009 general elections, Hanegbi drafted the proposed coalition agreement between the Likud and Kadima, and he has made it clear that he thinks that Kadima leader Livni erred when she rejected the agreement and joined the ranks of the opposition.
Over the past few months, Hanegbi reportedly has again been serving as political go-between for Netanyahu and Livni, in an attempt to help them overcome their personal animosities so as to stack or reconstruct the coalition with more moderate parties who could advance the peace process.
Hanegbi’s political trajectory – from youthful radical extremist to measured, even wise politician – has made him a popular figure. And should he ever wish to sell territorial concessions to the public, Netanyahu could present Hanegbi’s personal history as a kind of political metaphor for the changes that Israel has had to make as it matured from naïve belief in the Greater Land of Israel to a more reasoned willingness to compromise.
Since he was not assigned any jail time, Hanegbi is free to run for the next elections and to bid for a ministerial appointment. The courts, however, do distinguish between “eligible” and “reasonable” appointments for ministers and Hanegbi could be vulnerable if a petition were brought to court against him.
While pundits applauded the court’s decision to attach turpitude to Hanegbi’s perjury, saying that the court upheld the status, dignity and prestige of the Knesset and re-setting the norms for public servants’ behavior, in the months between the July verdict and the November 9 decision, dozens of public figures – including former president Yitzhak Navon, former Knesset speakers, reserve generals and none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – sent letters to the court in an attempt to persuade the judges to allow Hanegbi to continue to serve in public office. Although the Movement for Quality Government slammed the “public lobbying,” it seemed that the public was ready for Hanegbi to make a very quick comeback as an eminently “reasonable” candidate.
After all, as mother Geula Cohen told the press, “We in Israel don’t have so many great brains that we can afford to give one up.”