Scandals in Israel’s military, politics, and judiciary raise the question: Are we sick? - opinion

Her motivation was apparently noble. Attacked for having indicted jailers who seriously injured Hamas prisoners, she decided to leak to the press a closed-circuit video of the abuse. But that was not her job. She was not mandated to educate the public or even to dialogue with it. She was supposed to interact with the military alone.

Worse, the general then lied to the Supreme Court by denying the leak. The 51-year-old mother of three then made more mistakes when she wrote her family a farewell note, disappeared for hours, and apparently left her potentially incriminating cellphone on the Mediterranean’s floor.

Gen. Tomer-Yerushalmi, a gifted jurist by all accounts, headed a professional department that is part of the army, but removed from it. Its commander is appointed by the defense minister, its work is juridical rather than military, and its staffers are jurists inserted into uniforms.

UNVEILED DURING two years of investigation, the corruption network reportedly involved ministers, mayors, union leaders, private businessmen, executives in state-owned companies, and Likud party hacks.

Allegedly, the owner of a large insurance agency won contracts from public servants in return for kickbacks and assistance for primary-election candidates by recruiting for them supportive party members.

Unlike the judicial scandal, where the law’s violators were motivated by morality, this scandal is about everything except ideology. It’s about small people chasing after big money while buying and selling power and prestige.

Worse, this is not about a handful of people working in several adjacent rooms. This is about hundreds of people in varied sectors and multiple locations. It’s about an embattled nation, a stormy epoch, and an ever-fragile Jewish state – and it raises one big perplexing question:  Are we sick?

THE SUSPICION that we are sick was underscored by what happened last week at the World Zionist Organization, which nearly installed Yair Netanyahu as head of its information department.

Unlike the two other scandals, this one was a farce. This disgrace was not about hundreds of people in public office and private business sucking taxpayer money in multiple locations, but about one person’s one job.

It was also not about top-notch professionals like the IDF’s jurists, but about a foul-mouthed, brat-spoiled thirtysomething, who has never held a job other than his military service as a sergeant in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.

Even so, the job his father cooked for him – which would have granted Yair a monthly NIS 45,000 salary, in addition to a squad of aides, a car and a driver – was an insult to every citizen. It proved that to the prime minister and his servants, merit in public office means nothing, not to mention political hygiene and personal example.

The Yair Netanyahu affair thus redoubles the question that the scandals in the Histadrut and the military judiciary raise: Are we sick? Well, we aren’t.

One proof is that all three scandals have been exposed and their culprits have been derailed. But that is the second proof. The first proof came on Tuesday, in Tel Aviv’s military cemetery at Kiryat Shaul, where Col. Asaf Hamami was laid to rest.

HAVING COMMANDED the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade on the morning of October 7, the 40-year-old Hamami was in his headquarters outside Kibbutz Re’im when he received Kibbutz Nirim’s report that it was under attack.

Rushing the 8 km. to Nirim under a barrage of 7,000 missiles, Col. Hamami saw multiple squads of Hamas terrorists swarming the surrounding fields. The brigadier immediately understood the broad picture, radioing loudly to all his units: “We are at war!”

Ordering all his battalions and their companies to immediately rush west and fight, he did the same himself, arriving within minutes in Nirim, where he and two of his soldiers stormed a group of terrorists outside the kibbutz and killed them. Though heavily outnumbered, the three entered the kibbutz and fought more invaders until they were killed and their bodies were hijacked.

Col. Hamami was the antithesis of corrupt leadership, a man of conviction, courage, and sacrifice, a reincarnation of the biblical Gideon, who told his outnumbered troops: “Watch me and do the same” (Judges 7:17).

And Col. Hamami was not alone. Yes, Hamas’s 6,000 gunmen caught Israel off guard, but they soon met Israelis like Col. Hamami, who rushed to the battlefield from all over the country and within 24 hours killed most of the invaders, chased away the rest, and shifted the war to the enemy’s turf.

That is not a sick society. It’s a healthy society with sick leaders, people of arrogance, self-service, and incompetence who will soon make way for people of selflessness, merit, and conscience – leaders like Col. Asaf Hamami, may he rest in peace.