Amid Scandals, Israel’s Top Leaders Face a Mounting Wave of Criticism

JERUSALEM — A favorite character in Jerusalem Post cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen’s satirical “Dry Bones” strip is a cross-eyed King Solomon who acts as a fatherly commentator on the foibles of the modern Israeli state.

His services were in demand again Tuesday when another character, the confused citizen “Churl,” wanted to know whether the resignation two days before of the air force officer who allegedly recruited American Jonathan Jay Pollard to spy for Israel would finally end the affair.

“Of course I do,” Solomon replied. “It’s an example of our national motto: ‘The buck stops there.’ ”

Increases Criticism

As the cartoon suggests, the resignation of Col. Aviem Sella from the command of the prestigious Tel Nof air base has only served to heighten criticism here of a senior Israeli political leadership that the public sees as ducking its responsibility for the spy affair.

Further, this abdication of responsibility is increasingly perceived as part of a pattern that includes a number of other recent blunders and cover-ups that have plagued the “national unity” coalition government. And as a result, the country’s top three leaders have come under an unprecedented wave of personal criticism, including blunt public charges that they are no longer fit to guide the nation.

“It’s for the first time in Israel that you have such a wave coming up,” a senior Knesset (Parliament) member who requested anonymity, agreed. “There are no idols any more in the political establishment.”

Two senior government officials in recent days have volunteered during conversations with a Times reporter that Israel’s top leaders are getting “too old and tired” to handle their jobs.

“The whole political structure is sort of careening down the tracks with no one at the throttle,” a senior Western diplomat added.

And political scientist Allan E. Shapiro charged in a recent commentary published by the Jerusalem Post that “only a committed anti-Semite could believe that Israel has the political leadership it deserves.”

To these critics, the Pollard affair is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Pollard is the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced March 4 to life imprisonment for passing hundreds of top secret American military documents to Israel. Sella, who was then on a study leave in the United States, is said to have been Pollard’s first “handler” and the man who put the former Navy analyst in touch with a shadowy Israeli intelligence agency known by its Hebrew acronym as Lekem.

Officially, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister and Vice Premier Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin have all disclaimed any knowledge of what they still term an unauthorized, “rogue” operation.

However, leaks from two Israeli committees investigating the affair have raised serious doubts about that official line. It is now an all but officially acknowledged fact here that Sella, a much-decorated military hero whose duties would not normally include espionage, was authorized by the head of the air force, the chief of staff, or both, to act on Lekem’s behalf in the Pollard case.

The only way the top political leadership could have been unaware of the operation, the critics charge, is if they were either derelict in their duties or they simply did not want to know.

By the same line of reasoning, Sella is seen as a martyr for having been at least indirectly pressured into resigning his prestigious command while no one higher up shoulders any responsibility.

“It is the most courageous who fall,” the independent newspaper Maariv editorialized . However, it added, Sella “was not the commander here . . . and he is not the only one who needs to fall.”

The independent Hadashot daily added that “Sella is a victim of a power struggle among political elements who tossed him around just so that responsibility is lifted from their shoulders.”

Each of the “Big Three” leaders appears vulnerable in the Pollard affair: The former Navy analyst was recruited in the spring of 1984 during Shamir’s first term as prime minister; Peres is reputedly the man who set up Lekem 25 years ago, and he served as prime minister during most of the time that Pollard fed his information to the Israeli government, and Rabin, as head of the Defense Ministry since September, 1984, was organizationally responsible for Lekem and the acknowledged recipient of the intelligence that Pollard passed on.

The structure of Israel’s unique national unity government and the relationship of the three leaders within it also helps explain why no one at the political level has so far been held accountable for the Pollard affair.

Power Sharing

After inconclusive 1984 elections, the country’s two biggest political groups, the rightist Likud headed by Shamir and the centrist Labor Alignment headed by Peres, became the principal partners in a coalition of necessity. Peres and Shamir agreed to split the job of prime minister, with Peres serving for the first 25 months of the government’s 50-month term, and Shamir taking over last October for the second half. Rabin, another former prime minister and rival to Peres for leadership of the Labor Alignment of political parties, was named defense minister for the full 50 months.

The coalition of the two big party groupings gave the government such a large majority in the Knesset that it virtually emasculated any opposition. As long as Shamir and Peres remain in control of their respective parties, and as long as they want the government to continue, no one can bring it down.

Within that protected environment, the two, along with Rabin, have assumed virtually total control over all key decisions normally left here to a larger inter-ministerial committee on foreign affairs and defense. Their power is so total that the Israeli press has started calling them “The Gang of Three,” or, in its more respectful moments, the “Prime Ministers’ Club.”

As long as the “Gang of Three’s” decisions were non-controversial, there was little complaint here. But a series of embarrassing affairs, culminating with the Pollard case, are now laid at its doorstep.

For example, a senior Knesset source said, the three decided on their own to involve Israel with the Reagan Administration’s approach to Iran, a decision which normally would have been the province of the inter-ministerial committee.

Another controversy involved the slaying by Shin Bet security agents of two Arab prisoners captured during an attempted 1984 hijacking of an Israeli passenger bus. Subsequent investigations proved that both Peres and Shamir were warned that agency officials were trying to cover up the crime and shift the blame onto others.

Also, the head of the agency claimed that he had acted on higher authority in ordering the killings. But the only “punishment” meted out was that former Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom resigned after winning a presidential pardon for himself and the agents involved in the killings.

“The common denominator to all these fiascoes is a neglect of what is referred to in Western democracies as the principle of accountability,” Haaretz columnist Gideon Samet wrote last week. “The principle of accountability, which over the last generation led to the deposition or voluntary resignation of dozens of top office-holders in Scandinavia, France, Britain, the U.S. and Japan cannot remain a dead letter for us forever.”

“Under the national unity government accountability has become a politicized taboo,” the Jerusalem Post editorialized in mid-March. “Flawed men hang on to positions of power and flawed decisions are excused because to hold anyone to account would tilt the party equilibrium. . . . Thus we have a political system that steers itself without a pivot of recognized authority and without a corrective mechanism of accountability. Little wonder that we lurch from crisis to crisis.”

A few days later, the same paper went even further: “The Pollard affair, coming on top of the wretchedly mishandled Shin Bet affair and then the arms-for-Iran affair, puts in the gravest doubt the ability of the present ‘national unity’ government and its leading ‘national unity’ triumvirate to lead the country.”

As long as the “Big Three” stick together, however, few here see any scenario in which a different leadership will soon come to the fore.

On Sunday, the leading Herut branch of the Likud party overwhelmingly elected Shamir as its leader, thus confirming his status. And in June, the Labor party is expected to do the same with Peres.

“The real problem in the present situation,” Jerusalem Post editorial board member Yosef Goell wrote the other day, “is that while the malfeasance is equally bad at the top of both of our major parties, there is no clear alternative leadership to take over, were the present leaders to be effectively forced out.

“What is needed in this situation is a sustained chorus of outrage and disgust on the part of the public,” Goell added. Perhaps sufficient public protest would encourage “groups of determined politicians . . . to break up the present political party configuration and offer the country new alternatives in political leadership.”