New Archive:

February 2000 Issue, Volume 3

Power and Corruption

By Leonard Fein

Power tends to corrupt, wrote Lord Acton in 1887. Tammany Hall, Chicago, Maryland, the various gates (Water, Travel, etc.), Teapot Dome - we are not exactly unfamiliar with corruption. And it may yet turn out that Prime Minister Barak didn't know what his campaign people were doing, or that the loophole his campaign manager confesses to having used was wide enough to constitute an invitation, an "attractive nuisance, as it were, and it may be that the gifts President Weizmann accepted were entirely legitimate, and so forth and so on. So it is still a bit early to say it stinks.

However: Zionism, in its origins, sought not only a refuge for the Jews. It sought, explicitly, to create a "new Jew," a Jew healed of all the pathologies that centuries of oppression had produced. And Zionism was, in that goal, immensely successful. In the twinkling of an eye - Jewish farmers, Jewish soldiers, Jewish stevedores and bus drivers, policemen and judges. But our alienation from the land, to use early Zionism¹s favorite example of our unnatural state in the lands of our exile, was not the only pathology the Zionist critics had in mind when they spoke of the distortions that oppression had imposed on us. There was, of course, the passivity so eloquently described by Haim Nachman Bialik in his masterpiece, "In the City of Slaughter." And there was also the reality of the scheming Jew, the Jew who could survive only by outsmarting the authorities. We had learned to live, the critics held, more by our wits than by our labor. And, quite naturally, we resented authority, since it was so often used to punish us. Accordingly, no moral issue was raised by lying, cheating, doing whatever was required to stay alive.

These are decidedly unpleasant things to discuss. Going back to read what the early Zionists had to say about "Galut Jewry" can feel like taking a course in Jewish self-hatred. In truth, Zionism was not only a response to anti-Semitism; it was also, often, a sharp critique of Jewish life in the Diaspora. And, for all its unpleasantness, the critique was not an invention. It was sometimes excessive - but it was rooted in reality. Critical candor should not be confused with self-hate.

Comes the question: Has Israel, Zionism's stunning achievement, transformed its Jews into sober citizens, people who deal honorably with one another, who no longer seek to cut corners, whose stance is the stance of proud and responsible citizens rather than a con men, tricksters, cutters of corners?

I cannot say whether Israel is more corrupt than the United States or Germany. But surely something is amiss in a nation where the police have been called upon to investigate both the incumbent prime minister and his predecessor, as also the nation¹s president, as well as the former Minister of Justice, the publisher of the one of the nation¹s leading newspapers, the chief of staff of a former prime minister, as was until his conviction the head of one of the major political parties.

The nation reels from scandal to scandal, and the most recent and still unfolding scandal may well prove the costliest, by far. Few Israelis believe Prime Minister Barak's denial that he knew anything about the apparently illegal funds that were invested in getting him elected. After all, Barak has a reputation as something of a control freak, a man who essentially knows every detail of what affects him. So many Israelis are now saying, "This man cannot speak in my name." They feel betrayed, and early elections cannot be regarded as out of the question. And even if Barak manages to survive the inevitable vote of confidence - much depends, of course, on the outcome of the police investigation - his power will surely be significantly reduced. That power has derived from his reputation for straight talk, his lack of political tarnish, his can-do demeanor. But now "can-do" looks like "can get away with it," so that if and when Barak presents an agreement with Syria and/or with the Palestinians and claims that the treaty takes full account of Israel¹s security needs, he will no longer have a deposit of credibility to draw upon. And if in fact his "I didn¹t know" proves to have been an attempted cover-up - he is done.

And with him, for the time being, so too the peace process.

Acton is often misquoted, the common error being to assert that what he said was "power corrupts." No, it was "power tends to corrupt - and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Power¹s tendency to corrupt is only that, a tendency rather than an inevitability. But it is a tendency to which some political cultures may be particularly predisposed. Irony: The cultural predisposition of the Jews to corruption, if it exists, is one we came by honestly. But "the culture made me do it" is not an acceptable alibi any more than "I didn't know" is a credible excuse.

Again, it is early, and public opinion in Israel has raced in front of the established facts. And to conclude from a handful or two of notorious cases that an entire political culture is infected is obviously hazardous. But even if conclusions are premature, concern is not.

Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher, having published two books, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America's Jews and Israel: Politics and People, and more than 700 articles and essays which have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentary, Commonweal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He writes a syndicated OpEd column for the Forward.