The Israeli election on Tuesday, the fourth in that country in two years, is generally being portrayed in the Western media as the latest round in the gripping battle for survival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has established himself as one of the most important figures in the history of the State of Israel, having served as prime minister for 15 years. The real issue, in this and previous Israeli elections, is the continued viability of Israel’s democratic institutions. Over the course of the last 25 years, a highly independent, recently a rogue, prosecution service has been assembled by successive attorneys general of Israel in the shadow of the protection of the Supreme Court. Step by step, the power of Israel’s attorney general has been augmented and liberated from any supervision or restraint.
The role of the crusading prosecutor has been a politically popular one since Roman times. Famous tribunes, such as Tiberius Gracchus in 133 b.c., through such relentless and fearsome prosecutors as Fouquier-Tinville and Robespierre in the French Revolution, and up to more civilized times and prosecutors such as Thomas E. Dewey (twice Republican candidate for president) and Rudolph Giuliani, have advanced their political careers by punishing the corrupt and authoritarian abusers of public office. There was an element of this in the astounding career of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI and its predecessor organization for 48 years. He never sought elective office but cultivated a mystique as the scourge of gangsters and then of communist subversives, and was a shadowy and powerful, but generally popular, figure in the land for decades.
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