Wrongdoers Shielded : ‘Proteksia’: Shared Risks Bind Israelis

When longtime Shin Bet security chief Avraham Shalom was implicated in ordering the deaths of two captured Palestinian bus hijackers and then covering up his agency’s involvement, he was invited to the Cabinet meeting convened to figure a political way out of the scandal.

He wound up resigning, but only after receiving a presidential pardon that guaranteed him immunity from prosecution in the case. Meanwhile, he has continued in his post while the search for a successor goes on, and he has already been offered a new job as a top terrorism adviser to the man scheduled to take over as prime minister in October.

Before Shalom, there was Rafi Eitan, the man who ran what officials here describe as the unauthorized spying operation in the United States that recruited U.S. Navy counterterrorism analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard.

Heads Conglomerate

In the furor that followed Pollard’s arrest, Eitan lost his job as head of a previously secret Israeli intelligence agency. But soon afterward, he was installed as head of the government-owned conglomerate, Israel Chemicals.

Even an official blamed by a judicial inquiry for having played a key role in a fiasco that cost his fellow Israeli citizens billions of dollars got off lightly by many standards.

Yoram Aridor, a former finance minister faulted in the 1983 collapse of Israel bank shares, was later nominated to the parliamentary committee overseeing changes recommended by the inquiry commission that had condemned him. That proved too much even for the oft-forgiving Israeli Establishment, and his name was quickly withdrawn. But Aridor remains a member of Parliament and a frequently quoted economic seer.

Appearances Misleading

However it may look to an outsider, these and many other cases of leniency toward officials implicated in various kinds of wrongdoing involve more than the workings of some self-protective “old-boy” network, according to Israelis.

They also reflect a feeling of shared danger that permeates the subsurface of this seemingly fractious society and a deeply rooted tendency to “protect our own” forged across thousands of years of Jewish experience with persecution.

What Israelis call proteksia is often based on contacts made in the 1940s during the struggle to establish a Jewish state, according to Michael Elkins, a longtime British Broadcasting Corp. commentator on Israeli affairs and himself a participant in that effort.

“It’s the proteksia of shared assumption of risk,” Elkins said. “These are networks that other countries don’t know anything about. You don’t have the intensity of the struggle in living memory.”

That tradition has been continued with each succeeding generation of Israelis by a system of universal military service and virtual lifetime reserve status in a country that has fought five wars in less than 40 years.

Most Israelis are in close touch with their old army buddies, particularly those who served in elite fighting units such as the paratroopers. In civilian life, they attend each other’s weddings, “sit shiva” together during the traditional Jewish period of mourning at the death of a relative and sometimes die together when they’re recalled to serve in some new war.

“That’s a network,” said Elkins. “They’re bound.”

It is a phenomenon intensified by the small geographic size and limited population of a country where it is possible to drive from one end to the other in a few hours.

Even Jerusalem, the most populous Israeli city, is more like a small town in which everyone seems to know everyone else. And it is a lot harder to condemn a man you know than one you do not.

More Chuckles Than Anger

Even when they hear that some acknowledged scoundrel or incompetent has been appointed to public office on the basis purely of political ties, Israelis seem more likely to shake their heads and chuckle knowingly than to get angry.

Confronted with the case of an official who had used his position to steal, the late Levi Eshkol, Israel’s second prime minister, once recalled the passage in Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.”

In plain speech, if a man is doing an important job for you, do not condemn him for taking care of himself while he’s at it.

Aharon Abuhatzeira, who served both as minister of welfare and minister of religious affairs under former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had his sentence commuted to three months of community service after he was convicted on three counts of fraud and corruption involving misuse of public funds--charges that carried a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

That was in 1983. Within months, Abuhatzeira, the son of a revered rabbi, was reelected to Parliament by a mostly religious constituency which saw him as the victim of prejudice against Jews of Middle East and North African origin.

Awed by Intelligence Units

The intensity of other loyalties seems to pale in comparison, however, with the awe in which most Israelis hold those involved in the country’s two most famous security services: Mossad, the equivalent of America’s CIA, and Shin Bet, the equivalent of the FBI.

Shalom and Eitan, both of whom have had long and illustrious careers in those services, are beneficiaries of that awe. An overwhelming majority of Israelis feel that neither man should be punished at all.

If the average Israeli had any criticism of Eitan, it was not that he was spying on the United States, which is Israel’s most important ally by far; it was that he had used Pollard as an agent, thus providing raw material for those who would cast suspicion on the true loyalties of American Jews in general.

While some American officials saw Eitan’s appointment as chairman of Israel Chemicals as a “reward” for the Pollard operation, and thus an indication that, despite official denials, it had been sanctioned at top political levels, it was generally seen here as the least that should be done for a man forced out of a distinguished career in espionage.

“Rafi Eitan was super-spy,” commented one well-informed observer who requested anonymity. “So he got involved with Pollard and he made a mistake. But he served the state like no other. You don’t cut these guys off at the knees.”

Similarly, if anything upset Israelis about the so-called Shin Bet affair, it was not that two handcuffed Palestinian prisoners were beaten to death, but that in the subsequent cover-up there was a security police attempt to shift the blame onto a highly regarded army officer on the scene.

“It’s like betraying your Siamese twin!” exclaimed Elkins.

Henry Siegman, director of the American Jewish Congress, was amazed by what he found on a visit last month to be the prevailing Israeli view of the Shin Bet case.

“The leeway too many Israelis are prepared to allow their secret services is unprecedented,” he wrote in a column for the English-language Jerusalem Post.

‘All Good Guys’

“They do so, apparently, because of their belief, elevated to the level of sacred myth, in the integrity and infallibility of the Shin Bet. They are all ‘good guys,’ patriotic to the point of complete selflessness. Most important, they are secure in the knowledge that these extraordinary practices are applied to Arabs only.”

Most Israelis seem genuinely appalled at the idea of putting the sort of controls on the Mossad and Shin Bet that America imposed on its secret services in the 1960s and 1970s. Polls in the wake of the Shin Bet affair have consistently showed that Israelis, by a 2-to-1 margin, favor forgetting the whole incident.

The “secret agent” here is not some cloaked mystery man, spying on his countrymen and subverting foreign governments. It is the fellow with the wife and three kids next door.

One Israeli who requested anonymity fondly recalled his friend, the Shin Bet agent, who took a year’s leave of absence from the service to help his wife open a kindergarten.

A former government official who dealt frequently with the Shin Bet said that agents are “the elite of the elite,” usually recruited from top military units after their mandatory service.

“Probably the pilots in the Israel Defense Forces and these people are interchangeable,” he said.

‘Tough, but Not Amoral’

“These guys are tough, but not amoral in the sense of being guns for hire,” the former official added. “They’re not gorillas--they’re just not. You can’t be an idiot and work in the Shin Bet. And you can’t be out of control and work there. The Shin Bet is a scalpel, not a baseball bat. The border police (paramilitary units which help keep order on the occupied West Bank) is a baseball bat.”

Former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Chaim Cohen said that, more than regarding their security services as a necessity, Israelis “cherish them and appreciate them and feel some obligation to them. Were it not for them, terror here would have claimed many more lives that were saved, thanks to them.”

In the cases of Shalom and Eitan, Israelis feel a special bond because of something that happened before most of them were born.

Both men were members of the Mossad team that slipped into Buenos Aires in the spring of 1960 and captured Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” And it is the undying memory of that World War II horror that remains at the core of the feeling here that if Jews do not take care of one another, no one else will.