OPINION: It may be the season for jokes, but this is ridiculous

Sometimes, the news from Israel is so surreal it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.

Take, for example, a press release from the office of President Herzog, no less. “In honour of Passover, Ramadan and Easter”, the statement intones, “President Isaac Herzog invites members of the public to submit requests of pardons, especially requests for the erasure of criminal records.”

Well. Where to start? The president is a lovely man with decent instincts, and my guess is such an invitation has been issued regularly by most of his predecessors — though Moshe Katzav, in issuing one, might have been thought to have a conflict of interest, given that he ended up in jail, presidency curtailed, after being found guilty of rape and other sexual offences.

My mind, however, was gripped by more recent examples of how the criminal world manifests in Israeli society.

Look no further than the Shas founder and politician Arye Deri, convicted of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in 1999, jailed for three years and yet, like whack-a-mole, popping up again in 2021.

Despite Deri saying he would resign from political life as part of a plea bargain for tax offences, the 2022 elections saw him re-entering government as interior minister and health minister.

At the beginning of 2023, Israel’s High Court ruled Deri’s previous criminal record prevented him from serving in cabinet and he was duly dismissed. But on 15 March — yes, just two weeks ago! — a legal loophole, the so-called Deri Law, was magically found, which will enable his reappointment.

I wonder that the MKs devoted any time to devising obscure solutions to the Deri issue. They should simply have waited for President Herzog’s festive invitation to apply for pardons.

Meanwhile, the “justice minister” — and, believe me, those quotation marks have earned their place — Yariv Levin, seemed to find no problem in attending a Purim party at the home of a well-known Israeli crime figure, Rafi Chaim-Kedoshim.

The energy minister, Yisrael Katz, went to this party, too. Warm hugs were filmed as Levin and Chaim-Kedoshim, who has served four terms in prison for acts of violence, kidnapping and extortion, greeted each other.

Chaim-Kedoshim claims he has repudiated his criminal life and turned to religion. I mean, I know Purim is renowned as the festival of practical jokes, and that one should drink until one cannot distinguish day from night, but, you know, really?

Didn’t Levin and Katz consider the optics of attending such a party? Once again, the promise of a presidential pardon is waiting in the wings.

Should President Herzog consider pardons, I wonder, for such decorations of the political scene as Bezalel Smotrich?

His public utterings about Palestinians and Jordan have left the hapless foreign minister, Eli Cohen, trying to clear up his mess as Israel waits to discover if its ambassador to Amman will be expelled by a furious Jordanian government.

And finally, of course, there is the prime minister himself, currently in the middle of a long-running corruption trial and – as I write – facing charges of contempt of court. This latest comes at the request of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel which says that Netanyahu is allegedly violating a conflict-of-interest agreement, meant to prevent him from dealing with the country’s judiciary, while he is on trial.

The prime minister and his wife, Sara, were on a shopping trip/minor political encounters in London last weekend. Apparently there was no time in his packed schedule for a meeting with communal leaders where some honest opinions might have been aired.

Instead, the Netanyahus received the welcome they deserved. He’d better hope he is high on Mr Herzog’s pardon list, though what pardon there can be for someone hell-bent on systematically destroying the country is a moot point.