Scandals tighten noose around Israel government

JERUSALEM (AFP) - Sex, corruption scandals and a full-blown inquiry into the failures of the Lebanon war are tightening the noose around Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Kadima party.

President Moshe Katsav has suspended himself pending rape and sexual harassment indictments, ex-justice minister Haim Ramon has been found guilty of an "indecent act" and Olmert grilled for hours about the war against Hezbollah.

"Ramon's conviction will help weaken Olmert, who was already in a difficult situation, even more," said Efraim Inbar, political studies professor at Israel's Bar Ilan University.

"Ramon was one of the Kadima pillars, a political strategist. He brought many voters to Kadima because of his popularity. He's now totally out of the game," the academic added.

The 56-year-old former minister was found guilty on Wednesday under sexual harassment laws of forcibly kissing a woman soldier 35 years his junior at a party on July 12, the day the Hezbollah-Israel war broke out.

His political career in tatters, Ramon's departure as one of the premier's most gifted allies, the political brains behind Kadima and stalled plans to withdraw from much of the occupied West Bank, has hit Olmert hard.

Even before Ramon's conviction, one opinion poll found that if snap elections were held today, the right-wing Likud party would win at least 32 seats in the 120-member parliament while Kadima's share would crash to nine.

The same poll found that 77 percent of respondents want an official investigation into the conduct of the Lebanon war to recommend that Olmert and his deeply unpopular defence minister Amir Peretz resign.

Olmert himself faced a six-hour grilling on Thursday by the Israeli commission, which will now draft its preliminary report by March. If found directly responsible for failings, it could seal his political fate.

Kadima -- which Olmert inherited when his long-time mentor and then prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke six weeks after founding it -- has always been an unwieldy melange of mis-matched elements.

Uniting dissidents from the Likud and the centre-left Labour party, Kadima won fewer seats than predicted without Sharon at the helm, and since the Lebanon war, has shelved its main policy platform of drawing Israel's permanent borders.

"Some Kadima officials, like (Foreign Minister) Tzipi Livni are already making moves to succeed Olmert. Others, on the right wing of Kadima, are preparing their comeback to the Likud," said Inbar.

"Kadima doesn't have a real political structure. It has no activists on the ground. It's a possible scenario that it would disappear like many centrist parties did in the past."

On top of that, the prime minister is facing increasingly uncomfortable corruption allegations despite his flat denials of any wrongdoing.

He is suspected of intervening to help a friend while acting finance minister in 2005 during the privatisation of Israel's second-largest bank. He faces allegations of nepotism and Jerusalem property scams.

Another corruption probe into the tax authority has implicated Olmert's personal secretary. Finance Minister Avraham Hirshson faces graft allegations.

None of that is particularly new, says political analyst Ilan Greilsammer, pointing to years of malaise in Israeli politics.

"Without doubt there is a build-up of sex and corruption scandals affecting the political class and disgusting the public, hand in hand with the war in Lebanon which was perceived as a failure," he said.

"But we have always had this in Israel. Just look back 10 or 15 years."

What is different, he says, is that the attorney general intends to charge the president with raping a female employee when he was tourism minister, sexual harassment, abuse of power, breach of trust and accepting bribes.

"The most destabilising factor for Israelis is probably the indictment of president Katsav for rape. They have never seen that, they are completely terrified by their president's personality," he said.

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