Middle East
Israel
Deri’s Judgment Day
Surveying the torrent of words unleashed in the Israeli press by the trial, conviction, and sentencing of Shas party leader Aryeh Deri, Tel Aviv’s centrist Yediot Aharonot (July 16) observed that “if an alien from outer space had landed in Israel over the weekend and watched its broadcasts, he would have been certain that the country was in the midst of a stormy election campaign in which there were two candidates for prime minister—Ehud Barak and Aryeh Deri.”
The final chapter in the decade-long legal case against Deri, the 41-year-old former head of the right-wing religious party, was written in mid-July, when the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the district court’s ruling finding him guilty of corruption and bribery.
Deri is to begin serving his three-year sentence in August. He was also fined NIS 250,000 (US$62,500). Two additional cases against him are still pending and will proceed while he serves his prison term. The prosecutions stemmed from a series of investigative reports by Yediot in June 1990 under the headline “Aryeh Deri’s Regime of Fear and Money.”
During the past 10 years—as Yediot’s investigative reports became police investigations that brought back enough evidence to support three separate indictments—the charismatic Deri continued his political rise, serving at the ministerial level in four governments and building Shas, whose constituency is overwhelmingly of Sephardic or Eastern origin, into a powerhouse that now has 17 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
According to a report in Tel Aviv’s liberal Ha’aretz (“No Ministry for Deri Until 2012” by Gideon Alon), “The Supreme Court’s verdict will keep Aryeh Deri out of an Israeli cabinet for the next 12 years unless the president grants him a pardon that nullifies Deri’s conviction on major felony charges. But though he is disqualified from Knesset- and ministerial-level public service for several years, there is no legal impediment to Deri influencing Shas and other politicians behind the scenes even while he serves time in prison.”
Throughout his trial, Deri, who is of Moroccan-Jewish ancestry, has claimed that he is innocent. A report carried by Tel Aviv’s centrist Ma’ariv (July 14) quoted him as saying that he will not request a presidential pardon because it would be an admission of something he did not do.
In a July 13 Yediot article titled “The Ashkenazim [European Jews] Put Deri in Jail” by Tzvi Alush, Deri decried Israel’s racist “Ashkenazi elites” for hounding him because of the good work he has done on behalf of North African Jews. That day’s edition of Jerusalem’s religious right-wing Hatzofeh reported that Shas’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, had condemned the judges in the Deri trial as “perverts, damned, and evil.” It also quoted former Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs Rabbi Arye Gamliel as scorning the verdict and sentence and claiming that “show trials in which Jews are persecuted because of their religion” were taking place in Jerusalem as well as Tehran—an allusion to the recent conviction of 10 Jews in Iran (see WPR Update, right).
In a July 13 editorial, Ma’ariv speculated on the effect that Deri’s imprisonment will have on his rival Eli Yishai, the current chairman of Shas. Characterizing Yishai as “a weak leader” who must “constantly placate Shas supporters rather than lead them,” the editors suggest that “Eli Yishai, who is also much more right-wing in his views than Deri, will further sharpen his positions against Barak’s peace moves in the hope of perhaps winning the birthright for himself.”
So it seems that Deri’s conviction will continue to reverberate through Israeli politics for years to come.
