State must defend Katsav rape charge deal
Israel’s Supreme Court has ordered the state to justify its plea bargain that dropped rape charges against the former president.
Women’s rights activists launched appeals against the deal amid national outrage, demanding that the court scrap the deal with Moshe Katsav.
Katsav stepped down as Israel’s ceremonial leader yesterday, allowing him to confess to sexual harassment and receive a suspended sentence.
Now the court says that until it rules on the appeals, the plea bargain will not go forward. The state will reply today.
In January, Israeli attorney general Meni Mazuz said he was planning to file rape charges that could carry a 20-year prison term.
Now Katsav’s critics fear the deal will allow him to fade quietly away, insisting Mazuz signed the deal only to relieve the strain on his family, with the gravest of the charges buried.
Four women who worked for Katsav claimed he repeatedly groped them, kissed them, exposed himself and – in two cases – raped them while he served as president and earlier, when he was tourism minister.
The allegations shocked Israelis by painting the country’s symbolic head as a predatory boss who repeatedly used his authority over female employees to force sexual favours.
Katsav, who claimed he was the victim of a witch hunt, stepped aside in January to fight the case, but refused to resign until the plea bargain forced him to do so, two weeks before his term was due to end anyway.
Yesterday’s newspaper columns blasted the deal with near unanimity. In a front page editorial, Amnon Dankner, editor of the Maariv daily, said it was “the truth that fell victim” in the plea bargain.
While seen as an unlikely scenario, the supreme court judges could declare that Mazuz’s considerations in signing the plea bargain were unacceptable and send it back to be redrafted, said Noya Rimalt, an expert on criminal law and feminist legal theory at Haifa University.
In announcing the plea bargain, Mazuz said one of his considerations was the reputation of the Israeli presidency and his desire to avoid a prolonged trial with painful headlines – a point Rimalt believes could be legally invalid and might provide a motive for the court to strike down the deal.
Even if the court chooses to let the deal go ahead, a lower-level court that has to approve it could decide that the sentence was too light, imposing a heavier one, Rimalt said.
Framing the public protest is a slow evolution in Israeli public opinion, once tolerant of sexual misbehaviour by high-ranking public figures, said Tziona Koenig-Yair, executive director of the Israel Women’s Network, one of three groups behind the supreme court appeals.
Israeli heroes like Moshe Dayan were reputedly notorious philanderers, an excess that the country's macho culture was willing to accept then. But that changed with the conviction of Yitzhak Mordechai, a former defence minister, for sexual assault in 2001, and continued with the conviction of former Cabinet minister Haim Ramon for sexual misconduct earlier this year.
