Remaining Candidates Vow To Preserve Presidency’s Dignity, Dodo Birds

Either a cast of the dodo or a dignified presidency; no one has seen either in recent memory.

Jerusalem, June 8 – As corruption and criminal allegations mount against the various candidates for Israel’s presidency, the five remaining ones and their supporters are saying they will rescue and restore the dignity befitting the office of president just as hard as they are working to save the long-extinct dodo bird of Mauritius.

Three of the seven announced candidates have been forced to retract their candidacies after media reports or police investigations of suspected improprieties or corruption. The leading candidate supported by the Opposition, veteran Labor MK Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, withdrew from the race yesterday to fight charges that he had inappropriately accepted large sums of money as loans from a prominent oligarch. Another front-runner from the ruling Likud party, Silvan Shalom, pulled out amid allegations of sexual harassment in the 1990’s. Still another potential candidate, former Likud MK David Levy, declined to run, with speculation rife regarding what he also might be concealing. The dodo, as well, has not been seen in nearly four centuries.

Current scandal aside, the office of the president has suffered ignominy since serving President Ezer Weizman was forced to resign in 2000 after reports that he had accepted cash gifts and not reported them. His successor Moshe Katsav was similarly forced to leave office as part of an aborted plea bargain in a rape case; Katsav was subsequently convicted and is currently in prison on those charges. The Supreme Court refused to overturn his conviction, leading to his serving his seven-year term starting at the end of 2011, much in the way the dodo’s removal from the world’s biota cannot be reversed.

The surviving candidates and their supporters remain on tenterhooks regarding what other scandalous episodes will come to light in the three days before the Knesset votes to select the next president. The tension has highlighted the need to restore the respect that the office used to command, a task as urgent – and as feasible – as rescuing the dodo, a species driven to annihilation by humans and their domesticated animals within  century of its discovery.

Given the disgrace surrounding those who have served in the office, commentators and politicians have voiced the need to rehabilitate public trust in the office and Israel’s democracy as a whole, a task analogous to their ambition to keep the dodo from disappearing.

Historians only have vague descriptions of what a dignified Israeli presidency, like the plumage of the dodo, looks like.