The shaming of Sharon
1/11/2003

ARIEL SHARON is not in trouble because his rivals resent him or because of a political conspiracy, as he alleged Thursday in a tirade on television and radio - before Israel's Central Elections Committee cut off the broadcast, saying that the prime minister had violated Israel's law against political propaganda on the air within 60 days of an election.

Sharon and his Likud Party are sinking swiftly in polling surveys because of two separate scandals, one involving charges of vote-buying within Likud and the other a complex affair of receiving campaign funds from what might have been an American shell company and paying the money back with convoluted loans that culminated in $1.5 million being transferred in suspicious stages to Sharon's sons from a family friend in South Africa.

The Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the newspaper that broke the story about the campaign finance investigation of Sharon and his two sons, crystallized the damage that has been done to Sharon in an impertinent headline: ''Pinocchio heads for the polls.'' This is the nub of the problem for Sharon and his party: He is losing a politician's most indispensable asset - his credibility.

Sharon has campaigned as a straightforward military man who might not have been able to bring Israelis the security he promised two years ago but who still has more integrity than his opponents - those within Likud as well as those in the peace camp. Now his promises about peace, security, and prosperity are becoming as questionable as his integrity in the matter of campaign debts and loans from foreign sources. Under the floodlights of Israel's unruly democracy, Sharon appears to have squandered much of the trust his party had been counting on to carry Likud to a big victory in the election scheduled for Jan. 28. The latest poll - taken before Sharon's truncated tirade Thursday - showed Likud dropping from a November projection of 41 seats in the 120-member Knesset to 27, a mere three seats more than Labor is projected to receive.

Sharon is being investigated by the National Fraud Squad of the Israeli police on suspicion of bribe-taking, fraud, and breach of trust. He has tried to shift the public's focus from his financial entanglements to the question of who leaked the fact of the investigation. As some of his critics in Israel are saying, he owes the public a satisfactory explanation of his actions.

As things stand, Sharon is aligning himself against an Israeli expectation that political leaders will set an example of respect for the law. On April 10, 1977, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin resigned over a much less serious breach of trust - the disclosure that his wife held a checking account in a bank in the United States. More than ever, Israelis need a leader in the mold of Rabin.