With every passing day, another brick is added to the towering inferno of corruption around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Each news broadcast reports another crack in the bastion of aides and confidants Netanyahu built around himself. As his version of events disintegrates, Netanyahu is turning to a familiar line of defense known as “everybody does it,” along with the accusation that the media and political opposition are hounding him and his family. One can assume that such claims will not withstand the legal scrutiny of police investigators, the attorney general and court system. But is Netanyahu really being asked to pay an exorbitant price for violations of which his predecessors in power were cleared? Did the rules suddenly change in the middle of the game, as Vice President Spiro Agnew claimed during the Watergate affair?

Al-Monitor directed these questions to Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Or, who served as deputy director of the State Comptroller’s office, the official government watchdog charged with oversight of the country’s security forces and agencies. “I have conducted hundreds of investigations and inspections and have seen up close those who deviated, the damage they caused and their failures,” said Or. “The number of elected and senior officials paraded before us in a march of folly on their way to investigations, trials, community service and jails has kept growing over the years.”

Or is no stranger to efforts to pressure and bend law enforcement authorities. “I was there. More than once, sadly, I saw shameless elected officials and the pressure by government on the keepers of the gate. More than once I suspected that the authorities were trying to buy time, to drag out inspections and investigations for years until they could claim there was allegedly no longer any public interest in the case,” Or said. And that’s not all. “I sometimes suspected that inside information about investigations and inspections was passed on to those under investigation,” said Or, who currently volunteers for various projects designed to restore public confidence in government and law enforcement authorities.

The annual Corruption Perceptions Index, compiled by Transparency International, has consistently placed Israel for several years in the lowest tier of OECD countries. In 2017, Israel even dropped four places compared to the previous year. And this obviously happened before the Israel Police recommended earlier this month indicting Netanyahu on charges of bribery for accepting gifts from tycoons (an investigation known as Case 1000) and allegedly conspiring with newspaper publisher Arnon Mozes to obtain positive coverage (Case 2000). It also preceded the latest arrests of top Netanyahu aides and the heads of the Bezeq telecom giant (Case 4000) on suspicions of corruption. These events could perhaps indicate already the tendency for next year’s report.