Israel’s Supreme Court has scheduled a Dec. 31 hearing on whether a politician under criminal indictment can be tasked with forming the country’s government. Responding to the court's decision to hear a petition on the matter, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, said, “In a democracy, it is the people who decide who will lead them, not anyone else. Otherwise, it just isn’t democracy.”

If what Netanyahu said is indeed the case, let us examine the opinion of one of the people who is not just anyone, but a prominent leader of his generation. Does the person who has led Israel for the past decade, as well as for three years in the 1990s, believe that a prime minister under criminal indictment is worthy of leading the people? It is worthwhile dredging up yet again the strong views that Netanyahu, at the time a Knesset member, expressed on the subject as leader of the opposition when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was suspected of corruption, though unlike Netanyahu had not been indicted pending a hearing by the attorney general.

“A prime minister steeped up to his neck in investigations doesn’t have a moral or public mandate to make such fateful decisions regarding the State of Israel,” Netanyahu opined on Dec. 13, 2008. “There is a real, not unfounded fear that he will make decisions based on his own interests of political survivability rather than the normal interest.”

Like Netanyahu, Olmert indeed was not keen to step down, but his political partners at the time, chief among them former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, showed him the door. Today, Netanyahu’s partners from the ultra-Orthodox parties are providing him with a tightly woven safety net. They are not doing so out of love for Netanyahu, but rather making decisions “based on his personal interest for political survival, not on the national interest,” as opposition leader Netanyahu put it in Olmert’s case.