The contents of the Israeli state comptroller’s report on alleged illicit gifts and conflicts of interest — the so-called Bibi Tours affair — should not come as a surprise. Examining the funding of trips abroad by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family between 2003 and 2005, when he served as head of the opposition and later as finance minister, the report paints a picture of the same hedonistic, shameless and exploitive Netanyahu who had proudly marched into the prime minister's residence on Jerusalem’s Balfour Street 20 years ago, in 1996. It is also the same Sara Netanyahu who even then had already assumed the mannerisms of royalty at the expense of the public coffers.

What should most concern every Israeli and anyone else who fears for the character of the state, if not for its fate, are not new revelations about corruption by elected officials. Their primary source of concern should be Israel’s steady climb in the corruption index along with its decline in the shame index. The second source is the degradation of its checks and balances, i.e., attorneys general and state comptrollers who drag their feet in rooting out suspected corruption.

In the 1950s, the ruling Mapai, precursor of the Labor Party, ended the career of Eliezer Livneh, a member of the first and second Knessets, for daring to build himself a villa on a 2,700-square-foot plot in an obscure Jerusalem neighborhood. In April 1977, a dollar account opened by Yitzhak Rabin’s wife in the United States, in violation of Israeli law, ended his first stint as prime minister and as leader of the Labor Party. Shortly before that, in January 1977, Housing Minister Avraham Ofer took his own life after police launched an investigation into allegations that he had accepted bribes. “Everything is slander and libel,” Ofer wrote in a suicide note he left in his car. “But I cannot bear it any longer.”

Thus, the exposure of corrupt activity by Israel’s top leadership brought Mapai's rule to an end, after having led the country in one form or another since independence in 1948. In the 1980s, the head of Shin Bet, Avraham Shalom, was dismissed after trying to whitewash a probe into the execution of two bus hijackers. What about corruption these days?