Had Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu been a low-level official in Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection under indictment for corruption, the state’s Civil Service Commissioner would have sent him home a long time ago to spend time with his family pending the end of the legal proceedings against him. Ezra Saidoff, who served as deputy director general at the prime minister’s office under Netanyahu, was suspended for two years until the culmination of the legal proceedings against him in a case involving fraud and breach of trust at the prime minister’s residences.

The Civil Service Regulations stipulate that a state employee indicted or convicted of a crime or facing a criminal police investigation must report these developments to his or her supervisor. The supervisor will then examine whether “there is cause to suspend the worker.” The regulations make no mention of the “presumption of innocence,” the mantra of the right-wing chorus defending Netanyahu, reminiscent of the cries “he is innocent” by followers of Aryeh Deri, currently the minister of interior, when he was convicted of corruption in 1999 and sentenced to jail.

The presumption of innocence did not serve hundreds of state employees suspended over the years, most of them over offenses far less serious than those detailed in Netanyahu’s three indictments on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Many were acquitted of the charges against them and returned to their jobs. Absurdly, the law does not oblige an indicted minister or prime minister to resign, although the relevant instructive Supreme Court rulings in the cases against Deri and against Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs Rafael Pinhasi in the 1990s require ministers to step down if indicted. The law allows a prime minister to continue serving until a final ruling is handed down in his (or her) case. This strange discrimination stems from the fact that the resignation of a prime minister is tantamount in Israel to the resignation of the entire government.

Nonetheless, the Israeli lawmakers took into account that prime ministers are not immune to illness and are not immortal, which is why the law allows for suspending the prime minister due to “temporary incapacitation.” Netanyahu’s three indictments can be said to be a severe moral illness, if not an incurable one. As legal expert professor Mordechai Kremnitzer wrote in Haaretz, “Generally, government corruption that is not severe [involves] a one-time failure by a civil servant, a one-off slip-up at a certain point in time. The indictment against Netanyahu presents the opposite picture — of corrupt conduct on various levels that went on for 10 years.”