In an ominous display of mass protest and mistrust of Israel's democratic institutions, tens of thousands of people gathered outside a prison yesterday to bid a tearful farewell to a former cabinet minister beginning a three-year jail term for taking bribes.
The stability of democracy in Israel over the next few years, and the nature of its political leadership, may now hinge to a considerable extent on how many other Israelis share the demonstrators' belief that Aryeh Deri, former leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party and a former interior minister, is an innocent man, framed by a purported Israeli "political elite" and its misguided courts and judges.
Deri had been fighting to stay out of jail in a case that has run for the past decade, and exhausted every legal avenue to appeal an April 1999 Jerusalem District Court conviction of taking bribes totalling $155,000 during his years at the Interior Ministry. But apart from his personal legal battle, Deri, the mastermind behind the rise of Shas to centre-stage in Israeli politics, has also managed to rally his party and a large chunk of the Israeli public to his cause.
Campaigning almost exclusively around the slogan that "Deri is Innocent", Shas soared from 10 to 17 seats in the 120-member Knesset in last year's general elections, and many analysts believe it may grow still larger in the next elections.
Mr Yossi Beilin, the Israeli Justice Minister, said last night that yesterday's farewell rally to Deri at Ramle outside Tel Aviv represented the Shas "swan-song". An entire sector of the public "doesn't intend to link itself to a convicted criminal", he asserted.
But similar predictions were made, and proved false, prior to the May 1999 elections. The fact is that Deri has managed to persuade a substantial proportion of Sephardim - Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African origin - that the Ashkenazi (European) establishment is discriminating against them.
Such propaganda falls on fertile soil because, although Israel now has a Sephardi president and a Sephardi army chief-of-staff, Sephardim are still under-represented in the more prestigious professions, and generally live in working-class neighbourhoods with schooling too inadequate to enable them to break out of the cycle of poverty. The current Israeli government, like its predecessors, has itself failed to allocate the funding to alleviate Sephardi grievances.
Deri has been declared innocent by the Shas spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, who pronounced yesterday that, like the Biblical Joseph, his protege would emerge from an unjustified prison term to become the "King of Israel". Deri himself told the crowds that he was "saying goodbye . . . like someone going on a journey". In the words of every leading political analyst here yesterday, "he will be back".
The Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, told Arab foreign ministers in Cairo yesterday an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital was the least his people could accept in a peace deal with Israel. "We are not going to accept a settlement at any cost," he said.