The mills of justice grind slowly, they say in the corridors of the courts, but they forget to add that they grind continuously. They cannot be stopped. From the moment the case reaches the court, from the moment the suspect sets foot in the gloomy hall, there is no escaping it.
This axiom is probably the basis for those offenses that are now perceived as almost illogical: What was Olmert thinking when he approved the Holyland project, what were the municipal engineers and council members thinking, did it not occur to them that such a large and corrupt project would eventually explode in everyone's face?
The number of people involved in the project is enormous in terms of the bribery scandal. Didn't any of them fear that one of the group would turn their skin in a moment of distress or pending guilt and become a state witness?
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The man did not forget.
Yesterday, another legal hearing was decided, between the plaintiff, Attorney Yoav Lalom, and the Yated Ne'eman newspaper. What happened there? In the midst of the Emanuel affair, when he was the chairman of the Noar Kahala youth association in the lowest position in the Haredi public sphere, the newspaper attacked him with harsh words, as is tradition.
This was only natural. Lelum was perceived as an 'Israeli troublemaker', the public atmosphere was against him, and a host of insulting nicknames were almost expected. Posters with his picture accompanied by the caption 'Get out, you unclean one' were hung in the streets of the cities, and it seemed that the slandered petitioner had reached a place from which he would not be able to recover.
But the man didn't forget. He meticulously collected all the old newspapers, went through them with a magnifying glass, read the condemning lines, and arrived at the courthouse.
The mills of justice grinded slowly. Years passed, and then on the 13th of Iyar 5774, the newspaper was ordered to pay over 300,000 shekels to the stubborn young man, and in addition, it would be forced to publish an embarrassing apology for its conduct.
Did Yated think back then that a day would come and this would be the result? Does anyone remember today what they even wrote in the Lithuanian newspaper about the man everyone loved to hate in those days?
Ehud Olmert was an excellent mayor. A brief visit to Jerusalem, its road system, and its railway tracks prove this well. Those in the know say that even as prime minister - apart from the issue of the war - his tenure was characterized by exemplary management.
Hindsight
It's just that Olmert and his friends, and we - the observers from the sidelines, must say - have fallen into the psychosocial syndrome known as the 'poverty of retrospection': according to this approach, when there is knowledge about the outcome of a historical event, we as human beings cannot objectively and error-freely reconstruct the course of events that preceded that event. What seems to us today to be completely illogical, seemed completely normative then, and now we do not have the ability to understand it.
It may be difficult to understand what underpinned the actions of the talented man who played so many central roles in Israeli public life, but now it is impossible to judge what stood before him, since what seems to us today as a dreamy and illogical pattern was probably seen at the time as the most profitable 'combina'.
