Petition urges PM to nix Deri over criminal past

Over 11,000 signatories protest Shas leader returning to ministerial post due to his bribery conviction during previous stint

A petition posted to the Internet on Thursday called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from accepting Shas party leader Aryeh Deri into his government and to prevent him from reassuming a ministerial position, owing to his criminal record.

The petition on the Atzuma.co.il website (Hebrew link), which has so far garnered over 11,000 signatures, expressed “concern and outrage at the casual and natural manner in which politicians are now discussing the appointment of Aryeh Deri to interior minister in Netanyahu’s fourth government — the same job he once held and in which he carried out crimes.”

The open letter went on to call such a move “absurd” and “a blow to any citizen concerned about integrity and ethics in Israel.”

The appeal maintained that “Aryeh Deri has no place in public office and is certainly unworthy of being a minister in the Israeli government.”

Petitioners further urged legislators to rectify the law to prevent convicted felons from returning to public office.

Deri was the head of Shas until he was convicted in 1999 of accepting $155,000 in bribes while running the Interior Ministry and as interior minister, and served 22 months in prison. He returned to the party in 2012 and challenged then-party head Eli Yishai for the faction’s top spot.

A power-sharing agreement that created a leadership troika of Deri, Yishai and Ariel Atias was short-lived, and Deri returned to lead the party in 2013.

Yishai quit the party in the lead-up to the 2015 elections, but his rival party Yachad failed to achieve the minimal number of votes in Tuesday’s elections to enter the Knesset.