Newsweek: “Why Is Israel So Corrupt?”

A headline on the Newsweek website today asks why Israel is corrupt. Just how corrupt? “So corrupt,” the headline states, followed in the article by anecdotes about abuse of power by Israelis in politics and business.
“So corrupt” sounds pretty bad. But there are more thorough measures out there — for example Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, in which Israel ranks as 28th least corrupt of 176 ranked countries, which is tops in the Middle East and above a number of European countries. The index went unmentioned in the Newsweek article, as did other relevant reports.
The author — who, it should be noted, isn’t responsible for the headline’s strange wording — said on Twitter that the corruption he perceives isn’t in “the day to day doing business,” but rather at “the highest levels of business & government.”
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