RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Monday evening, the gag order was lifted on a sexual abuse complaint lodged against Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom. For more than 24 hours before that, the story was fodder for the Israeli gossip mill, with a number of websites even revealing Shalom’s identity.

According to the complainant, who worked for Shalom during his term as science minister 15 years ago, he invited her to his hotel room and used the power of his position to get her into bed.

The allegation is now being probed by police, and Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein is in the process of determining whether there is room to file charges.

There are a few problems with the case.

First of all, the 10-year statute of limitations on the sexual assault of an adult has passed. Police are thus waiting to see whether other women will come forward with more recent accusations against Shalom.

Secondly, the woman in question took two different polygraph tests, with uneven results.

Thirdly, the timing of the complaint is suspicious, emerging one month before the election for the next president takes place — and Shalom is a front-runner candidate.

For his part, Shalom not only denies the accusations, but claims to have no memory of the woman whatsoever.

This, too, is problematic. Former President Moshe Katsav, now serving a prison sentence for rape and sexual harassment, was equally vehement in his assertion that he never even touched his accusers.

The public is divided on this issue. On one hand, there is a sense that women have been taking unfair advantage of Israel’s stringent sexual harassment laws to ruin men’s reputations. On the other, in such a tiny country, many of these men’s bad reputations are as well-established as they are well-deserved.

Indeed, when Katsav was indicted, everyone who had ever worked with him — and journalists who had covered his career — admitted to having been aware of his sexual misconduct for years.

This is reminiscent of an old joke about a conversation between two female friends.

One asks the other, “Did you sleep with Moshe Dayan?”

“No,” she answers. “Did you?”

“No,” the first replies. “Small world!”

At the time, this was amusing because of Dayan’s serial sexual exploits. It is still funny due to what it says about life in a small pond, where everyone knows everyone else, even those in the top echelons.

The difference between then and now, however, is stark.

In the early decades of the state, it was not only a given that men in positions of power both magnetized and exploited female subordinates; it was virtually expected. And the only punishment those guys received was meted out by their wives.

This is no longer the situation, but a good number of politicians don’t seem to realize it. Instead of altering their Dayan-like behavior and adopting a personal code of honor or ethics, they rely on lawyers to protect them.

This is foolish for two reasons. One is that the legal system has not been friendly to them. Take the case of former Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who was tried in 2006 and convicted a few months later for kissing a female soldier against her will.

The other is that, where our politicians are concerned, we are less interested in the letter of the law than in its spirit. That many of our leaders have not bothered to notice the shift in our stomachs for sleaze shows how removed they are from the cultural climate.

A few years ago, I attended the March of the Living in Poland, commemorating the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi death camps. A government minister was at the event. His contribution to the somber occasion was to hit on a female journalist and hand her a slip of paper on which he had written his hotel room number. Nothing illegal about that, despite what his wife might have thought.

But, come on. Did he think this was an appropriate setting in which to flaunt his machismo? Did he not take into account that within five minutes, all the woman’s cohorts and associates would be whispering about it? Did he not consider that when word got out, other women with similar experiences would be swapping stories about it?

The answer to all of the above is: yuck.

Silvan Shalom is innocent until proven otherwise. Nevertheless, he would do well to check himself for the “yuck” factor. No matter what the attorney-general decides, the public will be engaging in talk that no court can counter.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the “Arab Spring.'”