Woo hoo, we beat the Congo!

Two polls released last week offered rather different views on public corruption in Israel.

A national poll conducted by the Dahaf Institute found that:

* 85% of the Israeli public thinks Israeli leadership is characterized by corruption.

* 84% does not believe in the integrity of political party leaders.

* 52% does not believe that there is a clean political party in Israel.

However, Israel was judged "strong" or "very strong" in four out of six categories in an international poll ranking anti-corruption mechanisms that promote public integrity. Israel did best ("very strong") in the categories of Civil Society, Public Information & Media (that's one category) and Elections, and worst ("weak") in the categories of Government Accountability (surprise, surprise!) and Administration & Civil Service.

That sounds pretty good at first glance, but take a close look at the other 42 countries in the 2006 Global Integrity Report.

Although the report includes the United States, presumably for comparison purposes, pretty much all the other countries are developing countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America or Eastern Europe. For the record, the worst-performing countries in the survey are Yemen, Vietnam and the Congo, and the top three, in descending order, are the United States, Romania and, yes, Israel.

It's a bit embarrassing to boast about besting Yemen and Vietnam, but when the vast majority of the Israeli public finds little about their government that's worth smiling about, I guess we should take whatever damnably faint praise we can get.