Dollar Account affair

The Dollar Account affair (Hebrew: פרשת חשבון הדולרים, Parashat Heshbon HaDolarim‎‎) was a political scandal in Israel in 1977, following the exposure of an illegal US Dollar bank account held by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife Leah. It led to Rabin's de facto resignation from the government.

In March 1977, while Yitzhak Rabin was meeting US President Jimmy Carter, Leah Rabin was spotted making a withdrawal from a Washington, D.C. bank. She had been withdrawing money from a joint dollar account in the names of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin. At the time, it was illegal for Israeli citizens to hold bank accounts overseas, barring exceptional circumstances; the account in question had been opened while Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli ambassador to the United States (1968-73), and according to procedure, should have been closed once he left that post. Dan Margalit, the Washington correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was tipped off, then rushed to the bank in question, told the teller he owed the Rabins money, and asked to deposit a $50 check into the account. After confirming the existence of the account, the teller wrote down the account number on the back of Margalit's check prior to depositing it. Margalit memorized the digits and wrote them down. Haaretz broke the story on March 15, 1977, the day after Rabin returned to Israel. Such minor offenses were usually resolved by an administrative fine, but Attorney-General Aharon Barak announced his intention to prosecute, coining the phrase "Buzaglo test", meaning that a leader must be held to the same judicial standards as an ordinary citizen. Although Leah Rabin explained that she alone had operated the account, Rabin publicly accepted joint moral and legal responsibility. He resigned following the revelation by Maariv journalist S. Isaac Mekel that the Rabins held two accounts in Washington, not one, containing $10,000, and that a Finance Ministry administrative penalty committee fined them IL150,000. Rabin thereupon announced (April 8) that he was withdrawing from the first place in the Alignment's Knesset list, and Defense Minister Shimon Peres was unanimously elected to succeed him. Since, according to Israeli law, resignation from a caretaker government was impossible, Rabin took a vacation from his duties as prime minister and Peres took his place.

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