KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — A day after Moshe Katsav, Israel’s former president, turned 66, his modest home in this immigrant town was filled on Tuesday with grandchildren and well-wishers. Phones rang. Neighbors with sun-creased faces offered hugs. Rabbis in tall hats gave their blessings.
Mr. Katsav was not celebrating his birthday, however. He was spending his last day as a free man in his own home, preparing to go to prison on Wednesday to serve a seven-year term for rape.
Convicted of raping an employee twice while he was minister of tourism in 1998 and of sexually abusing and harassing two others while head of state, Mr. Katsav seems to speak from the core of his being when he claims to be innocent of all charges. Tears flowed on occasion as he sat at his dining room table recounting the details of his case in a two-hour interview. He had come to doubt, he said, the system to which he had devoted his life.
“When I was president, I received 10,000 pardon requests,” he said. “They all claimed they had been the victims of injustice. I am so sorry that I immediately rejected those claims. Now I believe that some of them were innocent.”
Mr. Katsav will enter Maasiyahu Prison in the city of Ramle, south of Tel Aviv, early on Wednesday, accompanied to the main entrance by a few members of his family, perhaps including his wife of 42 years, Gila, and reporters and cameramen. He will be placed in a special wing along with other religiously observant Jews. And it is quite possible, he said, that among his fellow prisoners will be some whose pardons he rejected when he was president from 2000 to 2007.
Might he be at risk of harm or suicide? Mr. Katsav bristled at the suggestion, saying he would not let “the conspirators win,” by which he meant the Israeli news media, politicians, police and judges who he believes are to blame for what he calls a terrible injustice.
“I’m about to pay the price for something I haven’t done,” he said. “I’ve hugged and kissed women but not in an inappropriate way. We’ve become like Saudi Arabia. A hug is a sex offense.”
The country’s legal system firmly disagrees. He was convicted by a three-judge panel not of a hug but of two counts of rape involving force. Last month, a separate three-judge panel of the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
“A deep sadness descends on the State of Israel when it is determined that a person who served as a government minister, a deputy prime minister and president perpetrated acts such as those,” the judges wrote in their ruling. “It is a most difficult spectacle to see a man who was once the country’s symbol of state going to jail.”
Mr. Katsav has been stripped of his state-provided car and allowances for home maintenance, telephones and newspapers. His driver, office director and secretary have been let go. Other matters, like where he will be buried and how he will be officially remembered, are under discussion by a ministerial committee.
Many in Israel say that despite their shame that a man who held such high office has been convicted of such deeds, they feel pride because the case demonstrates that no one is above the law.
But Mr. Katsav’s defenders, especially in this south-central town where he once was Israel’s youngest mayor, believe that he was the victim of ethnic and class prejudice. Born in Iran and brought here as a child, Mr. Katsav and his family lived first in a tent and then in a wooden hut. After studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he rose quickly, especially once the Likud Party came to power in the late 1970s.
“The fact is that I am from a Muslim country and from a development town,” he said, using the term for the poorer urban areas in the country’s periphery. Israel’s traditional elite has European roots and lives in urban centers like Tel Aviv.
Some of Mr. Katsav’s defenders have quietly noted that both the original three-judge panel that convicted him and the three-judge panel that rejected his appeal were composed of two women and an Israeli Arab.
Mr. Katsav said he would not comment on that.
Shimon Shiffer, a political correspondent for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot who grew up in a nearby town and has known the Katsavs for decades, said in an interview that it would be culturally very difficult for Mr. Katsav to face his children and admit inappropriate sexual conduct. Mr. Shiffer’s belief is that such conduct occurred but not rape.
Others have argued that Mr. Katsav faced a changing legal and political landscape regarding the treatment of female employees, doing what other men his age had done but suddenly finding it to be not only unacceptable but criminal.
In 2008, Mr. Katsav was offered a plea deal where he would admit to inappropriate conduct well short of rape and avoid serving any prison time. But Mr. Katsav said on Tuesday that had he accepted the deal it would have amounted to admission of wrongdoing. He chose to fight in court.
Few commentators have been impressed with his professions of innocence. Most have accused him of being proud and foolish to have turned down the offer. Others, like Sima Kadmon of Yediot Aharonot, call him delusional.
“He has already proved that he lives in a world of his own, in which truth and lies are intermingled, in which women are manipulative temptresses, journalists are biased and malicious and judges are liars,” she wrote after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
Mr. Katsav’s account of his case on Tuesday fit that description. He argued that every sector of Israeli society had been part of an effort to destroy him. The news media, he said, loved the sensation. Many in the police despised him for his criticism of some of their recent actions. His fellow politicians feared his popularity — as he wound up his presidency, he was a potent candidate for prime minister. And the judges believed a woman he had fired rather than him.
No woman had ever gone on her own to the police to complain about his behavior. The case began when he approached the attorney general to say that a former employee from the president’s office was demanding money. An investigation was opened; the woman from the tourism ministry, whom he had fired, came forward; his conviction was the result.
A neighbor, Sammy Vaknin, stopped by on Tuesday. He said that for him, Mr. Katsav represented the state in the same way the national anthem and the flag did. To send Mr. Katsav to prison, he said — “even if he did something wrong” — was like throwing the flag in the garbage.
“We might as well hand the country over to the Palestinians,” Mr. Vaknin said.
