Judgment Day is drawing near, and much of Israel is trembling with anticipation.
No, we're not talking about the millennium here, about fears that December 31st in Jerusalem will see the beginning of the end of the world. This day of reckoning is rather closer - Wednesday to be precise. And it's not all of humanity in the dock, just Rabbi Aryeh Deri, Knesset member, political wheeler and dealer, and the man once thought likely to become Israel's first ultra-Orthodox prime minister.
So why should the legal fate of a precocious Moroccan-born political whizzkid, who was first appointed a minister in 1988 when aged only 29, have most of the country on tenterhooks? Because the corruption investigation and trial of Rabbi Deri, which began in 1990 and has dragged on through the entire decade, has come to determine a great deal more than the future of a single, albeit particularly charismatic politician.
For many of the 50 per cent or so of Israelis who share Rabbi Deri's Sephardi (Middle Eastern or North African) origins, it is a test case - a barometer of whether the overwhelmingly Ashkenazi (European-born) legal establishment is prepared to deal fairly with the non-elite, with the newcomers, with the working class, traditional Jews whom Rabbi Deri and his Shas party represent.
The specifics of the charges against him have long since ceased to matter much. Broadly speaking, Rabbi Deri is accused of fraud, bribery and misuse of funds from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, when director-general and then minister at the Interior Ministry. A host of other charges, also involving misuse of funds and illegal involvement in the appointment of an unqualified attorney-general two years ago, are still pending.
If Rabbi Deri, a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking man with a bashful smile, a modest demeanour, and a rare ability among Israeli politicians to talk common sense, is acquitted on Wednesday, many Sephardim will wail that he was unfairly targeted, and give thanks that their prayers - which included a session at the Western Wall yesterday and simultaneous prayer vigils among Sephardi Jews in several overseas capitals - have been answered.
But if he is convicted, the worst case scenarios forecast by police include thousands of Sephardi Jews converging on the Supreme Court in an effort to trash the building, attempts to attack judges, and other ongoing displays of violence. The leaders of Shas, Israel's third largest political party with 10 seats in the 120-member Knesset, have been urging their supporters to receive any verdict "with love, not violence'.'
President Ezer Weizman has pleaded with the Shas spiritual leaders to urge their flock to stay calm. But Shas activists are speaking in highly emotional terms about what they might do if the decision goes against him, and the police are planning a range of security measures to guard against an explosion of protest.