Nevertheless, around Messrs Deri, Netanyahu and Weizman there is an unmistakable whiff of gloating.
The three judges' unanimous 917-page verdict recalled Mr Deri's modest circumstances when he first worked at the interior ministry in 1984.
Mr Deri had been on the yeshiva's staff, before embarking on politics.
Arye Deri, a former interior minister, has been convicted of accepting bribes.
The resignation of Aryeh Deri from the leadership of the 17-member Shas party opens the way for a broad Israeli coalition government .
While Kadima would lose most of its Knesset seats to Lapid's party, it is Deri who would be the undoing of the Right.
The poll claimed that Deri, who since his release from prison has strengthened his bonafides as a secular-friendly political dove, would win seven mandates.
All this, the court held, was orchestrated by Mr Deri himself.
His disgraced predecessor, Aryeh Deri, whose appeal against a four-year prison sentence for taking bribes is to be heard early in the new year, stayed away.
From Shas, Mr Barak wrung the reluctant retirement of that party's powerful chairman, Aryeh Deri, who has been convicted of taking bribes and faces a prison term.
Mr Deri got a three-year jail sentence for bribery, but a decade has passed since then and he is eligible to run and hold high office again.
Deri's rise would decrease the political Right in all its various forms from its current 67-seat majority in the 120 seat Knesset to a minority of 57.
Ehud Barak, the prime-minister-in-waiting, was reluctant to bring in the religious party while Mr Deri, who was sentenced to prison in April for corruption, remained at its head.
Mason, from Deri, near Bargoed, Rhymney Valley, died in 2005.
The founder and spiritual mentor of the movement, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, seems at last to have severed his own psychological dependency on the charismatic Mr Deri, and reasserted his authority.
Moreover, Mr Deri had not made that claim when the allegations of wrongdoing were first levelled against him in a series of newspaper articles in 1990, but three years later, when Isser Werderber had died.
The suspicion was that Arye Deri, the leader of Shas (then part of the Likud coalition), who at the time was facing trial for bribery and fraud, would be pardoned if Mr Bar-On had the job.
Mr Deri was forced out of office once charges were brought in 1993, but he remains a member of the Knesset and will probably stand for election on May 17th at the head of his party's list.
For Israel's world of politics and the public at large, this catalogue of protracted perversion of justice is perhaps more disturbing than the crimes on the charge sheet, because it took place during the years when Mr Deri, as the leader of the Shas and a senior cabinet member, was a central figure in policymaking and in coalition-building and -breaking.
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