A message for President-elect Isaac Herzog By Ruthie Blum
Upon the election of Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog as Israel’s 11th president on Wednesday, letters of congratulations began to pour in from the leaders of organizations whose paths have frequently crossed with him in his current position, which he’s held for the past three years.
The heads of the American Jewish Committee, World Jewish Congress, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, American Jewish Congress and the Israeli-American Council all welcomed the news on the grounds that Herzog is just the right man for the job of unifying Israelis and strengthening bonds between the Jewish state and Jewish communities around the world.
Incumbent President Reuven Rivlin, too, extended felicitations. “I send you my warmest greetings, Mr. President,” Rivlin said in a phone call to his successor. “I can tell you that the responsibility of the role that you are about to assume is unlike anything you have done until now. The Jewish and democratic system we established here, in the land of our ancestors, has a body and soul. If the Knesset is a place of argument, as we have certainly seen recently, Beit Hanassi [the office and official residence of the president] is a place of discourse, partnership and statehood.”
Rivlin went on, “Beit HaNasi is the ‘neshama yetera,’ the additional soul of democracy. It is the home of the people, all the people of Israel. Its door is open and its ear is bent to all partners in building our home, their pains and their troubles, as well as to the fundamental issues of concern to Israeli society as a whole. The title of ‘first citizen’ and the task of guarding the character of the State of Israel, particularly at this point in time, are heavy responsibilities. I have no doubt that you will bear them superbly. I am proud to pass the baton on to you in a month’s time.”
IT’S A TALL order, for sure – too tall, in fact, for someone whose function is supposed to be mainly ceremonial. But each of Israel’s presidents has added his own personal touch to the seven-year station. Rivlin, for instance, seems to have considered it a perch from which to act as the guardian of Israel’s soul and morality. Indeed, his warnings about the country’s character and direction have become a trademark.
Take, for example, the statement he made on April 6, the day he handed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – whose Likud Party had garnered a clear majority in the March 23 Knesset elections – the first stab at forming a government.
“This is not an easy decision on a moral and ethical basis, and I fear for my country,” he said, referring to Netanyahu’s criminal charges. “But I am doing what is required of me as president of the State of Israel, according to the law and to the ruling of the court, and realizing the will of the sovereign: the Israeli people.”
To express his reservations about doing his duty, Rivlin didn’t invite Netanyahu to the customary ceremony to formally task the prospective premier with creating a coalition. How presidential of him.
His speech six months earlier, at the October 12 opening ceremony of the Knesset’s winter session, was just as heavy-hearted.
He began by saying, “It appears to me as if we have lost the moral compass that was with us from the state’s independence until today – the compass of fundamental principles and values that we are committed to uphold.”
This was his dramatic introduction to remarks about the coronavirus pandemic, the absence of a permanently appointed police chief and the lack of a state budget. Israel, like the rest of the world, was dealing with the literal and figurative ills of COVID-19, such as the toll that it took on small businesses and school kids.
As was true of populations around the globe, Israelis were grumpy and anxious, domestic violence was on a steep rise, and politicians were duking it out over health regulations. Connecting this to the country’s “moral compass” would have been funny if it weren’t so sad, not to mention false.
RIVLIN WAS equally morose in November 2019, when Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz failed to form a government, after Netanyahu had been unable to do so. This was following a second round of elections that ended in a coalition impasse, and the mandate was going to be returned to the Knesset for 60 of its members to back a fellow MK as a potential coalition-builder.
In the event that this never-before-used legal procedure didn’t work, the public would be sent back to the ballot box yet again. We now know, of course, that the latter ensued.
As unfortunate a situation as this was, Rivlin’s reaction to it was over the top.
“This is a time of unprecedented darkness in the history of the State of Israel,” he told then-Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein during a ceremony at the President’s Residence. “This is one of the most important times for soul-searching the State of Israel has known.”
Really? A deadlock caused in large measure by a cockamamie electoral system in need of serious reform constitutes “unprecedented darkness”? In a country that’s been fighting existential wars and terrorism since its inception? And where does “soul-searching” apply?
After all, it’s not as though he was bemoaning the fact that the main schism is due to a political camp whose members have nothing in common other than a joint desire to defeat Netanyahu. On the contrary, the outgoing president harbors the same wish.
Rivlin’s calls for “soul-searching” have also extended to individual instances of “Jewish extremism,” such as the killing of three members of the Dawabsheh family in the Palestinian village of Duma, and the murder of Shira Banki at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, both of which occurred in the summer of 2015.
IT’S NO wonder that he’s admired by the left-wing New Israel Fund (NIF), at whose joint conference with the Haaretz newspaper in December 2016 he gave a talk, along with the likes of Joint List Party leader Ayman Odeh, Palestinian negotiator Sayeb Erekat and then-outgoing US president Barack Obama.
In a glowing blog post several months later, NIF CEO Daniel Sokatch recommended reading Rivlin’s interview with Yediot Aharonot on August 7, 2016, in which he said that soul-searching “begins with the question of whether we [Israelis] did not fool ourselves when we preferred, for reasons of convenience, to think that these extremist phenomena [such as the Dawabsheh and Banki killings] were a passing, insignificant matter that did not have to be treated with full severity…. [Jewish extremists] think that they support settlement, but they will visit destruction on us by taking this path. These mystics are endangering Israel’s existence.”
Somehow, Israel’s president forgot to mention that those convicted of perpetrating the crimes in question were treated with the full severity of the law. Nor did he see fit to point out that while “Jewish extremism” is penalized and frowned upon in Israel, the Palestinian Authority encourages and rewards the slaughter of Jews. If any “soul-searching” is and has been in order, it’s Rivlin’s.
WHICH BRINGS us to Herzog, who has his work cut out for him if he intends on serving as the president of all Israelis, rather than using his post to pass judgment on whether we’re living up to his moral standards. On this score, there is reason for optimism.
Though he is no less of a political animal than Rivlin – having been a Cabinet secretary, Knesset member, minister, Labor Party leader and head of the opposition – his conduct at the Jewish Agency indicates that he’s capable of rising above the fray. A good start would be for him to shed the moralizing that’s characterized the President’s Residence since 2014 and focus on presenting and representing the beautiful face of the country and its people.
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