Reuven Rivlin is the president of Israel (Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister), a somewhat ceremonial post. Soon after the firebomb attack that killed 18 month old Ali Dawabsheh and left his family fighting for their lives, Rivlin took to Facebook to post a message in Hebrew and Arabic that read:
"More than feeling shame, I feel pain," Rivlin wrote. "Pain over the murder of a little baby. Pain that members of my nation chose this way of terror and lost their sense of humanity. Their path is not my path. Their path is not our path. Their path is not the path of the State of Israel and it is not the path of the Jewish people."
In his post, Rivlin urged readers to show restraint. "During these painful moments, I turn to you, to the Palestinian people, to all law-abiding citizens, and ask you not to give in to feels of anger and rage. This is a time for us to link arms," he wrote. "We must let the legal establishment carry out its duties and be careful not to let ourselves get dragged into harmful and needless deeds… despite the pain and the sorrow, we must continue to believe in our ability to build the bridges of co-existence, of a life together. We must not let terror win."
The
Internet wrote back in response to his plea for sanity, brotherhood and peace:
some posters said he would “come to an end worse than Ariel Sharon,” who became comatose in 2006 after suffering a stroke while serving as prime minister.
“You bloody loser, your end will be worse than Ariel Sharon’s, you will see. I pray that another ‘Yigal Amir’ will rise to cleanse you and the Arabs from our Jewish country, and so I wish you ill health and any other suffering,” one poster wrote.
Yigal Amir assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
“You sold your soul to the devil,” another message read, adding, “My children saw me taking your picture off the wall [of my house] and asked why. I politely explained that you resigned and are no longer part of the Jewish people. You give a green light to hurting the Jewish people. You have been disqualified!”
Someone photoshopped a kaffiyeh (traditional Palestinian peasant's headdres) onto his official state portrait and put it on FB.
Rivlin's security is taking the threats seriously and have asked police to investigate the threats.
Well, that should be a lesson to him that sanity is not rewarded in I/P so you should keep your lips tightly sealed when someone burns a toddler to death.
Rivlin is an interesting, complicated cat. He's a Likud member and has served as speaker. He is a very vocal defender of the rights of minorities and was elected president with the support of Arab members of the Knesset (MKs elect the president, quite common in Parliamentary systems). He criticized Bibi's "Arabs are voting in droves" remark. He speaks Arabic fluently.
Personally, I think he's a closet supporter of a bi-national state. Okay, he's kind of out of the closet since he's said on occasion that he would support a one state solution. He's made public statements saying “I would prefer for the Palestinians to be citizens of this country, rather than divide the land.”
more on what he said on that occasion below:
Reuven Rivlin's remarks in 2010:
“We’re living in a political reality that requires answers. “When people say that the demographic threat necessitates a separation, my reply is that the lesser danger, the lesser evil, is a single state in which there are equal rights for all citizens. Realpolitik requires us to opt for the danger in the demographic threat over the existential threat of separation.
“As a rule, whenever I hear about a demographic threat, it comes first of all from a type of thinking that says the Arabs are a threat. And this leads to thinking of transfer, or that they should be killed. I am appalled by this kind of talk. I go into schools, and when they hold mock elections, Lieberman gets 40 percent of the vote and I hear kids saying that Arabs should be killed. It seems to me that many of the belligerent Jewish movements that were built upon hatred of Arabs − and I’m not only talking about Lieberman, but within the Likud as well − grew out of the patronizing-socialist attitude that said ‘They’ll be there and we’ll be here.’ I have never understood this. When Jabotinsky says ‘Zion is all ours,’ he means a Jewish prime minister and an Arab deputy prime minister.
“There is a conflict in the Middle East between two entities, and they’re both right, each in their own way. This is our only home, and therefore all kinds of solutions can be found. One could establish a system in one state in which Judea and Samaria are jointly held. The Jews would vote for a Jewish parliament and the Palestinians for an Arab parliament, and we would create a system in which life is shared. But these are things that will take time. Anyone who thinks that there are shortcuts is talking nonsense. As long as Islamic fundamentalism thinks that Jews are forbidden to settle in the Holy Land, we have a problem. It will not be resolved by an agreement, even if we obtain a promise from all the Arab states that it will be fine.
“So if people say to me: Decide − one state or division of the Land of Israel, I say that division is the bigger danger. In an Israel with six million Jews it is much easier to sustain the vision of a Jewish and democratic state than it was in 1948. The people who now say that we must separate because otherwise the state will not be democratic or will lose its Jewish character would, for the same reasons, have said that no state should have been founded in 1948.
“I understand the difficulty with what I’m saying. It seems incomplete. But I know that we’ve overcome much bigger problems in the past. My friends on the left, like Beilin and Jumas [Haim Oron] are true Zionists and Israeli patriots, but this talk about separation, this attitude of patronage, is what gives rise to the hatred that is keeping us from reaching a solution.”