…is Reuven Rivlin. The former Knesset speaker and Likud party stalwart was elected yesterday. Dimi Reider, writing before the election, called Rivlin “the best president for the Left, for whom the Left will never vote”:
As a staunch right-winger, Rivlin is opposed to partition but is emphatically opposed to racism, coupling his opposition to a Palestinian state with support for offering Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians. While this is a stance being taken up by a number of right-wing politicians in recent years, Rivlin, as a democrat, goes one step further. When I interviewed him for Foreign Policy four years ago, for instance, he spoke nostalgically of a rotation-based executive espoused by Revisionist Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky – and held up by Belfast as one possible inspiration for a future of power-sharing. It’s a far cry from nationalist self-determination, or from the one state advocated by Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian Left. But it still offers infinitely more room for maneuver than anything ever plausibly offered or actually given to Palestinians by the centrist two-state Left.
What I take from this is that the two-state solution is dead and the project for Greater Israel continues apace. At some point, the Palestinian Arabs who would end the existence of a Jewish-majority state will be expelled, as they were in 1948. It’s hard to see any other outcome from the logic of one unitary Jewish state across the entire area that Israel has now controlled for the majority of its existence. “But Rivlin is more than his opposition to a two-state solution,” Raphael Ahren stresses:
During his two terms as Knesset Speaker, he wasn’t afraid to confront the right wing — for example by opposing legislation he deemed as discriminatory and undemocratic, which won him many friends even among Israeli left-wingers. MKs Ilan Gilon (Meretz) and Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) voted for Rivlin, as did all four MKs from the Arab-Israeli Ra’am-Ta’al faction.
“He has an opinion on the two-state solution, but he is not widely seen as an ultra-nationalist,” said Mitchell Barak, a pollster and political analyst. “He’s one of voices of reason in Likud; he’s not a hothead like Danny Danon.” The president-elect’s views on the peace process are not born of hatred for Arabs, as his voting record and his statements as Knesset speaker attest, and the Arabs and the world at large know that, he said.
Comparing Rivlin to his predecessor Shimon Peres, Jonathan Tobin argues that his election indicates how Israeli public opinion on the peace process has shifted:
Rivlin’s win is one more demonstration that the center of Israeli politics is well to the right of where Americans would like it to be. While liberals and others who deride Netanyahu think the views of the popular Peres represent what most Israelis think, the experience of the last 20 years of the peace process have created a new political alignment that means Rivlin’s opinions don’t place him outside of the mainstream.
This is disconcerting for those who would like to believe that Peres, the architect of Oslo process, speaks for Israel in a way that Netanyahu cannot. But even if most Israelis think a two-state solution would be ideal, they know that in the absence of a true peace partner it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
A little background on the Rivlins: The new president comes from a large and influential family who were among the first Jews to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the 19th century, making them, as Eetta Prince-Gibson calls them, “the closest thing to a Jewish aristocracy Israel has ever had”:
On their website (www.rivlinfamily.com), the clan claims to number today more than 50,000, of whom more than 35,000 are thought to live in Israel. The website lists some 195 people of note, including Yosef Yoel Rivlin, the author of the first Hebrew edition of the Koran (and father of Rueven Rivlin); Eliezer Rivlin, the deputy president of the Supreme Court of Israel from 2006 to 2012; Ranan R. Lurie, an American-Israeli political cartoonist and journalist; Rivka Michaeli, the doyenne of Israeli comedy; Sefi Rivlin, a wild-cat comedian and admired satirist, who died last year; Lilly Rivlin, an American feminist filmmaker and left-wing peace activist; Leora Rivlin, an award-winning actress, and Muki Tzur, from Kibbutz Ein Gev, a well-regarded historian of the period of the Second Aliyah.
The Dish 