In Israel, the president has a primarily symbolic role. His days are punctuated with official visits, social dinners and many, many ribbons to cut. Its function is not really defined by the texts, it is located above the parties and takes the place that the government wants to leave it. Réouven Rivlin’s presidency, which ended on Wednesday, July 7, was therefore complicated: his relationship with the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from his party, the Likud, was notoriously execrable.
“Mr. Netanyahu’s way of working, all these years, his way of doing politics, of consolidating his support by ‘dividing for better reign’, by pitting communities against each other and by attracting favor. of certain communities via anger and fear of the other… Rivlin tried to do exactly the opposite ”, analysis Anshel Pfeffer, journalist for the daily Haaretz. After four elections and a long political crisis, the tenth Israeli president finally left, on Wednesday, to his successor, the former leader of the Labor Party, Isaac Herzog, a country with a new government and Benjamin Netanyahu in the opposition.
During his seven-year term, Réouven Rivlin “ tried to play the role expected of a president in Israel, explains Gideon Rahat, researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute and professor of political science at the Hebrew University. Until the end he did the best he could to put together “.
A president never stepped out of his role
In 2015, the head of state, from a Jewish family established in Jerusalem since the XIXe century, already warned against the schism that lurked in what he called the ” four tribes of Israel : Palestinian Israeli citizens, ultra-Orthodox Jews, religious nationalist Jews and secular Jews. “The different tribes of Israeli society will stay. We must always make sure that in the natural tension that exists between the state and tribalism, it is the state, the republic that wins., he hammered again in his farewell speech to the Knesset. We are not doomed, but destined to live together. “
The past few months have been tough for the 81-year-old politician, minister under Ariel Sharon and later Speaker of the Knesset. His greatest fear seemed to materialize in mid-May, when violent clashes broke out in the so-called “mixed” towns of the country: an internal front suddenly opened up, while Israel was waging a war at the same time. to Hamas in Gaza. On May 12, Israeli public television broadcasts live a scene of a lynching against a presumed Arab man by a mob of Israeli Jewish extremists; just after, the president addresses his compatriots, on the competing channel and implores: “Please stop this madness!” “
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