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Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumIsraeli left's baffling support for Rivlin
If the Knesset elects Reuven Ruby Rivlin as Israels president on June 10, he will be the right man at the right time. There is no one more fitting than Rivlin to represent the Greater Land of Israel, the land of the settlers and of self-isolation. There is no time more fitting than this period of diplomatic drought and flood of settlements to bestow Israel's most stately and esteemed role on the person who proclaimed the following on the occasion of the 2012 Independence Day ceremony: Even in our 64th year of independence, we remember that we were a generation of settlers and continue to be a generation of settlers.Former Knesset Speaker Rivlin is the true face of Israel 2014. He is devoid of pretense, unlike Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in his landmark Bar-Ilan speech spoke of a two-state solution but has since spared no obstacle to prevent its implementation. Rivlin speaks out against the two-state solution and also votes against any move that even hints at it. Netanyahu was finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that voted in favor of Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Since that time, he does not miss an opportunity to present disengagement as a mistake.
As speaker of the 16th Knesset, in 2004 Rivlin lit a torch at the traditional Independence Day ceremony in honor of the pioneers who [march] before the camp, those who settle the land of our fathers and redeem its earth, from Hanita to Kfar Darom, and from Negba to Kiryat Arba, which is Hebron and in honor of the State of Israel. Kfar Darom was a Jewish settlement conquered by the Egyptian army in 1948, rebuilt in 1988 in the heart of a Palestinian population center in the Gaza Strip and evacuated in the 2005 Israeli withdrawal.
Little wonder, then, that Netanyahu tried to extend President Shimon Peres term to prevent Rivlins election. Rivlin will not travel on Netanyahus behalf to the White House to convince the American president that the prime minister is truly willing to withdraw from most of the occupied territories. Rivlin would not have been invited to the Vatican to embrace Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the presence of the pope. World leaders will not come to Jerusalem to celebrate Rivlins birthday as they did for Peres as he smiles at the photographers while at Netanyahus side, signaling business as usual to the rest of the world.
snip* Rivlins supporters in the Labor and Meretz parties, among them former Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich, praise Rivlins statehood. They rely on the rule that one doesnt see from here what one sees from there (i.e., that people adopt different behaviors once they assume office), but when Rivlin occupied the Knesset speaker's chair the seat closest to the president (by law the Knesset speaker is the presidents replacement) he stood at the exact same spot he has been standing his entire political career: the farmost corner of right-wing ideology.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/reuven-rivlin-president-netanyahu-right-wing-left-camp.html#ixzz34Ep7mFUQ
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Israeli left's baffling support for Rivlin (Original Post)
Jefferson23
Jun 2014
OP
alsame
(7,784 posts)1. He won
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)2. Thanks..another peace maker. sigh. n/t
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)3. Rivlin says he's now a man of the people not Likud
But Rivlin will also have to seperate from his political home, the Likud. "This party was my home as I said it would be until I was legally obligated to leave it. Now, I am no longer a party man, I am no longer a faction man. I am everybody's man. A man of the people."
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4528918,00.html
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)4. Time will tell. n/t