Sober Up, President Rivlin, From Your Good Intentions

Well-wishers are already asking if the left-wing council of elders has decided to cut short the president’s term. The more compliments the left showers on the president, the more Netanyahu hates him. In fact that seems to be the way to destroy Rivlin. In the recent Peace Now demonstration, the host called him “a ray of light in the darkness.” Immediately afterward the president was depicted in an SS uniform.

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Rivlin is even better than Peres, the left’s darling. Peres lived on Mars, to which he soared as the bionic man and a nanotechnological wonder. Rivlin knows very well where he lives. “Our society is sick,” the 10th president diagnosed, thinking how he could heal it. The 9th president used to raise a toast to this nation every day, extolling its virtues. His obsequious eulogy to Netanyahu’s father is engraved in our memory: “The father researched history, the son makes history.” Well, history is still waiting with bated breath. With such a president in the residence, the prime minister could sleep peacefully in his bed.

Precisely because his intentions are so good, we’d like to explain to the president where they lead. After all, we weren’t born in Jabotinsky’s cradle yesterday and the life-and-death experience we’ve accumulated testifies like a hundred witnesses that the Jewish state doesn’t want to grant equal rights to its minorities as in a proper democracy. Sixty-seven years the country’s Arab citizens have suffered discrimination and deprivation.

Adult Arabs aren’t the only ones Israel deprives. A few days ago the statistical figures were published again, showing that students in religious-state schools are generously funded, while Arab schools are short-changed. For these are the national priorities: Children from a religious settler home are sacred, children from a secular home are common, and Arab children are dust.

Even the Druze lag behind, although as soldiers they are the first to charge the enemy. We agreed to let them into the state’s bloodstream, but not into our nightclubs. They will always remain outside. Only after their cry rose to heaven, suddenly Netanyahu remembered them. He telephoned the bereaved families from Beit Jann and Yanuch-Jat and promised: “My nation-state law will remember our alliance with you and grant you benefits.” He threw them a bone, hoping they’d be tempted to crawl and pick crumbs under his table.

Rivlin’s good intentions are paving the road to hell. His dream of one state for two peoples is a nightmare to both. Raise your eyes to your beloved Jerusalem, what do you see? One city that is one large wound. This is what the one state will look like. Jerusalem is like an experimental laboratory. This is what coexistence has done to it.

What else do you see? A burnt school, the last remnant of shared life. It was burned by arsonists, but the voice behind them is Netanyahu’s and that of your old friends, the voice from the Zion Square balcony that has been terrifying the country for 20 years.

If we couldn’t integrate Israel’s one million Arabs, how will we live together with five million? If we haven’t succeeded in respecting the Druze, how will others trust us? If we haven’t united Jerusalem, how will we mend the torn shreds of our tent and make them one? And if President Rivlin had no proof of how fallacious and groundless his vision is, the “nation-state law” has proved it.

Your honor, it’s time to sober up. Don’t delude yourself like your predecessor with hallucinations of your own. Nations want to live among themselves and no nation in the world is immune from xenophobia. Esau hated Jacob, as every clever Jewish boy knows. That’s why Jacob is bashing Esau to a pulp, as every Israeli soldier knows.

We’d all like to be Jerusalemites of the heavenly city – clean-minded Rivlins, looking from the summit of Mt. Scopus down on the city of nations that has become the city of blood. But Jerusalem is pulling us down, placing our feet at its gates, where they sink deep into moral and spiritual contamination.