Isaac Herzog should be the next president of Israel - opinion

President Reuven Rivlin’s successor, who will be chosen next Wednesday, will doubtfully have a great time while inhabiting the presidential mansion in Jerusalem.

The two contestants, Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog and educator Miriam Peretz, are both qualified candidates, especially compared with some of the last contest’s participants, which included several second-rate politicians.

Miriam Peretz is not second-rate. A mother of six who was born in Casablanca and raised in an immigrants’ camp outside Beersheba, she earned a Ben-Gurion University degree in the humanities and then became a teacher, a school principal, and an Education Ministry executive. In the midst of all this she lost in Lebanon and Gaza two sons, Uriel and Eliraz, both officers in the Golani Brigade.

Peretz, who between these two losses also lost her husband, Eliezer, who died of cancer at 56, did not break down. Delivering motivational speeches to thousands in Israel and abroad, she set out to help others cope with grief and find meaning in their lives as parents, women, Israelis and Jews.

Peretz thus became an icon of perseverance and idealism, and while at it also became famous and beloved. As such she is not only better than some of the previous contest’s political candidates, but also than its non-political contestants, Nobel-laureate chemist Dan Shechtman and retired Supreme Court justice Dalya Dorner, whose illustrious careers did not include much contact with the public.

You would think, then, that Miriam Peretz is an ideal candidate for president. What’s more, as a humbly born, self-made and also Modern-Orthodox woman, she is positioned to inspire feminists and also bridge between rich and poor as well as religious and secular Israelis.

Well, despite all these merits, Miriam Peretz is not the right person for the president of Israel, for the prosaic reason that she is not a politician.

THE PRESIDENT of the Jewish state is, on the face of it, a figurehead whose task is to cut ribbons, greet dignitaries and deliver boring speeches.

That surely is a part of the job, as noted by Natan Sharansky when he humbly said this job description meant he was unqualified for it. Yet ceremony is not all the presidency involves, even in regular times, let alone these days.

As noted here when the previous presidential contest began (“Don’t know much about history,” January 23, 2014), there are moments when the president suddenly becomes crucial, for better or worse.

The better case happened in 1982, when Yitzhak Navon publicly demanded, and thus caused, the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry following the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon. The worse cases followed the Yom Kippur War and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.

In 1973, while Israel buried more than 2,600 soldiers, Ephraim Katzir said, “We are all to blame,” and thus infuriated the masses who felt they were being blamed for what was their leaders’ fault.

In 1995, Ezer Weizman delivered an embarrassing eulogy at Rabin’s funeral (“We ate something good, we drank something good”). Unlike Katzir, an uncharismatic scientist who never connected with the public, Weizman was a charismatic war hero, but still, in the years after the murder he proved unequipped to inspire the national appeasement Israel begged.

Now, facing a society torn by Arab-Jewish strife and a political system frayed by constitutional crisis, the next president must be not only socially relevant, but also politically effective, legally informed, and historically inspired.

Peretz will not be nearly as good at this as Isaac Herzog.

For one thing, Herzog has been in politics for 22 of his 59 years, while Peretz has not spent in this fray one day of her 67 years. More importantly, in his years in politics, Herzog has displayed a unique ability to work with everyone, from Meretz and the Arab factions through the ideological Right to ultra-Orthodoxy’s Talmudic sages and hassidic courts.

Peretz has no such line in her resume. Unlike the social front, where she has the skill set, if not the experience that the presidency requires, there is nothing in her record that can make her help repair the political system. This daunting task can only be performed by a product of the political jungle.

THE NEXT president will have to play a key role in treating the worst constitutional crisis Israel has ever faced. This will include two tasks: first, affecting Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal situation, and second, rehabilitating the institutions he has traumatized.

The first task may require pardoning Netanyahu. The second will demand assembling a constitutional convention, a task that Miriam Peretz – like most others – cannot fulfill, and Isaac Herzog can.

First of all, if Netanyahu is to be pardoned, the pardon had better be handed by a president identified with Netanyahu’s opposition, which Herzog is, as a former chairman of the Labor Party. This way the pardon will not be suspected as partisan.

Second, in terms of treating the constitutional crisis, Herzog brings three assets: He is an experienced political negotiator; he is a lawyer as well as a former minister, lawmaker and cabinet secretary who understands legislation well, and the current crisis in particular; and lastly, he is in a position to temper the judiciary’s sway without being suspected of serving its right-wing detractors. This is besides Herzog’s biggest asset: He is a modest man.

Herzog is therefore equipped not only to build social bridges, but also to assemble, and possibly head, a multi-partisan forum that will rewrite the three branches’ powers and redefine their relations, and thus reboot Israeli politics.

That is why Isaac Herzog should be Israel’s 11th president.