Reuven Rivlin: The President Who Refused to Match His Politics to His Empathy
In a farewell letter to his successor in 2021, Reuven Rivlin described the presidency not as a platform for policy but as an emotional obligation: "You will want to hug them, all of them. You will want to cry with them, and to laugh with them." It was a strange thing for a lifelong Likud hawk and unapologetic advocate of Greater Israel to write, and it captured the contradiction that defined his seven years as Israel's tenth president — a settler-sympathizing nationalist who spent his term defending Arab lawmakers, court independence, and the dignity of communities his own party often overlooked.
A Jerusalem Family, Four Generations Deep
Rivlin was born on September 9, 1939, in Jerusalem, then under British Mandatory rule, into a family that had lived in the city since 1809 — a lineage almost unmatched in modern Israeli politics. His father, Yosef Yoel Rivlin, was a scholar who produced the first Hebrew translation of the Quran and even ran as a presidential candidate in 1957. Rivlin attended Gymnasia Rehavia, Jerusalem's storied secondary school, before earning a law degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served in the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and saw action in the 1967 Six-Day War as an intelligence officer attached to the Jerusalem Brigade and the Paratroopers Brigade. Before politics consumed him, he built an eclectic legal and civic career: he was legal advisor and later manager of the Beitar Jerusalem football club, whose fans he had supported since age seven, sat on the Jerusalem City Council, and served on the boards of the Israel Museum and the Khan Theater.
Three Decades in the Knesset
Rivlin entered the Knesset in 1988 as a Likud member, serving until 1992, then returning in 1996 and being re-elected in 1999. He chaired the Likud party organization from 1988 to 1993. In March 2001, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he became Minister of Communications, a post he held until February 2003, when he was elected Speaker of the Knesset — a position of institutional rather than partisan power that suited his instincts. He served two nonconsecutive terms as Speaker, from 2003 to 2006 and again from 2009 to 2013, the second time winning with ninety of 120 possible votes. As Speaker he made a point of visiting the Arab-Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm, a rare gesture from a Likud figure, and later defended the parliamentary rights of Arab lawmaker Haneen Zoabi amid the furor over the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid — a stance that drew criticism from within his own camp. He also broke publicly with Sharon over the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and clashed with Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak over the limits of judicial authority.
Winning the Presidency
Rivlin was elected Israel's tenth president on June 10, 2014, defeating Meir Sheetrit in a runoff with the support of 63 Knesset members, and was inaugurated on July 24, 2014, succeeding Shimon Peres. His seven-year term, which ended on July 7, 2021, when Isaac Herzog succeeded him, coincided with the most turbulent stretch of coalition politics in Israeli history: according to the President's Residence, no previous president had presided over more elections, tasked more politicians with attempting to form governments, or spent more hours in formation consultations. Between 2019 and 2021 alone, Israel held four inconclusive elections, and Rivlin was repeatedly forced to hand mandates back and forth between Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, and eventually Yair Lapid, including a November 2019 episode — unprecedented in the country's history — in which the mandate to form a government passed to the Knesset itself and still failed.
The Hawk Who Defended Minorities
Rivlin's ideology never softened: he remained an outspoken advocate of a "Greater Israel" one-state framework incorporating the West Bank and Gaza, declaring that "West Bank settlements are as Israeli as Tel Aviv," and he acknowledged bluntly that Palestinians could not be expected to accept a settlement in which "one state is an invincible superpower, and the other is sub-autonomous." Yet as president he repeatedly used his moral authority against extremism within Israeli society. In July 2015, after Jewish extremists firebombed a Palestinian home, killing a toddler, Rivlin called the attackers "terrorists" and received death threats for it; he was later found spray-painted as a "Nazi apostate from Judaism" on a wall in Bnei Brak after criticizing the Netanyahu government. He defended African asylum seekers, saying "As a democrat and a Jew, I have a hard time with concentration camps," canceled a state event after a singer performed an anti-Arab song, and declared that "Israeli society is sick, and it is our duty to treat this disease." His record was not without its own inconsistencies — in 1989 he had called Reform Jews "idol worshippers" and long refused equal recognition to non-Orthodox rabbis, a position he only partially walked back as president, and in 2016 he barred an Arab lawmaker from the presidential residence after she visited the families of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
Diplomacy and Memory
As president, Rivlin met with U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and with Pope Francis, and took on Holocaust memory as a signature cause, participating in the March of the Living at Auschwitz in 2018 and telling Polish President Andrzej Duda directly that "Poland and Poles had a hand in the extermination" — a rebuke of Warsaw's efforts to legislate away wartime complicity. His wife, Nechama Rivlin, whom he had married in 1971, died in 2019 during his presidency; the couple had four children. He was a vegetarian from the late 1960s and fluent in Arabic, and relied throughout his career on Rivka Ravitz, an ultra-Orthodox chief of staff who managed his campaigns and appearances for over two decades.
Why Reuven Is Called a Genius
"Genius" is not the word history is likely to settle on Rivlin, and the honest accounting says so plainly: he was not a scholar, scientist, or innovator, and none of the sourced record credits him with intellectual originality. What he possessed instead was an unusually acute political and emotional intelligence — a capacity, rare among ideologues, to hold a hardline nationalist position on territory while using the presidency's moral pulpit against the uglier instincts of the movement that put him there. That produced real skill: reading a room of feuding party leaders during four consecutive elections, calibrating exactly which fights to pick from a nominally ceremonial office, and turning personal grief and stubborn empathy into public gestures that outraged his own base as often as his opponents. It is a genius of temperament and timing more than of ideas, and it sits alongside a genuinely contradictory record — a Greater Israel maximalist who also, at moments, called his own society "sick." Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.
Legacy
Rivlin left the presidency having stabilized an office battered by an unprecedented run of electoral chaos, and having demonstrated, however imperfectly, that a president chosen from the nationalist right could still function as a check on that same camp's excesses. His successors inherited a presidency whose independence from the sitting government he had visibly, sometimes painfully, defended.
Achievements
- Educated at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Gymnasia Rehavia
- Worked as politician, lawyer and jurist
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