by sheera claire frenkel
jta
Vice Premier Shimon Peres put an end to his historic losing streak this week by beating Knesset Members Reuven Rivlin (Likud) and Colette Avital (Labor) to become Israel’s ninth president.
In his presidential acceptance speech, the 83-year-old former prime minister, wearing a white yarmulke, gave thanks to his fellow candidates Avital and Rivlin, and paid tribute to his family.
“I have been in the Knesset for 48 years and not for one moment have I lost faith or hope in Israel,’ Peres said. “What Israel has achieved in 60 years, no other country has been able to achieve. I hope I can be representative of our faith, not because there are no problems but because we all want to overcome them.
“I will dedicate myself wholly to the nation,” he continued. “The president’s role is not to deal with politics and partisanship, but to represent what unites us in a strong voice.” He also vowed to continue efforts to bring back the kidnapped IDF soldiers.
Peres thanked his family for their support and spoke warmly of his wife Sonia, who was hospitalized recently. “A word to the love of my life, to Sonia,” he said, going on to describe her as “truly a rare kind of woman. She discovered in her recent bout of illness just how much the country loves her, perhaps because she is humble and dedicated to this country with all her being.”
The Knesset elected him in a second round of voting in which Peres was the only candidate. Eighty-six Members voted in his favor, while 23 voted against him.
Rivlin, a former Knesset speaker, and Avital, a former diplomat, dropped out after the first round after earning 37 and 21 votes respectively.
Peres’ age did not work against him. If anything, Peres is widely seen as having the gravitas the position demands.
Peres assumes the presidency on July 15 for his seven-year term, replacing Acting President Dalia Itzik and the temporarily suspended current president, Moshe Katsav.
The largely ceremonial position will cap Peres’ six-decade long career, in which he served in nearly all of Israel’s top civilian posts and won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for reaching an interim peace deal alongside Yitzhak Rabin and the late Yasser Arafat.
The Poland-born Peres began his career in 1959, as Knesset Member and top aide to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. But he was never elected prime minister outright, serving once in a caretaker role in the 1970s, and once in the 1980s under a rotation agreement with political opponent Yitzhak Shamir after a general election failed to produce a clear winner. He served as premier again in the 1990s after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist.
Peres, who had earned the title “the greatest loser” in Israeli politics, has always been a favorite of Jews in the diaspora, but the Israeli public never elected him. Even now, he won the presidency from the Knesset. The public has no say in that vote.
In 2000 Peres also ran for president, but the Knesset elected Katsav, who has been tainted by allegations that he raped or otherwise sexually assaulted four women employees. Katsav has not been formally charged, pending a final hearing before Israel’s attorney general, but has stepped down temporarily to fight the allegations.
AP and ynetnews.com contributed to this report.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California