President Reuven Rivlin is proving himself to be the wrong man for the job.
He visited the family of terror victim Danny Gonen last week to express his condolences but instead stabbed the relatives in the heart with the comment by asking them why he was not carrying a gun.
Gonen, from the city of Lod near Ben Gurion Airport, was killed and a companion was wounded by a Palestinian Authority terrorist when they were hiking near Dolev, a community in Samaria. The attacker still is at large.
Yediot Acharonot reported that the family was shocked and bitterly upset by the insensitive remark, which implied that Gonen was guilty of being murdered because he did not carry a weapon when hiking,
Not even his Rivlin’s predecessor Shimon Peres would have made such a tactless statement.
It could have been worse. He could have asked the family why Gonen even stepped foot into Judea and Samaria, but Rivlin has not gone that far, at least not yet.
The family did not respond to Rivlin’s remark, but Gonen’s wounded friend Natanel Hadad did not remain silent.
He reportedly said to the President:
Danny posted a sharp criticism when there was arson here at a Jewish kindergarten here in Lod, and you remained silent and did not condemn it.
Rivlin did not have the courage to apologize for his tactless remark and instead shot back at Hadad, “For everyone who thinks like him [Hadad], there are 300 who think like me.”
President Rivlin left the house where the relatives were sitting shiva and tried to call Gonen’s mother on Friday. She refused to speak with him.
The family issued a statement:
We strongly condemn the remark by the President that our son did carry a weapon, and we call on the President to come with us on Friday to visit the spring {where they were hiking] without a weapon.
The office of the President issued a remarkably dumb statement that “we share the sorrow of the family that lost their son.” Rivlin, so politically correct for the United Nations, couldn’t even bring himself to emphasize that Gonen was a victim of Palestinian Authority terror.
It is difficult to be nostalgic for Shimon Peres, who may have thought exactly like Rivlin and probably thinks that Jews really shouldn’t live in most of Judea and Samaria, but he certainly had enough sense at least to act out the part of someone who is supposed to show sympathy.