Search for New President Spurs Debate About Post, Ideal Leader

Just days after Ezer Weizman announced that he will end his controversial tenure as Israel’s president in July, three years ahead of schedule, the campaign for his successor is in full swing.

Members of parliament and other prominent Israelis already are proclaiming their support for one or the other of the announced candidates: Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and Nobel Peace laureate, who is the choice of the ruling Labor Party, and Moshe Katsav, a three-time Cabinet minister preferred by the opposition Likud.

Commentators and editorial writers are making their choices too. Proponents of Peres, 76, describe him as Israel’s most distinguished living statesman, a man who should receive the largely ceremonial post as a reward for years of service.

Those who favor Katsav, 54, call him a pleasant, noncontroversial figure who might help unify this divided nation.

But there are other voices casting doubt upon the whole proceeding. Does Israel, which has an elected prime minister, really need a president too? they ask. Given Weizman’s troubled seven-year tenure, some say, now would be a perfect time to do away with a job that has never been well defined.

A blunt-spoken former fighter pilot, Weizman was forced to announce his planned resignation last week after an attorney general’s report on allegations of financial impropriety left his reputation badly tarnished. He has acknowledged receiving, and not reporting, more than $300,000 in cash gifts when he was a Cabinet member and legislator but has maintained that he did nothing wrong.

Weizman was controversial even before the financial scandal. He angered many Israelis--and endeared himself to others--with a series of outrageous, tart-tongued comments, especially in his first years as president. But his saying that a French businessman made monthly payments to him from 1988 to 1993 was the last straw for many.

“Precisely because [Weizman] has been the most intolerable president in the history of the state, one may ask: Who is the ideal president? Someone honest, clean-spoken, distinguished, wise?” columnist Irit Linor wrote in Sunday’s Maariv daily.

“Of course. But a wise person will ask another question,” Linor continued. “Assuming we had an ideal president, who needs him?”

Linor argued that with one exception--Ezer Weizman’s uncle Chaim, who was Israel’s first president--the office has served as nothing more than an “old-age home” for prominent politicians.

Others have raised similar, if more delicately phrased, concerns, suggesting that the institution be reviewed at least, or the rules for election changed. The president is chosen by a majority vote of the parliament. Some say the public should vote instead.

Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University, says Israel may be unique in having a directly elected head of government, currently Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is not head of state. That honor is reserved for the president, who has little power other than to issue pardons and reduce sentences.

Still, Diskin does not believe that Israelis are ready to abolish the presidency, despite the troubles of its current occupant. They like the idea of the post as it was originally intended, he says: that of a president who serves as a national symbol and stays above the political fray.

Can either Katsav or Peres--especially Peres--actually do that? Both men are veteran politicians, and Peres, who lost the leadership of the Labor Party to Barak nearly three years ago, is regarded by many of Barak’s allies as a meddler, a man who has not entirely relinquished his political ambitions.

Peres has sought to allay such fears, telling reporters that he has assured Barak he would “serve with loyalty.”

Katsav and his allies, in turn, have tried to stoke the concerns, presenting Katsav as the candidate who can rise above the political tumult.