Rivlin calls for end to incitement on both sides

Israel’s president-elect Reuven Rivlin says no one can remain silent in the face of the evil perpetrated by Muslim and Jewish killers, and is calling on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to stop incitement and work together for coexistence.

“Cursed be revenge which ravages and destroys, which hurts for the sake of hurting and strikes the innocent,” Rivlin writes in a Facebook post (Hebrew).

“We have a choice,” he says, “to give in to the destructive worldview propped up by the racists and the extremists or to fight it to the last; to surrender to cruel and savage Muslim and Jewish terror or to end it by any possible means.

“We must understand that there is no other path but coexistence,” Rivlin adds. “Bloodshed will end only when we realize that we are not doomed to live together but destined to live together.

“We have no other option,” he says. “We have no other country.”

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman calls the killing “beyond despicable.”

“The shocking murder of Muhammed Abu Khdeir is beyond being a despicable crime,” Liberman says in a statement. “Even with the justifiable rage each and every one of us feels from the murders of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrach, as well as the murder of Shelley Dadon, nothing can justify another murder.”