Rivlin urges ‘all Israelis’ to build Jewish-Arab trust

President Reuven Rivlin has called on all citizens of Israel to take part in efforts to build trust between the Jewish and Arab populations in the country.

Rivlin sent a letter on Monday to a youth event in Jerusalem, in which both Israeli and Palestinian teenagers were participants. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Rivlin wrote that “attention to Jewish-Arab relations must be advanced to the central political, public and media discourse, and anything less than that is simply negligence and the forsaking of our future and the future of our children.”

“The mission of building trust,” Rivlin said, “is not a mission of ‘the left,’ or one political camp or another, but rather a mission for anyone who cares about this country. It cannot be that one camp takes ownership and dictates the country’s ways and its language, since we cannot have one camp completely avoiding [this] responsibility.

“The fact that this issue has become identified with a political camp, on both the Jewish and Arab sides, is nothing short of tragic, since building trust between Jews and Arabs is the key to our existence here, to our future and our fate.”

Participants of the event, called “Children Live in Peace,” also received a letter from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Israeli and Palestinian youths grow up and live with almost no chance of knowing one another. We want peace and work to achieve change for you, the generation of the future, youths in Palestine and in Israel, and the sooner the better,” wrote Abbas.

The inclusive comments contradict the spirit of a statement by Abbas made last week, when he said on a Palestinian TV station that Jews should not be allowed to visit the Temple Mount “with their filthy feet.” The comment was condemned as racist by several Israeli officials.