Warm, popular and moral

The late Yitzhak Navon was a president beloved and admired at every level. During his time as president (1978-1983) I was a frequent visitor to the President's Residence as a reporter for Haaretz. Even today, I remember the long lines of visitors Navon and his wife, Ofira, would welcome during the Sukkot holiday. During his time in office, some 300,000 people visited the President's Residence, and Navon always said that it was no wonder there were so many disputes and schisms in Israeli society, since "Jews from 102 countries who speak 81 languages live in Israel, and it takes time to mold them into a single people."

Navon was elected a year after the Likud went into power. Heads of the party were suspicious of him because throughout the years he had been a man of Labor in its various incarnations, even though his relations with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin were, as he put it, "proper and appropriate." Begin would come to Navon's office once every few weeks and update him about what was going on behind closed doors. Their conversations were candid. Navon once told me he was never afraid to give Begin his opinion, such as that he opposed settlement expansion and refrained from visiting communities beyond the Green Line.

While Navon was president, then-President of Egypt Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Israel. Navon and Sadat held in-depth discussions on relations between the two countries, and in 1980 Navon visited Egypt -- one of only two trips abroad he made during his presidency. He received a warm, affectionate welcome in Cairo and gave a speech in Arabic. After Sadat was assassinated, Navon traveled to Cairo to pay a consolation visit to Sadat's wife, Jehan, and I had the privilege of being one of the journalists who covered his short trip to Egypt.

During his term as president, Navon avoided public criticism of the government and its actions and comported himself with great stateliness. But in 1982, after the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps west of Beirut, when a Lebanese militia killed as many as 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, he was unable to turn a deaf ear. Navon invited Begin to an urgent meeting in his headquarters and told him: "The situation is serious. We need to investigate what happened. I don't think for a moment that our soldiers did it, but something awful took place and our soldiers were in the area."

Begin said he was afraid that if an investigative committee was established, Israel would be blamed for the slaughter. A few days later Navon appeared on television and said that it was hard to express the feeling of horror over the massacre at the refugee camps, but that Israel had a moral obligation to put together an investigative committee of its own so that it wouldn't be blamed for the terrible acts committed there. Later on, a massive demonstration was held at Kings of Israel Square (today Rabin Square) in Tel Aviv, and the government was forced to establish the Kahan Commission, a government committee of inquiry under the leadership of then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan.

Because he was so popular as president, some in the Likud worried that Navon would return to politics and run for prime minister. Therefore, Likud MK Micha Reisser authored a bill that would mandate a "cooling-off period" of four years before a former president could once again seek political office. The bill wasn't passed, and Navon did return to politics, serving as deputy prime minister and education minister in the unity government formed in 1984.

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