President of Israel

President of the State of Israel is the head of state of Israel, but has a largely ceremonial, figurehead role with real power lying in the hands of the Prime Minister of Israel.

List of Israeli Presidents

• Chaim Weizmann (1949 - 1952)
• Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1952 - 1963)
• Zalman Shazar (1963 - 1973)
• Ephraim Katzir (1973 - 1978)
• Yitzhak Navon (1978 - 1983)
• Chaim Herzog (1983 - 1993)
• Ezer Weizman (1993 - 2000)
• Moshe Katsav (2000 - )

All Israeli presidents before Moshe Katsav have been members of, or associated with, the Labor Party and its predecessors, and all have been considered politically moderate. These tendencies were especially significant in the April 1978 election of Labor's Yitzhak Navon, following the inability of the governing Likud coalition to elect its candidate to the presidency. Israeli observers believed that, in counterbalance to Prime Minister Begin's polarizing leadership, Navon, the country's first president of Sephardi origin, provided Israel with unifying symbolic leadership at a time of great political controversy and upheaval. In 1983 Navon decided to reenter Labor politics after five years of nonpartisan service as president, and Chaim Herzog (previously head of military intelligence and ambassador to the United Nations) succeeded him as Israel's sixth president. Likud's Moshe Katsav's defeat over Labor's Shimon Peres in 2000 was an upset. In 1952 the presidency was offered to Albert Einstein, who declined, claiming that he did not have the necessary people skills.

Related Topics:
Yitzhak Navon - Sephardi - Ambassador to the United Nations - Shimon Peres - Albert Einstein

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