Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not have hoped for more: Within less than a week, two high-ranking leaders publicly sided with him. First, President Reuven Rivlin joined the ranks of the prime minister’s spokespeople. The popular Israeli president joined the campaign against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Netanyahu would have been hard pressed to articulate his opposition to the French peace initiative better than Rivlin did in his June 22 speech to the European Parliament in Brussels.

Five days later, Netanyahu completed the reconciliation deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israel’s partner in the fight against the European Union. The end of the crisis with Turkey came just in time for the start of the long summer vacation. Masses of Israelis — Jews and Arabs alike — can once again flock to the all-inclusive Antalya resorts. It's the surest way to make them forget or forgive the price of the luxury hotels of which the Netanyahus are particularly fond and the controversy over the prime minister’s residences. Who remembers the critical comments made last week by former Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon against Netanyahu at the Herzliya Conference and the combative appearance of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Channel 2?

The deal with Turkey includes an easing of the closure on Gaza, an important achievement for Hamas with serious implications for Abbas’ shaky standing. Let us focus here on the meeting that wasn’t between Rivlin and Abbas.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of their failure to meet. First of all, Rivlin, as everyone knows, is not Netanyahu’s yes-man or mouthpiece. The prime minister, after all, spared no efforts to prevent Rivlin from being elected president. The relationship between the two is somewhere between frosty and hostile. Therefore, there’s no suspecting the president of serving as the prime minister’s envoy of recalcitrance. Second, his views on equal rights, freedom of expression and Israel’s foreign relations have made him the darling of Israel’s liberal camp. Declarations that there’s “no Palestinian partner” by leaders considered moderate, such as Rivlin and opposition leader Isaac Herzog, are different from when the words are said by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. I heard quite a number of leftist Israelis expressing disappointment in recent days over Abbas' refusal to meet with Rivlin.