By Rami Ayyub, Jonathan Saul, Stephen Farrell and Zainah El-Haroun
HAIFA/JAFFA (Reuters) - Two days after Hamas and Israel began launching rockets and air strikes, Israel's president called a TV station to plead with his fellow Jews and the country's Arab minority not to turn on each other over the conflict.
Reuven Rivlin, who belongs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, takes pride in the fact that his scholarly father translated the Koran from Arabic to Hebrew.
"Please stop this madness," he said on May 12. "We are endangered by rockets that are being launched at our citizens and streets, and we are busying ourselves with a senseless civil war among ourselves."