Remembering Rabin

Last week Israel commemorated 14 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  Predictably, there was much discussion in the press – and I dare say in the cafes and on the street – about his legacy.

The left have claimed his memory – he did, after all, begin the peace process with the Palestinians and make peace with Jordan.  However, prior to his (second) premiership in 1992 he was not part of the ‘Peace Now’, anti-occupation left.   Rabin was a tough, security-obsessed military man – a hero of the War of Independence, IDF Chief-Of Staff during the Six-Day War and a hawkish Defense Minister.

His decision to sign the Oslo Accords and embark on a peace process with Yasser Arafat – a man he personally detested – stemmed from a belief that the status quo could not continue.  This is his legacy.  A military man to his bones, he became profoundly disturbed at how the occupation of the Palestinians had turned his beloved IDF into riot police or enforcers of checkpoints against a civilian population. He was the first prime minister since the conquering of the disputed territories in 1967 to sound the alarm about the corrupting effect that controlling another people was having on Israeli society, and the first to declare that Israel would have to give up land if it was to remain both Jewish and democratic.  The latter point at least as since been absorbed even by some on the right – witness arch-settlement builder Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, dyed-in-the-wool Likudniks Ehud Olmert’s and Tzipi Livni’s zealous conversion to the two-state faith, and even Bibi Netanyahu supporting the creation of a (demilitarized) Palestinian state.

The assassination itself shook the country to its core.  That another Jew could murder the prime minister was not something that anyone in Israel had believed possible.  But though Yigal Amir fired the shots, he was not operating in a vacuum.  Opposition to Oslo had been intense and heated, and while the vast majority of the protesters were genuinely concerned at the risks being taken in the name of peace, there was also something darker simmering.  More extreme right-wing elements in Israeli society began to take things further. At demonstrations posters appeared depicting Rabin as an SS officer while religious edicts issued forth from certain radical West Bank Rabbis calling the prime minister a traitor to the Jewish people and religious newspapers branded him ‘an antisemite’.  The assassination was merely the culmination of what had been developing for a long time: the presence of a growing population of extremists who believed that the Torah commanded them to keep all of Eretz Israel and that violence was acceptable to prevent the secular government from giving up sacred territory.

Today, this ideology can be seen in the settlers who attack IDF soldiers and call them Nazis when they come to dismantle illegal outposts. Clearly, one lesson to be taken from the assassination is that Israeli should be on its guard against those who would strip Judaism of its ethical dimension and imperil Israel’s democracy in the name of religion.

As for Rabin himself, his legacy can be expressed best in his own words.  His 1992 speech to the Knesset after becoming Prime Minister, included this address to the Palestinians:

"You have failed in your war against us.  One hundred years of your bloodshed and terror against us have brought you only suffering, humiliation, bereavement and pain…  For forty-four years you have been living under a delusion.  Your leaders have led you through lies and deceit.  They have missed every opportunity, rejected all the proposals for a settlement, and have taken you from one tragedy to another...

“We are destined to live together, on the same soil in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough."

And three years later, also in the Knesset, he spelt out the future that Israel must create:

“We had to choose between the whole of the land of Israel, which meant a binational state, and whose population, as of today, would comprise four and a half million Jews, and more than three million Palestinians, who are a separate entity -- religiously, politically, and nationally -- and a state with less territory, but which would be a Jewish state. We chose to be a Jewish state.”

Yitzhak Rabin - Prime Minister, Soldier, Zionist, Jew. Defender of Israel and seeker of peace.

May his memory be blessed.