Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman, by Itamar Rabinovich (Yale University Press, £16.99)
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On the evening of 4th November 1995, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, a Jewish fanatic named Yigal Amir shot and killed the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In Rabin’s jacket pocket was a neatly folded sheet of paper with the words of the song he had just sung—“The Song of Peace.” It was later found stained with the 73-year-old’s blood, pierced by a bullet.
Amir wanted to punish Rabin for signing the 1993 Oslo Accord with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)—and to derail the peace train altogether. Few political killings in history have been so successful. Twenty-two years on, the dream of a secure Israel and viable Palestine is a distant fantasy. The increasingly right-wing stance of the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the drastic increase in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the weakness of Abu Mazen’s Palestinian leadership, and the periodic outbursts of violence in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza have resulted in precious little trust on either side. Factor in Donald Trump—who campaigned on the provocative promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and who in a meeting in February with Netanyahu distanced himself from the two-state solution—and the lack of brave and intelligent leadership on all sides is all the more conspicuous.
It’s no wonder, then, that Rabin now has the aura of a secular saint. The epitaph on his grave—“Peacemaker”—is well deserved. Yet it does not take account of the long journey that preceded the transformation of one of Israel’s toughest military hawks into a prominent political dove.
This concise and well-rounded biography traces every stage in Rabin’s rise to the top; but it is particularly illuminating on foreign policy during his second term as prime minister, from 1992 until 1995. Itamar Rabinovich, a historian of modern Syria and former rector of Tel Aviv University, is eminently well qualified for his task. In 1992, Rabin appointed him as ambassador to the United States and chief negotiator with Syria. Rabinovich was not just an academic observer but a significant player in the diplomacy he chronicles so ably here. His closeness to Rabin, however, has its downsides. Although Rabinovich is careful not to let his biography topple into a hagiography, his sympathy is almost invariably with his friend and political mentor.
Born in Jerusalem in 1922, Rabin was the first Israeli prime minister born in British mandated Palestine. Jews born inside the country are popularly known as sabra, a cactus fruit prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Rabin was certainly prickly: shy, inarticulate, gruff, emotionally buttoned-up, uncomfortable with small talk and lacking in charisma. But he also possessed high intelligence, acute analytical ability and dogged determination. These qualities made him a first-rate staff officer and accounted for his steady rise through the ranks of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)—from a young brigade commander in the 1948 war of independence to a victorious chief-of-staff in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Throughout this period, Rabin looked at Arabs mainly over the barrel of a gun.
Ambassador Rabin used all his considerable influence, in both Tel Aviv and Washington, to press for military escalation in the conflict with Egypt to compel it to sue for peace on Israel’s terms. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had launched a “war of attrition” against Israel in 1969 to try to dislodge it from Sinai. This war took the form of artillery barrages across the Suez Canal. It was protracted, costly in casualties and inconclusive. Bypassing his immediate boss, the moderate Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Rabin recommended to the cabinet the use of the Israeli air force for “deep-penetration bombing” in Egypt to bring about Nasser’s downfall. Regime change by military force is always a sign of confused thinking. Prime Minister Golda Meir followed Rabin’s advice as part of her strategy of attrition—to let Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, sweat it out until he was left with no choice but to accept Israel’s dictates. Instead, Sadat launched (with Syria) the October 1973 war, which caught Israel by surprise. Although Israel eventually won, the fallout precipitated Meir’s fall from power.
Rabin was one of the very few beneficiaries of this unnecessary and costly war: he was chosen by Labour Party power brokers to succeed Meir. The accidental prime minister was 53 years old, still graceless, and politically immature. He had the mind-set of a soldier rather than a statesman, and was fixated on playing for time to rebuild the IDF. Consequently his foreign policy hardly deviated from the intransigence of the Meir era. Opportunities for resolving Israel’s dispute with its neighbours through diplomacy were frittered away in the pursuit of short-term advantage. True, an interim agreement was reached with Egypt in 1975, based on a limited Israeli pull-back from the Suez Canal. But Rabin could potentially have pursued the fully-fledged peace treaty which his right-wing successor Menachem Begin concluded with Sadat five years later. The treaty required complete Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in return for peace and elaborate security arrangements. Sadat had made it clear that he was ready for peace if Israel would return every inch of Egyptian land. Meir and Rabin, however, clung to the status quo, which was intolerable to the Arabs.
King Hussein of Jordan was left to twist in the wind. Ever since the guns had fallen silent in June 1967, the king had repeatedly offered Israel peace in return for withdrawal from the West Bank. But Israel preferred land to peace. In the three years of his first term, Rabin had eight secret meetings with the king. So there was a dialogue across the battle lines but it remained largely futile.
Rabin was brought down by a trivial matter. Leah, his wife, had kept an active bank account in Washington in violation of Israel’s currency law. She was prosecuted and made to pay a large fine. Rabin withdrew from the elections of 17th May 1977. Shimon Peres became acting prime minister but lost the elections to the right-wing Likud Party under the leadership of Menachem Begin.
The Likud victory marked a historic turning point. It put an end to nearly three decades of Labour hegemony in Israeli politics. Labour’s fall from grace was partly due to a series of scandals that exposed it as corrupt. It was also a delayed reaction to the intelligence failure that preceded the October 1973 war and the setbacks of the war’s first days.
During most of the 1980s, Rabin served as minister of defence first under Peres, his Labour Party colleague and bitter rival, and later in a Likud-led coalition government headed by ultra-nationalist Yitzhak Shamir. Rabin was dedicated to preserving the status quo on the eastern front, including the occupation. When the First Intifada broke out in 1987, he ordered the army to crush it with an iron fist, in his words, “to break their bones.”
Eventually, after witnessing the limits of military power in dealing with a political problem, Rabin came up with a plan for elections in the occupied territories. The idea was to foster a tame local Palestinian leadership as an alternative to the Tunis-based PLO. The government ostensibly agreed but Shamir’s stonewalling made sure it came to nothing. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the peace process was held hostage to Israel’s domestic politics. It was a striking illustration of what Kissinger meant when he said that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics.
In the lead up to the June 1992 elections, Rabin managed to wrest back the leadership of the Labour Party from Peres. Rabin, known as “Mr Security,” was the only candidate who could attract a sufficient number of votes from the centre and the soft right to bring Labour back to power. Labour’s strategy was to exploit Rabin’s popular persona and to play down his party. His platform combined his security credentials with a vision for breaking the diplomatic deadlock by talks with the local Palestinian leadership, but not the PLO. He also promised to repair the relations with the US that had been badly strained by Shamir. Even with all these advantages, Rabin only won the election by a narrow margin.
Failed leaders rarely get a second chance. Rabin was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his first term. He was still preoccupied with security but he was older and wiser now, and he understood at last that time is not Israel’s friend. As he told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the country had two options: seek peace with security, or live by the sword forever.
From his Likud predecessors, Rabin inherited the 1991 Madrid framework that aimed at a comprehensive peace in the Middle East by proceeding simultaneously on two tracks: one Syrian and one Jordanian-Palestinian. Rabinovich explains Rabin’s reservations about negotiating with the Arabs collectively: he feared that they were bound to be radicalised by the most extreme member. What he does not tell us is that Rabin’s solution was to play off his Arab interlocutors against one another, to signal to the party he was talking to that he had other options, in order to lower Arab expectations.
“Divide and rule” is a clever ploy when fighting a war against several enemies, but it is not a sound tactic in a peace process. Peace is not a zero-sum game, where a gain by one actor entails a loss by the opponent. Both sides have to win. Rabin’s Machiavellian tactics aroused mistrust on the part of his Arab interlocutors and created a sour atmosphere.
As a former soldier, Rabin had a preference for “Syria first.” Syria was a “confrontation” state with a strong regular army, unlike the PLO, which enjoyed political legitimacy in the Arab world but posed relatively little threat. The issue with Syria was Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights since June 1967. A deal based on land for peace could change the entire strategic landscape in Israel’s favour.
Rabin made an all-out effort, through US intermediaries, to achieve a breakthrough with Syria. He even agreed in principle to a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights. But in return, he expected substantive concessions: elaborate security arrangements, normalisation of relations up front, and a phased withdrawal over a period of five years. President Hafez al-Assad’s response was positive in tone but ultimately failed to measure up to Rabin’s expectations. The outcome was deadlock.
Disappointment with Syria made Rabin turn his attention to the Palestinians. But now, he understood that he could not bypass the PLO in Tunis. By holding informal talks with PLO officials in Oslo, two Israeli academics created a back channel that produced the breakthrough. The talks gradually received official sanction, eventually from the sceptical prime minister.
Suspicious of his dovish subordinates, Rabin added to the Israeli delegation Joel Singer, a former colonel and a hard-headed international lawyer. Singer revoked many of the concessions his compatriots had made. Still, on orders from above, the Palestinian negotiators settled for a deal on those terms. The worst defect was that it did not require a freeze on settlements during negotiations.
The Oslo Accord entailed a repackaging rather than an end to the occupation. Basically, it accomplished three things: the PLO recognised Israel; Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; and the two sides agreed to resolve their differences by peaceful means. Despite its many flaws, it constituted a historic landmark: it was the first ever agreement between the two principal parties to the century-old conflict. It amounted to a historic compromise between the Jewish and the Palestinian national movements, and the potent symbol of that compromise was the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat at the White House on 13th September 1993.
The assassination of Rabin was consequently a disaster for the king. Unlike Egypt, he aspired to a warm peace with Israel. Hussein spoke eloquently about their joint journey at Rabin’s funeral on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. To a journalist who saw him crying afterwards, he said: “I had to come to West Jerusalem for the first time in my life in order to bury a friend.” There was a brief pause and then he added: “I have the impression that today I have also, in some way, buried the peace.” These were prophetic words.
Had Rabin’s life not been cut tragically short, would he have reached a final peace settlement with the Palestinians? There is no way to know. What is clear is that the Israeli right, and especially the settlers, conducted a vicious and effective campaign to delegitimise Rabin and Oslo. Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud, played a leading part in the demagoguery that culminated in the assassination. In one protest against the government, he walked in front of a coffin inscribed with the words “Zionism’s murderer.” Ahead of him marched a man carrying a gallows. Worse was to follow.
On 28th September 1995, Rabin concluded an interim agreement with Arafat, popularly known as Oslo II, and a week later he presented it to the Knesset. On 5th October, the day of the vote, Likud organised a mass rally in Zion Square in Jerusalem. Netanyahu worked the crowd into a frenzy with an inflammatory speech blasting the government. At one point an image of Rabin in SS uniform was screened on the wall behind him. The rally turned violent with the mob shouting “Death to Rabin.”
Following Rabin’s killing, Peres succeeded him as Labour Party leader and prime minister. He was a mediocre politician with a record of four electoral defeats behind him. He started with a 20-point lead over Netanyahu but still blew it. Netanyahu won the May 1996 elections by less than one per cent, but this did not deter him from promptly reversing Labour’s peace policy.
During his three years in power, Netanyahu subverted Oslo and blocked the road to a final settlement by a relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. He was defeated in 1999 by Labour’s Ehud Barak, another soldier who late in life turned to peacemaking. Barak posed as Rabin’s disciple and promised to return to the pot-holed road that had started at Oslo. The crunch came at the Camp David summit of July 2000. When the summit failed, Barak and Bill Clinton blamed Arafat, although they bore a far larger share of the responsibility.
Back in Israel, Barak coined the saying that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace.” This claim is belied by the historical record, but it was believed by the majority of Israelis of all political colours. With this claim, Barak virtually destroyed the peace camp in Israel, including Labour. For if there is no Palestinian partner, it makes more sense to vote for a party that promises to fight, not talk. Since 2001, Israelis have voted for parties of the right and the extreme right, while the Labour Party has shrunk to a shadow of its former self.
Netanyahu is now in his fourth term as prime minister. On 26th October 2015, soon after the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, he said: “These days there is talk of what would have happened had this or that man remained… This is irrelevant; we will forever live by the sword.”
But Israel is not doomed to live by the sword. There is another way, Rabin’s way: to explore the diplomatic avenue to peace with security. Rabin will go down in the annals of the modern Middle East as a soldier-statesman and a peacemaker. Netanyahu, by contrast, is a destroyer of dreams. He has already achieved the dubious distinction of being the most disagreeable, divisive and destructive prime minister in his country’s history. The demise of Rabin and the dominance of Netanyahu encapsulate the tragedy of Israeli politics in the last two decades.
Buy this book on Amazon
On the evening of 4th November 1995, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, a Jewish fanatic named Yigal Amir shot and killed the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In Rabin’s jacket pocket was a neatly folded sheet of paper with the words of the song he had just sung—“The Song of Peace.” It was later found stained with the 73-year-old’s blood, pierced by a bullet.
Amir wanted to punish Rabin for signing the 1993 Oslo Accord with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)—and to derail the peace train altogether. Few political killings in history have been so successful. Twenty-two years on, the dream of a secure Israel and viable Palestine is a distant fantasy. The increasingly right-wing stance of the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the drastic increase in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the weakness of Abu Mazen’s Palestinian leadership, and the periodic outbursts of violence in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza have resulted in precious little trust on either side. Factor in Donald Trump—who campaigned on the provocative promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and who in a meeting in February with Netanyahu distanced himself from the two-state solution—and the lack of brave and intelligent leadership on all sides is all the more conspicuous.
It’s no wonder, then, that Rabin now has the aura of a secular saint. The epitaph on his grave—“Peacemaker”—is well deserved. Yet it does not take account of the long journey that preceded the transformation of one of Israel’s toughest military hawks into a prominent political dove.
This concise and well-rounded biography traces every stage in Rabin’s rise to the top; but it is particularly illuminating on foreign policy during his second term as prime minister, from 1992 until 1995. Itamar Rabinovich, a historian of modern Syria and former rector of Tel Aviv University, is eminently well qualified for his task. In 1992, Rabin appointed him as ambassador to the United States and chief negotiator with Syria. Rabinovich was not just an academic observer but a significant player in the diplomacy he chronicles so ably here. His closeness to Rabin, however, has its downsides. Although Rabinovich is careful not to let his biography topple into a hagiography, his sympathy is almost invariably with his friend and political mentor.
Born in Jerusalem in 1922, Rabin was the first Israeli prime minister born in British mandated Palestine. Jews born inside the country are popularly known as sabra, a cactus fruit prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Rabin was certainly prickly: shy, inarticulate, gruff, emotionally buttoned-up, uncomfortable with small talk and lacking in charisma. But he also possessed high intelligence, acute analytical ability and dogged determination. These qualities made him a first-rate staff officer and accounted for his steady rise through the ranks of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)—from a young brigade commander in the 1948 war of independence to a victorious chief-of-staff in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Throughout this period, Rabin looked at Arabs mainly over the barrel of a gun.
"Few political killings in history have been so successful: 22 years on the dream of a secure Israel and viable Palestine is a fantasy"From 1968 to 1973, Rabin served as Israel’s ambassador to the US. He was a most undiplomatic diplomat but a successful one, at least in terms of procuring money and arms. During his tenure the friendship between the two countries developed into a close strategic partnership. Yet the ambassador remained an awkward customer. Henry Kissinger noted wryly in his memoirs: “Yitzhak Rabin had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them. If he had been handed the entire United States Strategic Air Command as a free gift he would have (a) affected the attitude that at last Israel was getting its due, and (b) found some technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a reluctant concession to us.”
Ambassador Rabin used all his considerable influence, in both Tel Aviv and Washington, to press for military escalation in the conflict with Egypt to compel it to sue for peace on Israel’s terms. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had launched a “war of attrition” against Israel in 1969 to try to dislodge it from Sinai. This war took the form of artillery barrages across the Suez Canal. It was protracted, costly in casualties and inconclusive. Bypassing his immediate boss, the moderate Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Rabin recommended to the cabinet the use of the Israeli air force for “deep-penetration bombing” in Egypt to bring about Nasser’s downfall. Regime change by military force is always a sign of confused thinking. Prime Minister Golda Meir followed Rabin’s advice as part of her strategy of attrition—to let Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, sweat it out until he was left with no choice but to accept Israel’s dictates. Instead, Sadat launched (with Syria) the October 1973 war, which caught Israel by surprise. Although Israel eventually won, the fallout precipitated Meir’s fall from power.
Rabin was one of the very few beneficiaries of this unnecessary and costly war: he was chosen by Labour Party power brokers to succeed Meir. The accidental prime minister was 53 years old, still graceless, and politically immature. He had the mind-set of a soldier rather than a statesman, and was fixated on playing for time to rebuild the IDF. Consequently his foreign policy hardly deviated from the intransigence of the Meir era. Opportunities for resolving Israel’s dispute with its neighbours through diplomacy were frittered away in the pursuit of short-term advantage. True, an interim agreement was reached with Egypt in 1975, based on a limited Israeli pull-back from the Suez Canal. But Rabin could potentially have pursued the fully-fledged peace treaty which his right-wing successor Menachem Begin concluded with Sadat five years later. The treaty required complete Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in return for peace and elaborate security arrangements. Sadat had made it clear that he was ready for peace if Israel would return every inch of Egyptian land. Meir and Rabin, however, clung to the status quo, which was intolerable to the Arabs.
King Hussein of Jordan was left to twist in the wind. Ever since the guns had fallen silent in June 1967, the king had repeatedly offered Israel peace in return for withdrawal from the West Bank. But Israel preferred land to peace. In the three years of his first term, Rabin had eight secret meetings with the king. So there was a dialogue across the battle lines but it remained largely futile.
Rabin was brought down by a trivial matter. Leah, his wife, had kept an active bank account in Washington in violation of Israel’s currency law. She was prosecuted and made to pay a large fine. Rabin withdrew from the elections of 17th May 1977. Shimon Peres became acting prime minister but lost the elections to the right-wing Likud Party under the leadership of Menachem Begin.
The Likud victory marked a historic turning point. It put an end to nearly three decades of Labour hegemony in Israeli politics. Labour’s fall from grace was partly due to a series of scandals that exposed it as corrupt. It was also a delayed reaction to the intelligence failure that preceded the October 1973 war and the setbacks of the war’s first days.
During most of the 1980s, Rabin served as minister of defence first under Peres, his Labour Party colleague and bitter rival, and later in a Likud-led coalition government headed by ultra-nationalist Yitzhak Shamir. Rabin was dedicated to preserving the status quo on the eastern front, including the occupation. When the First Intifada broke out in 1987, he ordered the army to crush it with an iron fist, in his words, “to break their bones.”
Eventually, after witnessing the limits of military power in dealing with a political problem, Rabin came up with a plan for elections in the occupied territories. The idea was to foster a tame local Palestinian leadership as an alternative to the Tunis-based PLO. The government ostensibly agreed but Shamir’s stonewalling made sure it came to nothing. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the peace process was held hostage to Israel’s domestic politics. It was a striking illustration of what Kissinger meant when he said that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics.
In the lead up to the June 1992 elections, Rabin managed to wrest back the leadership of the Labour Party from Peres. Rabin, known as “Mr Security,” was the only candidate who could attract a sufficient number of votes from the centre and the soft right to bring Labour back to power. Labour’s strategy was to exploit Rabin’s popular persona and to play down his party. His platform combined his security credentials with a vision for breaking the diplomatic deadlock by talks with the local Palestinian leadership, but not the PLO. He also promised to repair the relations with the US that had been badly strained by Shamir. Even with all these advantages, Rabin only won the election by a narrow margin.
Failed leaders rarely get a second chance. Rabin was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his first term. He was still preoccupied with security but he was older and wiser now, and he understood at last that time is not Israel’s friend. As he told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the country had two options: seek peace with security, or live by the sword forever.
From his Likud predecessors, Rabin inherited the 1991 Madrid framework that aimed at a comprehensive peace in the Middle East by proceeding simultaneously on two tracks: one Syrian and one Jordanian-Palestinian. Rabinovich explains Rabin’s reservations about negotiating with the Arabs collectively: he feared that they were bound to be radicalised by the most extreme member. What he does not tell us is that Rabin’s solution was to play off his Arab interlocutors against one another, to signal to the party he was talking to that he had other options, in order to lower Arab expectations.
“Divide and rule” is a clever ploy when fighting a war against several enemies, but it is not a sound tactic in a peace process. Peace is not a zero-sum game, where a gain by one actor entails a loss by the opponent. Both sides have to win. Rabin’s Machiavellian tactics aroused mistrust on the part of his Arab interlocutors and created a sour atmosphere.
As a former soldier, Rabin had a preference for “Syria first.” Syria was a “confrontation” state with a strong regular army, unlike the PLO, which enjoyed political legitimacy in the Arab world but posed relatively little threat. The issue with Syria was Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights since June 1967. A deal based on land for peace could change the entire strategic landscape in Israel’s favour.
Rabin made an all-out effort, through US intermediaries, to achieve a breakthrough with Syria. He even agreed in principle to a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights. But in return, he expected substantive concessions: elaborate security arrangements, normalisation of relations up front, and a phased withdrawal over a period of five years. President Hafez al-Assad’s response was positive in tone but ultimately failed to measure up to Rabin’s expectations. The outcome was deadlock.
Disappointment with Syria made Rabin turn his attention to the Palestinians. But now, he understood that he could not bypass the PLO in Tunis. By holding informal talks with PLO officials in Oslo, two Israeli academics created a back channel that produced the breakthrough. The talks gradually received official sanction, eventually from the sceptical prime minister.
Suspicious of his dovish subordinates, Rabin added to the Israeli delegation Joel Singer, a former colonel and a hard-headed international lawyer. Singer revoked many of the concessions his compatriots had made. Still, on orders from above, the Palestinian negotiators settled for a deal on those terms. The worst defect was that it did not require a freeze on settlements during negotiations.
The Oslo Accord entailed a repackaging rather than an end to the occupation. Basically, it accomplished three things: the PLO recognised Israel; Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; and the two sides agreed to resolve their differences by peaceful means. Despite its many flaws, it constituted a historic landmark: it was the first ever agreement between the two principal parties to the century-old conflict. It amounted to a historic compromise between the Jewish and the Palestinian national movements, and the potent symbol of that compromise was the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat at the White House on 13th September 1993.
"Since 2001, Israelis have voted for parties of the right and the extreme right, while the Labour Party is a shadow of its former self"Rabin established with King Hussein a close friendship and political partnership that culminated in a peace treaty in October 1994. The treaty was extremely popular in Israel, but not in Jordan. It was seen as the king’s peace and provoked widespread opposition. As a result, the peace between the two countries was not institutionalised; it remained dependent to a perilous degree on the two men at the top.
The assassination of Rabin was consequently a disaster for the king. Unlike Egypt, he aspired to a warm peace with Israel. Hussein spoke eloquently about their joint journey at Rabin’s funeral on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. To a journalist who saw him crying afterwards, he said: “I had to come to West Jerusalem for the first time in my life in order to bury a friend.” There was a brief pause and then he added: “I have the impression that today I have also, in some way, buried the peace.” These were prophetic words.
Had Rabin’s life not been cut tragically short, would he have reached a final peace settlement with the Palestinians? There is no way to know. What is clear is that the Israeli right, and especially the settlers, conducted a vicious and effective campaign to delegitimise Rabin and Oslo. Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud, played a leading part in the demagoguery that culminated in the assassination. In one protest against the government, he walked in front of a coffin inscribed with the words “Zionism’s murderer.” Ahead of him marched a man carrying a gallows. Worse was to follow.
On 28th September 1995, Rabin concluded an interim agreement with Arafat, popularly known as Oslo II, and a week later he presented it to the Knesset. On 5th October, the day of the vote, Likud organised a mass rally in Zion Square in Jerusalem. Netanyahu worked the crowd into a frenzy with an inflammatory speech blasting the government. At one point an image of Rabin in SS uniform was screened on the wall behind him. The rally turned violent with the mob shouting “Death to Rabin.”
Following Rabin’s killing, Peres succeeded him as Labour Party leader and prime minister. He was a mediocre politician with a record of four electoral defeats behind him. He started with a 20-point lead over Netanyahu but still blew it. Netanyahu won the May 1996 elections by less than one per cent, but this did not deter him from promptly reversing Labour’s peace policy.
During his three years in power, Netanyahu subverted Oslo and blocked the road to a final settlement by a relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. He was defeated in 1999 by Labour’s Ehud Barak, another soldier who late in life turned to peacemaking. Barak posed as Rabin’s disciple and promised to return to the pot-holed road that had started at Oslo. The crunch came at the Camp David summit of July 2000. When the summit failed, Barak and Bill Clinton blamed Arafat, although they bore a far larger share of the responsibility.
Back in Israel, Barak coined the saying that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace.” This claim is belied by the historical record, but it was believed by the majority of Israelis of all political colours. With this claim, Barak virtually destroyed the peace camp in Israel, including Labour. For if there is no Palestinian partner, it makes more sense to vote for a party that promises to fight, not talk. Since 2001, Israelis have voted for parties of the right and the extreme right, while the Labour Party has shrunk to a shadow of its former self.
Netanyahu is now in his fourth term as prime minister. On 26th October 2015, soon after the 20th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, he said: “These days there is talk of what would have happened had this or that man remained… This is irrelevant; we will forever live by the sword.”
But Israel is not doomed to live by the sword. There is another way, Rabin’s way: to explore the diplomatic avenue to peace with security. Rabin will go down in the annals of the modern Middle East as a soldier-statesman and a peacemaker. Netanyahu, by contrast, is a destroyer of dreams. He has already achieved the dubious distinction of being the most disagreeable, divisive and destructive prime minister in his country’s history. The demise of Rabin and the dominance of Netanyahu encapsulate the tragedy of Israeli politics in the last two decades.
