Yet the killing of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in 1995, by Yigal Amir, an Israeli extremist, bids to be one of history’s most effective political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a former terrorist, to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories; the next year, somewhat less painfully, he returned to the White House, with Jordan’s King Hussein, to officially end a forty-six-year state of war. Within months of Rabin’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new Prime Minister and the prospects for a wider-ranging peace in the Middle East, which had seemed in Rabin’s grasp, were dead, too. Twenty years later, Netanyahu is into his fourth term, and the kind of peace that Rabin envisaged seems more distant than ever.
The story of Rabin’s assassination, told in “Killing a King” (Norton), by the journalist Dan Ephron, inevitably raises the question of what might have been. At the time of his death, Rabin showed every intention of trying to forge a broader peace that would have included ceding most of the occupied territories to the Palestinians, and probably would have resulted in the establishment of an independent state.
Rabin, who was seventy-three when he died, spent most of his life fighting the Palestinians. Born in British-ruled Palestine, he was brought up by secular, socialist immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother, Rosa, was one of the most important female Zionist leaders of her time; she was apparently so consumed with the cause that Rabin grew up feeling mostly alone. The experience, according to one of his biographers, Dan Kurzman, may have contributed to his intense self-containment, which often made him seem aloof. (Once, at the White House, Jimmy Carter asked him if he would like to listen to his daughter, Amy, play the piano. Rabin replied that he would not.)
When he was a teen-ager, Rabin joined the Palmach, a commando unit of the Haganah, the Zionist militia, and was twenty-five when, in 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. The partition plan demarcated the boundaries of Jewish and Arab territories; the U.N. envisioned a two-state solution from the start. This led, in May, 1948, to the founding of Israel, which prompted a full-scale attack by the armies of the surrounding Arab states. In battle against the Arabs (and, before that, the British), Rabin proved himself to be a daring and courageous fighter. But he also took part in the expulsion of some fifty thousand Palestinian residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle, situated between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Several hundred villagers were shot during that operation, part of a wider exodus of Palestinians from the new Jewish state. Rabin was also involved in a bloody, and eerily foreboding, incident that took place within weeks of independence, and involved the Irgun, an extremist guerrilla group that had broken off from the Haganah. When a cargo ship carrying weapons for the Irgun tried to dock, Rabin, then a commander in the newly formed Israeli Defense Forces, ordered the soldiers to open fire. Sixteen Irgun fighters were killed; the group’s leader, Menachem Begin—later the Prime Minister—was carried ashore by his men.
After independence, Rabin focussed on building the I.D.F.; his animating vision—like that of many Israeli leaders since—was that peace would be possible only when Israel achieved military superiority over any combination of Arab foes. As a commander, Rabin felt responsible for the lives of his soldiers; he was also physically repelled by the sight of blood. In the run-up to the Six-Day War, in 1967, as the Arab armies were gathering to attack Israel, Rabin, at that time the I.D.F. chief of staff, suffered a nervous collapse. He considered stepping down, but pulled himself together and oversaw Israel’s sweeping victory. “I had to hold his balls,” his deputy, Ezer Weizman, said. The Six-Day War made Rabin a national hero, and left Israel in possession of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, parts of Syria, and more than a million Palestinians.
Ephron’s book doesn’t speculate about the degree to which Rabin, in his early years, might have imagined the possibility of a broader peace. He and the Labor Party governments bear nearly as much responsibility as their Likud successors for expanding settlements in the West Bank. Nor does the younger Rabin appear to have considered the likelihood of a Palestinian state. In the late nineteen-eighties, when he was the Minister of Defense, he presided over the response to the first intifada—a full-scale Palestinian uprising—during which he was quoted as ordering the I.D.F. to “break the bones” of protesters. (Rabin denied saying this.) For most of his career, he regarded the P.L.O., which had carried out bus bombings and plane hijackings, as “liars and bastards.” But the experience of the intifada seems to have convinced him that the status quo was unsustainable. “I’ve learned something in the past two and a half months,” Rabin told a group of Labor Party colleagues in 1988. “Among other things, that you can’t rule by force over one and a half million Palestinians.”
The chance to break with the status quo didn’t come until the early nineteen-nineties, when a semi-official group of Israelis, on the initiative of Norway’s deputy foreign minister, reached a tentative understanding with P.L.O. representatives regarding what amounted to a plan for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank. (Rabin considered most of the settlers who began streaming into the West Bank shortly after the Six-Day War to be misguided, along with government programs designed to encourage them. He did think that some outposts were essential to Israeli security, and therefore important to hold on to.) Rabin, who had become Prime Minister for a second time in 1992, wasn’t told of the Oslo talks until the preliminary teams had agreed to the rudiments of a deal.
Rabin went forward, despite his deep mistrust of Arafat. The Palestinian leader was living in Tunis, having been expelled from Jordan in 1970 and from Lebanon in 1982, following the Israeli invasion. Rabin deputized Shimon Peres, his foreign minister and longtime rival, to help bring the deal to fruition. Viewed in retrospect, the audacity of the agreements that came out of Oslo was breathtaking: Arafat and the P.L.O. would recognize Israel’s right to exist, and Israel would withdraw from Gaza and seven cities of the West Bank, and also allow limited self-rule and the creation of an elected parliament—what we now know as the Palestinian Authority. A majority of Israelis supported the deal, but Rabin clearly had to rely on his reputation as a hawkish military man to reassure them. He was a kind of Israeli Nixon (the two men liked each other); at least in domestic political terms, he had far more leeway to bring about a comprehensive peace than some of his more dovish colleagues might have had. (Rabin may have favored giving the Palestinians their own state, but, if so, he never said so publicly.)
On September 13, 1993, the day of the agreement ceremony at the White House, there were detailed discussions about everything from Arafat’s attire (no gun allowed) to what would happen if he tried to embrace his Israeli counterparts. (He didn’t.) In a photograph from that day of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands in front of President Bill Clinton, Arafat, whom the White House regarded as a terrorist for most of his career, seems overjoyed. Rabin is practically grimacing. After the handshake, Rabin turned to Peres and said, “Your turn now.”
It was a happy story—indeed, as it turned out, a little too happy. The Oslo Accords prompted an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups like Hamas, which sought to inflame the Israeli public and scuttle the deal. But, rather more unexpectedly, the accords ignited a groundswell of animosity from right-wing Israelis, who feared that Rabin intended to give the Palestinians their own state and carry out widespread evacuations of settlements. (At the time that the Oslo Accords were signed, about a quarter of a million Israelis had moved into the West Bank and East Jerusalem.) While many of the deal’s opponents invoked religious justifications for maintaining Israel’s hold on the territories it acquired in the Six-Day War, a large number of the opponents were secular. What united the two groups was their rejection of the notion that any conquered territory should be turned over to the Palestinians, even in the interests of peace.
Yigal Amir was not a settler; he was a law student from the coastal city of Herzliya and the son of ultra-Orthodox Yemeni immigrants. As the Oslo process gathered steam, Amir became increasingly convinced that Rabin was selling out the Israelis and, in particular, the settlers; he organized rallies in the occupied territories to denounce the agreements and even tried to start his own militia. Drawing on tapes and transcripts of Amir’s detailed and unabashed confession, Ephron carefully reconstructs the journey from disgruntled right-wing activist to murderous fanatic. The seed for the assassination was planted about a year before it was carried out, when Amir, quite unexpectedly, spotted Rabin at the wedding of a friend in Tel Aviv. He was stunned at how close he could get to the Prime Minister—and with a pistol “jammed in his belt.” Amir vowed never to let the chance slip away again. “Someday I will be sorry if I do not kill him,” he told himself.
The milieu of right-wing religious nationalists that Amir inhabited will be familiar to anyone who follows the news in Israel today, but it’s striking to see that it was so fully developed two decades ago. Though Amir discussed his plans only with his brother, Hagai, and a friend, he spoke openly and often about the need for Rabin to be killed, and many of his friends and fellow-students had heard him proclaim that he wanted to be the one to kill him. Israeli security forces, focussed on Palestinian terrorism, devoted scant resources to tracking Israeli extremists. Agents of the Shin Bet, the internal-security service, were aware of ominous chatter in extremist circles, but they were not prepared for the threat.
They should have been: little more than a year earlier, Baruch Goldstein, a resident of an isolated West Bank settlement called Kiryat Arba, walked into a mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a contested holy site in the Palestinian city of Hebron, and killed twenty-nine worshippers and wounded a hundred and twenty-five before being beaten to death. Goldstein became a folk hero to many people in the settler community. After the massacre, Rabin considered dismantling a nearby settlement, Tel Rumeida. But settler leaders warned him that such an action could provoke an armed reaction, and a former chief Ashkenazi rabbi commanded Israeli Army soldiers to disobey an evacuation order. Rabin backed down.
The Shin Bet kept a file on Amir that contained no more than a few sentences. Much of the agency’s information on extremist groups was provided by a paid informant, Avishai Raviv, who often joined rallies and told police that he had beaten Palestinian civilians and other backers of the peace process. In the months leading up to the assassination, Raviv heard Amir vow to kill Rabin several times, but apparently did not take him seriously. A former intelligence officer whose girlfriend travelled in the same circles as Amir learned that he was planning to kill Rabin, but didn’t turn him in.
In the weeks leading up to Rabin’s murder, three extremist rabbis from the West Bank issued a written opinion suggesting that it would be acceptable to kill Rabin, on the ground that he had betrayed the Jewish people. The rabbis based their justification on the concept of din rodef, a Hebrew term that describes a person who is stalking a defenseless man. (“Rodef” means “pursuer” in Hebrew.) Under certain interpretations of the Talmud, it is obligatory to kill a rodef in order to save the intended victim. Amir later told his interrogators that he had consulted several rabbis in search of an official sanction but could never find one. (His brother, Hagai, insisted that he had.) As Ephron points out, it apparently never occurred to Amir that he himself was a rodef.
As the Oslo Accords unfolded, and the terror attacks continued, Israeli public opinion began to shift from hope to fear. Rabin and Arafat now saw themselves as partners in a perilous endeavor. Whereas Rabin had once mistrusted Arafat, he now believed Arafat’s claims, buttressed by the Israeli intelligence services, that he was unable to stop Hamas. (Rabin believed that if Arafat did not prevail Hamas would.) In Israel, the extreme wing of the anti-Oslo coalition capitalized on the rising insecurity to excoriate Rabin; some protesters began comparing him to Hitler. As Rabin and the Labor Party’s fortunes sank, those of the Likud and its followers rose, and they stood by as Rabin was vilified. Ephron places Netanyahu at a rally, about a month before Rabin’s murder, where crowds spent two hours chanting, “Death to Rabin.” Netanyahu did nothing to discourage them.
On the day of his death, Rabin considered staying home from a peace rally, because he feared that he’d be embarrassed by a low turnout. The crowd, at Kings of Israel Square, in Tel Aviv, was enormous—about a hundred thousand people—dwarfing anything the anti-Oslo camp had put together. The main fear among the security services was a Palestinian suicide bomber; Rabin himself could not imagine that he would be killed by a Jew. Neither, apparently, could his bodyguards; when the moment came, Amir pushed through the crowd and shot Rabin twice in the back. Later that night, Amir asked the police for a glass of schnapps to toast the Prime Minister’s death. Arafat, hearing of the assassination, wept.
The public revulsion at the news was overwhelming, but it did not translate into a victory for Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres. Peres waited three months to call an election, figuring that he would first conclude a peace treaty with Syria. But a treaty never materialized, and Hamas kept attacking, while the Likud leader, Netanyahu, vowed to make Israelis safe. Under American pressure, Netanyahu paid lip service to Oslo during his first, three-year administration. But the peace process never really recovered.
It’s jarring to contemplate the assassination of Rabin and then read Dennis Ross’s “Doomed to Succeed” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a detailed account of U.S.-Israeli relations since 1948. In four hundred-plus pages, there is almost no mention of the changes that have transformed the Israeli polity in the past six decades, and surprisingly little discussion of the steady growth in the settlement population, which now exceeds half a million. For Ross, who was the State Department’s director of policy planning under President George H. W. Bush, the special Middle East coördinator under President Bill Clinton, and an adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the settlements are evidently problematic only insofar as they present an obstacle to a smoothly functioning bilateral relationship. The United Nations and most foreign governments consider them illegal, but for him they are a political difficulty to be finessed. There is no talk of justice. Pressure on Israel—by Palestinians, by Europeans, by President Obama—appears to Ross bewildering and unreasonable.
Ross describes a situation, in 2010, when Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, refused to negotiate with Netanyahu unless he agreed to extend a moratorium on settlement construction, and the Obama Administration tried and failed to broker a compromise. His conclusion: Abbas “showed little flexibility and squandered the moratorium.” And Ross criticizes President Obama for “putting the onus on Israel.” This sort of analysis makes sense only if you regard the expansion of Israeli settlements and the Palestinian objections to them as morally equivalent.
Ross is as impatient with Palestinian efforts to gain a more sympathetic hearing at the United Nations and elsewhere as he is sensitive to the political needs of Israeli Prime Ministers. Yet he says almost nothing about the political realities that have shaped the situation, or how those realities might be changed. He evinces almost no sympathy for similar pressures on Abbas and others at the Palestinian Authority. Only near the end of the book does he bring himself to criticize Israel. Netanyahu’s decision to accept an invitation from John Boehner to address the House of Representatives, thereby defying the White House and inserting himself in a domestic political debate, was, Ross says, “a mistake.” He writes repeatedly that Israeli leaders will make concessions only when they feel secure. This may be true, but where does this leave American policy? And where does it leave Israel?
The highest compliment Ross seems able to pay an American President is to say that he is a “friend of Israel.” But how can an American President help an ally steer away from a potentially disastrous course when that ally, by the nature of its own domestic politics, isn’t able to do so by itself? Ross doesn’t say.
It’s tempting to speculate about whether Israel might have turned out differently had Rabin lived. Dan Ephron plainly thinks that it would have; he says that Rabin had made the fundamental decision to give up most of the occupied territories, even if he never explicitly said so. That meant, almost certainly, the creation of a Palestinian state, or something resembling one. Such a deal, Ephron says, would have “struck a blow for the pragmatists over the ideologues” and helped slow what he calls “the messianic drift” in Israeli society. “Had he lived,’’ Ephron writes, “Rabin might plausibly have reshaped Israel broadly and permanently.”
Ephron is probably right about Rabin making a deal, but he may be overstating the rest. For one thing, allowing for the creation of a Palestinian state, even in the late nineteen-nineties, would have been a politically explosive undertaking. There were some hundred and thirty thousand settlers in the West Bank then, and, even with the broad support of the Israeli public, the government would have had a very difficult time uprooting more than a handful of them. In 1994, after the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, Rabin could not bring himself to order the removal of a single unauthorized enclave. In 2005, when the Israeli government, led by Ariel Sharon, the hard-bitten former general, ordered the evacuation of about eight thousand settlers from Gaza, their departure was accompanied by entrenched resistance and mass protests. With a broader peace deal, Rabin would have been in for quite a fight.
And it’s far from apparent how much even a comprehensive peace deal would have changed Israeli society. It might have helped open up Israel and the Palestinian areas to each other, but, at least in the short term, it would almost certainly not have brought peace. After all, the Oslo Accords brought more bloodshed, not less. It’s not clear that even Rabin could have persevered.
More important, a deal with the Palestinians, even one that included substantial withdrawals from the occupied territories, would have done little to alter the demographic trends that have been reshaping Israeli politics and society; that is, the growth of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities. In the twenty years since Rabin was killed, Israel has become more religious, more conservative, and, to borrow a word from Ephron, more “messianic.” Rabin would have found himself increasingly among people to whom he had very little to say.
However slim the chances for a comprehensive peace agreement were in the nineteen-nineties, today they are effectively zero. Until recently, it was heretical to suggest that a two-state solution was implausible. Today, it seems nearly impossible to imagine one at all. What this portends for Israeli society may be disturbing—depending on which estimate you choose, the combined population of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will exceed the number of Jews there as soon as 2020—but it doesn’t make peace any more likely. There are now four hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank, and they are more powerful and more organized than they were when Rabin was killed. Since then, the Israeli center has moved steadily rightward; in 1996, when Yigal Amir was convicted, ten per cent of Israelis said that he should be released; in 2006, thirty per cent said so. (Amir’s brother, Hagai, convicted for being an accomplice, is already out of prison and, as Ephron details, has slipped comfortably back into Israeli society.) Today, so-called price-tag attacks, which aim at punishing not only Palestinians but Israelis who try to impede settlement activity, have gained widespread acceptance in settler councils and are often protected by a popular refusal to coöperate with police. The extremists may still be a minority in the occupied territories, but no Israeli politician hoping to hold national office dares to confront them.
There isn’t much reason to expect anyone in Washington to ride to the rescue. When Netanyahu, during his reëlection campaign earlier this year, declared that he would never allow a Palestinian state, he was scolded by the White House, and then reëlected to a fourth term. In September, President Obama, whom Netanyahu had humiliated in front of Congress only months before, invited him back to the White House.
It’s possible that the course of events in Israel and Palestine might be altered by some extraordinary act of leadership—by some Rabin we haven’t met, or by some crisis we have not foreseen. But, for now, nothing like that seems remotely possible. Tolstoy posited that history is not made by individuals, that it is, rather, the continuously unfolding consequence of innumerable interconnected events. But, if the story of Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Amir has anything to teach, it’s that individuals matter. Rabin was the right man at the right time, and so, in his perverse way, was Yigal Amir. The opportunity that Rabin was trying to seize—however small—was there for a moment, and it may never come again.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: Dexter Filkins
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