Killing Rabin, killing the prospect of peace

I was visiting my sister and cousins in Philadelphia, having a family dinner in a Chinese restaurant, when I noticed pictures of Yitzhak Rabin on the television above the bar. Seemed odd, wasn’t a news time slot, the photos stayed up there and had that austere look. I walked up to the bar, asked for the audio to be turned up and heard the tragic news that a fellow Israeli had assassinated the prime minister of Israel. Nov. 4, 1995, proved to be a much more fateful evening than I, or anyone else, imagined.

I’d been working in the State Department the previous couple of years on the Middle East peace process. I recalled Sept. 4, 1993, when the letters exchanged by Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat came over our fax machine. “We handle lots of pieces of paper every day,” remarked my boss, Sam Lewis, then policy planning director and formerly U.S. ambassador to Israel, “but these are truly historic.” And then that beautiful autumn day, Sept. 13, 1993, when President Bill Clinton brought Rabin and Arafat together for the signing of the “land-for-peace” Oslo Accords. It all seemed so hopeful.

In Israel a couple of weeks after the Rabin assassination, I visited the square where the tragic event had been perpetrated. The teenagers playing guitars and singing somber songs especially struck me. I knew how devastated Israeli friends and colleagues of my generation were, how much they believed in Rabin’s leadership. Yitzhak wasn’t exactly a well-coiffed dynamic speaker or a telegenically charismatic type, yet he clearly had connected with the younger generation and their hopes for their future.

Yigal Amir, the right-wing religious-extremist assassin, saw it differently. In killing Rabin he sought to bury the peace process with him.

In the two years since Oslo had been signed, significant progress had been made. Israel and the newly established Palestinian Authority worked out follow-on agreements building on the Oslo foundation. Israel and Jordan signed a full peace treaty. As many as 15 Arab governments engaged in multilateral talks with Israel on issues such as arms control and regional security, water, regional economic development, the environment and refugees.

Terrorism, though, also reared its ugly head. Israeli Jewish extremists perpetrated some, as with the killing of Palestinian Muslim worshipers in a mosque in Hebron. Much was by Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Buses were bombed in Jerusalem. A suicide bomber snuck into a community Passover seder, killing and wounding almost 200 people when she detonated her vest.

Israelis understandably grew increasingly anxious about whether they were becoming less secure. But much of the opposition ran much deeper and would have been there even if there had been no terrorism. Israeli religious extremists claimed to answer to a “higher” authority than their government’s prime minister, even one who had been the military chief of staff in the triumphant 1967 war and defense minister. “God decided Rabin would die,” was how Hagai Amir, brother of the assassin and co-conspirator, put it. Nor was this the view just of two brothers: A number of ultra-Orthodox rabbis claimed biblical basis for killing Rabin and hailed the Amirs for doing it.

I once asked Dalia Rabin, Yitzhak’s daughter and a former member of the Knesset and deputy defense minister, whether she thought peace would have been achieved had her father lived. She paused. He was becoming quite frustrated with Arafat, she said. But he also saw the progress they had made, after having been sworn enemies for decades. While wary about whether Arafat would genuinely follow through enough to get to a peace conducive to Israeli security, he felt it could be done. And she reminded me of his core precept: “I’ll fight terrorism as if there are no negotiations, and negotiate as if there is no terror.”

We can’t know whether peace would have been achieved had Rabin lived. What we do know is how much worse things are 20 years later.

The Palestinians bear their own substantial share of responsibility. Arafat launched the second intifada in 2000. His successor Mahmoud Abbas has been some combination of unable and unwilling to provide meaningful leadership. Hamas continues to reject any peace at all with Israel, repeatedly turning to terrorism. The recent wave of violence, manifesting deepening alienation and anger especially among youth, is quite troubling.

Increased violence also is being perpetrated by Israeli right-wing extremists, and as provocation not just retribution. When Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, himself a member of the rightist Likud party, last week said he would never pardon Yigal Amir’s life sentence, brother Hagai (who had been sentenced only to 17 years) posted on Facebook that it was time for Rivlin “to pass from this world.” Secular-religious tensions among Israeli Jews go well beyond this issue, posing their own fundamental concerns about the country’s societal cohesiveness.

Having worked on and studied Middle East policy for lots of years, I can say very few things I know for sure. One is that as hard as peace is today, it’s that much harder tomorrow. Yitzhak Rabin’s leadership provided the best opportunity to achieve a peace that would have made Israel more secure and would have met the aspirations of the Palestinian people for their own state.

This story was originally published November 7, 2015 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Killing Rabin, killing the prospect of peace."