Some dates in history are seared into the consciousness of a nation and remain indelible.
Thirty years have elapsed since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, but many Israelis remember it as if it had happened yesterday.
I heard the awful news on the radio on that grey autumn day in Toronto. When I conveyed it to our Israeli house guests after they had returned from a city tour, they could hardly believe what had happened.
Aryeh, my wife’s old friend, was shaken to his core. He went into the kitchen, sat on the edge of a chair and cried softly, tears rolling down his cheeks.
I, too, was shocked, though I was not entirely surprised. This unprecedented catastrophe, triggered by deep political divisions, was long in coming. The 1993 Oslo accord, which materialized during Rabin’s second premiership, was a polarizing event that pushed Israel into two irreconcilable camps.
Nevertheless, I could hardly imagine that an Israeli would shoot Rabin — the first native-born prime minister of Israel and the first one to be assassinated — in cold blood.
Right-wing Israelis, who condemned Oslo as a betrayal of Israel’s claim to the West Bank, singled out Rabin as a turncoat. At rallies, they portrayed him as a Nazi in an SS uniform, or in the crosshairs of a gun. Still other protesters likened him to Adolf Hitler and chanted, “Rabin is a murderer.”
Four months before Rabin was killed, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, led a mock funeral procession at an anti-Rabin rally during which a number of demonstrators shouted, “Death to Rabin.”
Carmi Gillon, the director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, asked Netanyahu to tone down the rhetoric, but he declined to do so and denied any intention to incite violence.
Rabin, in agreeing to the first and second Oslo agreements with the PLO, envisaged Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip rather than Palestinian statehood. Nor was he ready to abandon strategically-placed settlements.
Yet his enemies accused him of betraying cherished Land of Israel ideals, which hold fast to the belief that Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people.
In fact, Rabin was dragged into embracing Oslo by his colleague, Shimon Peres, the dovish foreign minister and his longtime rival. Rabin, a pragmatic realist, believed that the dispute with the Palestinians should be resolved through diplomatic means so that Israel could effectively deal with the threat emanating from the vociferously anti-Israel Islamic regime in Iran.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Rabin was born in Jerusalem. During the War of Independence, he was chief of operations of the Palmach commando force. He played a role in the expulsion of around 60,000 Palestinians from Lydda (Lod) and Ramle.
A seasoned but painfully shy politician who was chief of staff of the armed forces from 1964 to 1967 and the ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1973, he assumed the premiership in 1974 after Golda Meir’s abrupt resignation following the Yom Kippur War.
The high point of his tenure was the daring Israeli commando raid in 1976 that resulted in the rescue of passengers from an Air France plane that had been hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and diverted to Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Much to his consternation, he resigned after the Israeli media disclosed that his wife, Leah, had opened an illegal bank account in the United States.
During the mid-1980s, Rabin was the minister of defence when the left-of-center Labor Party, of which he was a member, and the right-wing Likud Party jointly governed Israel under a national unity government. In this capacity, he ordered soldiers to “break the bones” of Palestinian protesters during the first intifada, which erupted in December 1987.
Returning to office in 1992 after Yitzhak Shamir stepped down as prime minister, Rabin attempted to forge a peace treaty with Syria, one of Israel’s most implacable foes. His demarche failed, and Rabin focused on the Palestinian file and Jordan.
In 1994, Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan, the second Arab country after Egypt to formally recognize the Jewish state. Israel’s rapprochement with Jordan was due, in part, to Rabin’s friendship with King Hussein of Jordan.
Oslo established a framework for peace, but it is debatable whether it offered the Palestinians a path to a two-state solution. Nonetheless, Rabin was committed to achieving an accommodation with the Palestinian Authority, which was headed by his former nemesis, Yasser Arafat.
When Arafat stretched out his arm to shake Rabin’s hand at the Oslo ceremony in Washington in September 1993, Rabin visibly flinched before reciprocating.
Rabin, Peres and Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, but Oslo turned out to be a failure in major respects. A spate of terrorist attacks launched by Hamas suicide bombers infuriated and frightened Israelis and pushed Israel further to the right. The expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank disillusioned the Palestinians.
Yet Rabin, a security dove, argued that it was in Israel’s vital interest to separate itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. His argument was based on the assumption that Israel’s occupation would undermine Israeli democracy, turn Israel into a binational state, and shatter the Zionist dream.
Speaking to tens of thousands of supporters at Kings of Israel Square in central Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995, he said, “I always believed that most of the people want peace and are ready to take a risk for it.” He then joined the crowd in singing the popular Israeli song “Shir la-Shalom.”
At 9:45 p.m., as he got into his car after leaving the rally, Yigal Amir, a Bar-Ilan University student and a right-wing radical who claimed that Rabin was a traitor, shot Rabin twice.
Policemen wrestled Amir to the ground. En route to the police station, he confessed he had fired his gun at Rabin.
Rushed to the nearest hospital, Rabin died during an emergency surgical procedure. He was 73, the second prime minister after Levi Eshkol to die in office.
An autopsy determined that one bullet had entered Rabin’s lower back, ruptured his spleen, and punctured his left lung. The second bullet pierced his back below the collarbone, smashed through his ribcage, and pierced his right lung.
The coroner concluded that Rabin had died of massive blood loss and the collapse of both of his lungs. He added that his chances of surviving the shooting had been very low.
His funeral in Jerusalem was attended by dignitaries from 80 countries. U.S. President Bill Clinton, an admirer, delivered a moving eulogy.
Amir was sentenced to life imprisonment. To this day, he languishes in jail despite a series of appeals.
Supreme Court justice Meir Shamgar delivered a report about the assassination. He concluded that security failures at the scene had enabled Amir to approach Rabin on that fateful night. He wrote that Carmi Gillon had exposed Rabin to “serious risks” and had failed to act on threats by Jewish extremists.
Gillon resigned shortly afterward.
Peres succeeded Rabin as prime minister, but was unable to move the Oslo process forward. Neither could he convince Syria to come to terms with Israel within the framework of a peace accord.
Peres, in the 1996 general election, was narrowly defeated by Netanyahu, who had bitterly denounced Oslo. Despite U.S. pressure, Netanyahu tried to gut Oslo of any meaning.
Oslo’s death knell was sounded during the second Palestinian uprising, which broke out in September 2000 and lasted until the summer of 2005, when Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza.
Three decades on, Rabin’s untimely death remains a dark stain on Israel’s body politic. It is impossible to know whether Oslo would have been a success had Rabin, a peacemaker and a warrior, not been assassinated.
Yet this much is certain. Rabin was an Israeli patriot whose ambition was to settle Israel’s protracted conflict with its Arab neighbors and the Palestinians.
His successors have fallen far short of that objective, and Israel is as divided today as it was in 1995.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, alluded to this in a forceful speech at a memorial ceremony in Jerusalem on November 3.
He said, “Three decades later, we are still seeing the same signs — perhaps even more so: harsh, crude, and coarse language; accusations of treason; poison spreading across social media and the public sphere; violence in every form, physical and verbal.”
“We still face such threatening violence within our society,” he added. “This is a strategic threat in every sense.”
Herzog is absolutely correct.