It’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel on Nov. 4, 1995. The tragic irony is that Rabin was at a peace rally in Tel Aviv when he was shot by Yigal Amir, a law student at Bar Ilan University and a deranged Jewish nationalist. Amir was motivated by Rabin having made peace with Yasser Arafat of the PLO two years earlier and was in the process of relinquishing territory to the Palestinians.
The assassination is etched into my memory. I was driving home from Montreal, having just covered the Quebec sovereignty referendum for National Review and was worried my editor would take my article apart. Then a bulletin came over the radio with news more important than my article.
Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy is complicated. He nurtured a rivalry with his fellow Labor Party member, Shimon Peres (who served as his foreign minister), and he was considered hawkish (in contrast to Peres who was thought to be more diplomatic). Rabin was also a general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and had been the architect of the Jewish state’s overwhelming victory in the Six Day War in 1967.
As Defense Minister in the 1980s, Rabin took a hard-line toward the Palestinians in the occupied territories during the Intifada. Given Rabin’s staunch brand of Zionism, few observers predicted he would one day shake hands with Arafat on the White House lawn and recognize the PLO as the sole voice of the Palestinians.
But Rabin had always maintained that he wanted peace. He insisted only that the conditions be right, in particular the PLO’s renunciation of terror and its recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist. When the PLO accepted these conditions in 1993 in peace talks sponsored by Norway, Rabin in turn accepted Palestinian aspirations.
Optimism seemed to have dawned over the Middle East. But a mad assassin harbored different ideas and Amir was by no means the only one opposed to peace. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now prime minister of Israel, was then the opposition leader. He was leading inciteful rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem prior to the assassination which included demonstrators who hoisted images of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform. More recent events in the Middle East indicate Netanyahu still seeks something other than peace.
Demonstrations led by Netanyahu in 1995 were disgusting. But just as disgusting were sentiments on the Israeli left expressing relief that the assassin was a Jewish extremist rather than a Palestinian, lest the peace process collapse. To think the prime minister of Israel had been gunned down and people were concerned about the nationality of the assassin.
Alas, Netanyahu would return to power and peace has since been elusive. Much has happened since the assassination of Rabin. But much is still the same. Throughout the years of the Arab-Israeli conflict peace itself seems to many as treason, just as peace was considered treason by the extremists who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 for establishing relations with Israel.
Speaking of the assassination of Sadat in 1981, Menachem Begin (who was then the prime minister of Israel) declared that Sadat was a man of peace killed by the enemies of peace. Begin was right. At this somber thirtieth anniversary, the same can be said of Yitzhak Rabin.
John O’Neill is an Allen Park freelance writer and a graduate of Wayne State University.
