"Thirty years ago, on November 4, 1995, I attended a pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv’s central square," recalls u/forward columnist Dan Perry. "It was a joyous, carnival-like atmosphere."
“'We have decided to give peace a chance — a peace that will resolve most of Israel’s problems,' Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said at the rally. 'I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is a chance for peace. A big chance. We must seize it.' Rabin stepped off the stage and headed toward his awaiting car at the bottom of a concrete stairway. Then, three shots rang out, and the trajectory of Israel’s history changed."
"It seems incredible in this era of tunnel vision, radicalism and cynicism to even recall Rabin’s last words,” Perry continues. "His assassin did more than end a man’s life. He also ended the possibility of a better version of Israel, and set the country on a course that has led to a crisis of identity, democracy and purpose."
"The Israel that emerged after Rabin’s death was one deprived of its moral center. It was an Israel where fear triumphed over hope, where slogans replaced strategy, and where a cunning politician named Benjamin Netanyahu deployed every conceivable cynicism to stay in power. The tragedy of Rabin’s death is not only what was lost, but what was gained: a political culture of manipulation and paralysis."
https://forward.com/opinion/780946/yitzhak-rabin-assassination-netanyahu/
Posted by forward
14 comments
Ridiculous headline. They all *want* peace. They’re divided on its feasibility and the realistic path to achieving it. Rightfully so given past overtures were only ever met with eventual refusals followed by lethal violence.
Rabin completed ignored 50% of the population.
You can’t shove peace through someone’s throat.
Look at Rabin’s Oslo accords in 2025, it failed!
The Palestinian authority is corrupt and basically an authoritarian regime and the A/B/C areas are slowly becoming more and more blurred.
October 7th pushed many Israelis back, even those who were a loyal left voters and peace advocates.
There won’t be peace between Israel and any Palestinian entity for AT LEAST a 2 decades. By that time the Palestinian identity will continue to be burned out and the West Bank will basically turn into an Israeli autonomous state.
As for Gaza, Hamas will continue to control the “Mini Gaza” they have now while Israel will keep occupying the Gaza in the yellow line. I won’t be surprised if in a decade or two we will see Jewish settlements there too. We might not see it happen if Hamas and the Arab world will actually manage to demilitarize Hamas. But if not and a frozen state will occur it will definitely happen.
This article is asking the wrong question. Every Prime Minister in Israel’s history has wanted peace. The problem is that no Israeli leader–indeed, no leader of any country–will accept a “peace” that compromises security. There are a thousand examples throughout history that “peace” deals that leave a country in a more vulnerable position just lead to more aggression. See Czechoslovakia’s capitulation to Nazi Germany as the purest example. And the reason for the lack of security has always been the same: there is no legitimate Palestinian guarantor for peace.
The problem remains that while Israeli leaders and the Israeli state enjoy the popular legitimacy to enforce a peace on their own people, there exists no entity with similar legitimacy on the Palestinian side that could enforce the peace on Palestinians. The mainstream of Palestinian political opinion is that Israel is wholly illegitimate and its entire territory is rightfully Palestinian land. No Palestinian leader believes they could sign a deal that effectively signs away Palestinian claims to Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem and remain alive, because so many Palestinians would turn to violence to undo the peace treaty.
This is not unique to Palestinians: when the Irish signed a treaty that partitioned Ireland and left some of the island under British control, hard-line Irish rebels rose up and fought the new Irish state to reverse the treaty and maintain the fight for the whole of Ireland. The Irish Free State government that had signed the treaty with Britain had to win a civil war. Does anyone, anywhere believe that there is a Palestinian faction with both the popular legitimacy to agree to a peace deal *and* the popularity and force to win a civil war against Hamas and the other militant factions in Palestinian society that would reject a treaty?
Remove Hamas, Hezbollah and the iranian regime from the equation and you get a peaceful Israel.
Author should google Abraham Accords.
Israel is working on peacemaking with whoever agrees, and is actively safeguarding existing peace accords (e.g. allowing Egypt to move army forces to the DMZ to combat ISIS).
There aren’t many peace supporters with Palestine now, for obvious reasons, but it’s dishonest to pretend Israel is the problem.
Maybe instead of blaming the Israeli PMs that were during the years, the author should ask if modern day Palestinians will ever have a leader which is not an actual terrorist like Sinwar or lunatics/holocaust deniers such as Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas.
That would be a good start…
What good can come from an Israeli PM who truly wants peace if the other side of the table is Hamas or the PA?
The Forward also has this great opinion piece from Einat Wilf, that addresses this obsession of the What If of Rabin’s death:
[Let’s lay the myth to rest: Rabin wouldn’t have brought peace.](https://forward.com/opinion/457437/lets-lay-the-myth-to-rest-rabin-wouldnt-have-brought-peace/ )
A lot of the Israelis—die-hard Progressives and Peaceniks—got straight up murdered, raped, kidnapped and tortured by the people with whom they sought to live in peace. Probably gonna be a minute before they let their guard down again.
>Will Israel ever have another leader who truly wants peace?
That depends on what kind of peace and what kind of sacrifices and compromises they’d have to make.
* If your idea of peace is for the Arabs/Palestinians to regain full control of the Levant and de-establish the State of Israel then…no, that will never happen.
* If your idea is of peace is a single state solution with Israelis and Palestinians living together in harmony then, again, probably won’t happen unless there is a verifiable way to ensure that groups like Hamas no longer exist, and even then.
* If your idea of peace is a two state solution then as with the aforementioned option, only if the Palestinian state is virtually unarmed outside of a national police force and all militias and other groups disbanded, and even then.
So the end answer I am afraid is no, any future Israeli leader will always have the safety and security of the Israelis first in mind always even if that means a continuation of what we see now.
Tw world isn’t in a place where peace is likely any time soon. It’s too profitable to be an extremist.
I think that attributing the failure of a solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict to one person or one event, can not be logically defendable.
Rabin went through personal transformation that reflected a change that many in the Israeli society shared. But his murder, was not the nail in the coffin that this extract claims it to be. Its a process that the region went through peace proposals that were met with increased violence, the realization that the risks that were associated with taking the steps towards peace ( and required trust that the other side will fulfill its share) becamea ever so apparent. As the trust erroded, the willingness to make concessions wasa reduced, fueling disappointment and disillusion.of the other side and thus spiraling into a cycle of actions and counter actions that pushes both populations views away from co existence.
Bigger a better leadership might have done better to stop that destructive process, but the Israeli side became more and more polarized and the errosion of the political centre was making any significant proposal more and more difficult. But maybe worse still, the Palestinian side lacked any leadership wiling to seize the few opportunities that were there, kept fueling the negative sentiment of its population, while working primarily to secure its own profits and retain power.
Will the Palestinians ever have a leader who truly wants peace?
I think every leader has wanted peace. The Palestinians have a history of leaders who have rejected every chance for statehood and peace. Netanyahu is no saint but the Palestinians haven’t had a single leader in history willing to make peace, even when they get everything they ask for in a peace deal. The framing of this question is backwards.
Even look at Gaza, when you elect a savage terrorist group to be in charge, a group that boasts about stealing billions in aid to turn gaza into an instrument of war, perhaps that’s the root of the problem
You cannot have peace in Israel with the existence of Hamas and Hizbollah when the majority of Palestinians support them. Either kill or get killed. Every other view is nice but naive.
Comments are closed.