The tenth anniversary, Thursday, November 03, 2005

As has happened every year since that awful night ten years ago, the scars of the trauma have been reopened by events. There was a TV interview with assassin Yigal Amir’s family, who not only justify the murder, but are now demanding a new trial if not his release from prison. The cries for mutiny against the disengagement orders coming from the same Rightist-Rabbinical circles who spoke openly about Rabin’s liability under din moser, the Jewish law that allows the preemptive murder of someone believed to be threatening the community, contributes to this year’s sense that nothing has really been learned from the assassination. Rightist ‘moderates’ meanwhile keep insisting that Rabin’s ‘legacy’ is not the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO, as delineated by Oslo, but some mythic military hardheadedness that would have Rabin favoring some watered down version of the Allon Plan, which would have created a landlocked Bantustan for the Palestinians in the West Bank, surrounded by Israeli settlement.

The open wound of the Rabin assassination is not on its way to healing, that’s for sure. Some 85 percent of the public expects another assassination, said one poll; another says that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the public does not believe that Yigal Amir should be in jail. After all, as his brother explained, ‘Yigal stopped a criminal,’ so where’s the justice in keeping him locked up. And then there’s the odd manner in which the Rabin biography and his ‘legacy’ is taught in most schools: lots on Rabin’s role in the Palmah, and of course his stint as chief of staff for the Six Day War, but very little about his two terms as prime minister – the one that ended ignominiously in 1977 when he resigned from office over a then-illegal foreign bank account kept by his wife (enhancing accusations by the opposition parties, led by the Likud, that Labor was corrupt), and the one that ended even more ignominiously (for Israeli society at large) in his assassination by the Rightist-religious Amir. True, Rabin is credited for the peace with Jordan, but nobody wants to be reminded of Yasser Arafat, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres a few weeks before the assassination, but who later bedeviled the peace process with his inability to change from a revolutionary father of his nation to the tedious gray politics of state and nation building.

For at least the last five years, starting in the fall of 2000 with the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada and the massive Israeli use of force to put it down, Oslo, referring to the peace process – now called the political process – with the Palestinians, has been synonymous with failure and a naïve wrongheaded approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But today, in what sounded like one of his stalking horse speeches for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his deputy prime minister and chief ally in the Likud, Ehud Olmert struck a completely different pose as he spoke to a conference convened to mark the anniversary of the assassination. ‘From the distance of time and perspective, Yitzhak Rabin's Oslo Agreement brought on a process of disillusionment by the Israel public and the formation of a more realistic, sober and balanced perception of the moves Israel has to make,’ said Olmert, adding, ‘Oslo agreement had its weaknesses but it was also justified. There is no doubt that it forced Israeli society to self examination that lead to the conclusion that Israel must return to its correct borders and that it should be a Jewish and democratic state.’

True, Olmert went on to explain that part of the Rabin legacy was to make sure the Temple Mount remains in Israeli hands and that Jerusalem remain undivided, but like so much of the rhetoric that tries to depict Rabin as less dovish than his support for Oslo might reflect, Olmert’s comment freezes Rabin in time, as if nothing in this world changes requiring politicians to change.

Sharon, who more than most has proved that he understands history does not stand still and that a statesman can change his mind, is said to have wanted to attend the annual rally outside Tel Aviv City Hall, in what is now known as Rabin Plaza. Because of the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank and Sharon’s continuing insistence that he wants to strike a deal with the Palestinians – if only they take responsibility for preventing terror attacks against Israelis -- the Rabin family was ready to invite Sharon. But the Shin Bet VIP Protection Unit so far has scotched that idea.

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