The Rabin legacy, Friday, November 04, 2005

This year is the first ‘round number' anniversary of the 1995 assassination at a Tel Aviv peace rally that Rabin did not believe would attract a large crowd. But it drew some 300,000 people, police said that night, before the three shots that killed Rabin diverted everyone's attention from the success of the pro-peace rally that came days after a Jerusalem rally of several thousand settlers and their supporters.

That rally, sponsored by the Likud, saw posters of Rabin in an SS uniform eagerly handed out by religious youth, as placards depicted Rabin, together with Yasser Arafat, in blood-soaked keffiyot, as speaker after speaker from the Likud and other Rightist political parties took to the podium to denounce Rabin and his government as traitors to the state of Israel.

The Right, since the night of the murder, has denounced the assassin as ‘a wild weed in the flowerbox,' never considering the fact that the Right's leaders are supposed to be its gardeners and their job as gardeners is to weed out those wild weeds. Instead, it keeps cosseting its zealots, and out of inertia perhaps, or because it has become so infiltrated by the settler movement, the army and police continue to use kid gloves on wildcatting, often violent settlers and their supporters.

A lot has changed since 1995 with the most radical change being the Likud, under Ariel Sharon of all people, starting to implement what was essentially the Rabin legacy – a retreat from occupation back to the boundaries (more or less) of the state of Israel in 1967 before the Six Day War. But a much more profound change has taken place in Israeli society – the loss of belief in peacemaking, the loss of faith in the national political leadership (except Sharon and to a certain extent Shimon Peres), a loss of trust in the democratic process itself.

The far-Right, particularly the religious Right, openly admits as much – for them, Judaism is far more important than the state of Israel, and certainly far more important than the essentially foreign form of government known as democracy. For them, statehood's fulfillment will be the reemergence of a Sanhedrin, a body of rabbis elected by other rabbis, to determine law. For them, democracy meanwhile is an instrument to exploit for their own ends.

The Left, meaning those who regard peacemaking as the number one priority for any Israeli government, is lost, essentially leaderless since Rabin -- and the Oslo peace process -- was murdered. For the last five years, Labor has essentially been a supporting character actor in a show starring only one person – Sharon. Peres has not been an alternative to Sharon, but his helper.

But that could change next week. Indeed, next week, as schools conduct ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Rabin assassination, as seminars and conferences discuss the meaning of the murder and its implications for the state, and while foreign leaders converge on Israel for the formal opening of the monumental Rabin Center in Tel Aviv's posh Ramat Aviv neighborhood, Israeli politics could change.

For one thing, Sharon appears determined to face down the rebellion from the so-called Likud rebels, mostly backbench freshmen MKs whose rhetoric might be all about Likud values and ideals but whose politicking is transparently playing to the jingoistic crowd in the Likud central committee. There's a Knesset vote on Monday to name three Likud ministers – the rebels, backed by Binyamin Netanyahu – are threatening to vote against.

Sharon is fed up with the constant fighting with them and he comes out on the polls ahead of everyone, if he leads the Likud or heads a new party. Such a new party would promote a new system of government for Israel, meaning a presidential system. Considering what he has to go through with his own party, there's still lively betting that Sharon could yet form a new party and call snap elections. He must, in any case, smash the rebels lest they gnaw away at his every move – as is their plan.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the Labor Party primaries race, which has turned into a horse race between the indefatigable octogenarian Peres, and the decidedly and unabashedly socialist union leader Amir Peretz. The latest polls before the upcoming November 9 vote shows them neck and neck, with the conventional wisdom being that the fewer voters go to the polls, the better Peretz's chances of winning the party leadership. We'll see.

Nobody can be sure what would happen if Peretz wins. He has no ministerial level experience, but he has run the Histadrut for a decade. He promises a revival of the welfare state, without harming the private sector but doesn't hide his intention to raise taxes on the rich to spend on education, welfare, infrastructure, etc. Meanwhile, two icons of the old Israeli left, when Labor meant labor -- Yitzhak Ben Aharon (nearing his 100th burthday) and Lova Eoliav, have endorsed Peretz and he has won over some leading Israeli industrialists and is counting on the votes of the poor and the working class and the lower middle classes that are being driven into poverty by the neo-Thatcherite policies of Netanyahu when he was finance minister up to the eve of the disengagement in August -- those are all traditional Likud voters. As Labor's candidate for premier, Peretz also expects to win back Arab votes lost to Labor by the Barak govermment's handling of the riots of October 2000, when 13 Israeli Arabs were shot dead by police. And there's even a chance he could draw some votes from theultra-Ortodox sector because of his promises to repair the destruction wrought by Netanyahu on the welfare system.

If Peretz wins, he will pull Labor out of the government. Theoretically, Sharon could bring in Shinui to buttress a government for another few months. But with the showdown brewing in the Likud, the smell of elections now dominates the Knesset – and the daily doses of reports on corrupt MKs and government officials only serves to enhance the feeling that the current government is on its last legs.

The ruling party, in any case, has a titanic leader at its helm, but nearly everyone else in his party is doing all they can to bring him down, seemingly oblivious to the fact that without Sharon as their leader, the Likud has little appeal to anyone except those who owe the party their jobs.

Thus, on this tenth anniversary of the Rabin assassination, perhaps the long-anticipated reshuffling of the political deck in Israel might be soon upon us. Call it what you will, big bang or littlebang, the era after Sharion and Peres will see a dramatic change in the political arena. Only then, perhaps, will we learn if the Israeli body politic did indeed learn the lesson from the murder on November 4, 2005.

Yitzhak Rabin's Last Speech, which he delivered at the Tel Aviv peace rally on Nov. 4 1995

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