Now we are a country

November 6 1995

Israel is the only country born as a democracy after World War II that did not have a revolution, a junta, a coup, a civil war, a dictatorship calling itself a republic or people's democracy, or whatever.

Now we have had an assassination. Elsewhere in the Middle East, an assassination means a coup. In a democracy -- assassinations do not cause chaos. They cause fear. Peres did not phrase it precisely the same, and didn't attribute it to Roosevelt, but at the Peace Rally the night Rabin was shot, Peres said he was not afraid. "the only thing I fear is fear," he said.

Our democracy is unusually fragile, constantly testing its limits as it grows stronger. Arabs inside Israel always have had the vote, but they have also been de facto, if not de jure second class citizens. With the Peace Government elected at the start of the '90s, to replace the National government of the late '70s and '80s, that relationship began to change. The Peace Rally the night Rabin was shot was the first in the history of Israel in which Arabs and Jews demonstrated together to support an Israeli government's policies.

Jews who grew used to patronizing Arabs already are in the minority, and the extremists among them, from whom the assassin was spawned, will be reigned in, often with some of the methods sometimes used against Arab terrorists. They will protest it violates Israel's democracy, the way the left denounced tactics used against Arabs.

But terrorism is indivisible, not only because it attacks the innocent. It attacks the only form of government that ensures stability and expanding prosperity, for it is a commonwealth based on the free marketplace of ideas, the neccessary condition for marketplaces to grow.

Democracy will survive here for the same reason the peace process will continue: here is no alternative for the Jewish State. It was indeed it was precisely over the issue of the preservation of the Jewish State's ability to survive as a democracy, that Rabin was assassinated.

"We are finally a country," said another grandfather, a Holocaust suvivor and Israeli citizen. His daughter an American Jew, said she couldn't understand him. It is difficult to understand, for with the shattering of some hopes, others are being born.

During these past two and a half days of non-stop talk with relatives friends, on TV and radio, Israel is in the first shudder of a catharsis that we have no choice but to come out of much stronger, able to recognize our own frailties as human beings. In the complicated relationship between the Jews among themselves and the rest of the world, we tell ourselves and are told by others that we are different. We thought so. This is the first government in Israel's history in which the lives of elected ministers are threatened by Jews. Until now, only Arabs threatened Israeli politicians.

It is a dangerous situation, but the checks and balances of democracy are our ultimate protection. For months, people have wondered when the israeli election campaign would officially begin. With Rabin announcing? With Arik Sharon trying to claim the mantle from Bibi Netanyahu.? Now we know. It began at the end of the Peace Rally, with the shots that cut down Yitzhak Rabin.

And the choice will be clear: either peace with our neighbors, opening Israel and the Middle East as a bridge between the three contintents, and serving finally as a Light Unto the Nations, giving up a piece of our Land to let the Palestinians create the first real democracy in the Arab world, or retreating into an isolationist shell, as xenophobic and fundamentalist as the worst of democracy's enemies. This is not about left and right. It is about the choice of tollbooths or roadblocks on the roads of the Holy Land, the land bridge between three continents, the metaphysical bridge between East and West, the center that Yeats warned could not hold, but which we, who have no choice but follow in Rabin's path, will insist on holding until peace truly reigns.

Yitzhak Rabin's Last Speech

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