Patricide - Six Years After

Yizhak Rabin wanted to build a different Israel and a different Middle East, because he could see that without peace, there would be no future for Israel or the Palestinians, and perhaps no future for the entire Middle East. Perhaps he understood, as the terror attacks on the US showed, that without peace here, the future might be bleak for the entire world.

Six years after Rabin’s assassination, he, and his generation, and the hopes and ideals of the Israel that we once knew, are sorely missed. The essence of the meaning of his assassination was epitomized by the distinguished Middle East analyst, Professor Fouad Ajami:

“Rabin’s assassination was a deed of patricide, the killing of a father. Rabin’s great gift to his people had been the victory in the Six Day War of 1967; his assassin, Yigal Amir, a young messianic Zionist, twenty-five years of age and a law student, was born after that time of peril had passed; he had incorporated the conquered land into his psyche and made it his own. With the victory in the Six Day War and the acquisition of biblical land, Israel had been placed in the way of a great temptation. ‘For a month, for a year, or for a full generation, we will have to sit as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history,’ the novelist Amoz Oz wrote in his chronicle, In the Land of Israel. ' We have not liberated Hebron and Ramallah, nor have we redeemed their inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them only until our peace is secured.’ This would not do for the religious nationalists. That strand of Zionism, which made the conquered land the measure of all things, broke with the secular, pragmatic Zionism of Israel’s mainstream. The victory in 1967 that the methodical Rabin had won became to the messianic fringe a sign of divine favor and a permanent deed to the land.”

Fouad Ajami, “The Dream Palace of the Arabs,” 1998

Rabin’s assassination was a deed of patricide. Rabin had given Israel not only the victory of 1967, but the liberation of Jerusalem in 1948. For many, he defined what “Israeli” should mean. Yigal Amir murdered Mr Israel, the Israeli De Gaulle, and his ignorant “patriotic” fanatic friends cheered and called Rabin a traitor. History will tell if in fact, Yigal Amir killed Israel itself.

Rabin was a member of a special elite, the former Palmah fighters who helped to forge the state and saw it through its darkest hours. He was irreplaceable because of when he lived, what he did and how he did it. History cannot be redone. No Israeli alive can match his record of service to the state. None commands the international respect that he did, and perhaps none ever will again.

When Rabin was assassinated, there were those who hoped that somehow the ideals of the old Israel, the ideals that he represented, would be preserved, and the assassin, Yigal Amir, would be denied the victory of assassinating the peace, and forcing the agenda of the settlers on the Zionist movement.

It was a forlorn hope. The “peace process” that Rabin initiated may be clinically dead, though attempts at resuscitation continue. Perhaps he could have saved it, perhaps not. However, had we followed his lead and his principles, it is unlikely that we would have fallen into the trap of allowing settler ideology to dictate the Israeli national agenda, as they are now. This was brought home to all of us last month when another former member of the Palmah, Rehav’am Zeevi was assassinated. Ze’evi was a brave general, but unlike Rabin, he did not represent the political mainstream of the Palmah. We are enjoined to speak nothing but good of the dead, but it must be said that Ze’evi favored perpetuation of the occupation and “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of Israel. Ze’evi, a Minister of Tourism, was mourned with all the pomp and circumstance awarded to Rabin. The same songs were played, and some of the same rhetoric was used in the media, but the ideology had changed. In his eulogy, Ze’evi’s son said “Arabs of Israel - you are temporary residents here.”

There are those who claim the current violence invalidates the ideals of Rabin and the attempts to make peace. They should bear in mind the principle that drove Israeli peace efforts from the start: Without peace, there is no Zionism and no future for Israel. If Israeli society cannot separate the need for security from the attempt to rule another people or dispossess them, there will be no peace, and no Zionism, and it is we Zionists who will be temporary residents here.