It is necessary to explain for those who do not know, that Yitzhak Rabin dedicated his life to the service of his country. He fought for the liberation of Jerusalem of Jerusalem in 1948. As Chief of Staff, he was responsible for Israel's victory in 1967. He served Israel as Prime Minister in the 70s and was responsible for the brilliant rescue operation in Entebbe. It is necessary to repeat that Rabin chose to give up territory not because he hated settlers or Jews, but because he hated war, and he understood that there could be no Israel and no Zionism without peace, and no Jewish state without a territorial compromise.

It is necessary to explain, because unfortunately there are too many in Israel who really imagine that Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor, some sort of "leftist" anti-Zionist. They do not understand that a father of the Zionist movement was murdered. It took an Arab commentator, Fuad Ajami, to understand that the assassination of Rabin was Israeli national patricide.

The assassination should have been a watershed event in Israeli society, but it was not. Nothing fundamental changed. While many individuals were deeply shocked and re-evaluated their views of Zionism and of our society, society and politics continued to drift in the dangerous direction dictated by the assassin, Yigal Amir, and his small but stubborn group of supporters, and the much larger group that "understood the motives" of Yigal Amir without approving of the method.

The pragmatic Zionism of the founders was coopted by religious Zionism, a contradiction in terms. Zionism is based on the premise that the Jews are a people, and therefore need their own nation-state. Orthodox Jews were originally opposed to Zionism, and insisted that the relation between the land and the Jews was a religious one, a theoretical one, that would be fulfilled in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem brought about by a miraculous Messiah, rather than in an earthbound state made by flesh and blood people like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.

There could be Zionists who are also religious Jews, and those who are Zionists because of their faith, but religious Zionism as an ideology is an oxymoron, and it leads to practical dangers. A religious state has no sanction in the international community. The only salient examples are Iran and Saudi Arabia, neither of which are worthy of emulation A flesh and blood state, unlike a heavenly Messianic one, must make compromises to exist in the real world. World opinion, military feasibility and economics must be taken into consideration when making real-world policy decisions. A messianic state need only follow the dictates of the Messiah or his stand-ins. A state that relies only on God's protection, and on God's word as interpreted by rabbis, is headed for disaster. As the Israeli Knesset headed for a vote on disengagement, orthodox and ultraorthodox parties went to consult their rabbis, like ancient Romans consulting the augurs before a battle. Alas, the omens were unfavorable. The goat had a bad liver, as ascertained by the Rabbis for Greater Israel of the National Religious Party, by Ovadia Yosef of the Shas party and the Council of Torah Sages of United Torah Judaism.

Because we have not laid the ghost of Rabin to rest, the dangers brought home by his murder are still with us and have grown. This time the target is not Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor movement, but the ex-arch-hawk Ariel Sharon. The clash between Sharon and the Frankenstein of fanatic religious Zionism that he and his colleagues have nurtured is inevitable. Any sane politician, no matter what his beliefs, must be a pragmatist in the final analysis. Pragmatism and divine dictates must inevitably clash at some point, and they have. Now, as in 1995, rabbis insist that those who follow the policy of the Israeli government are traitors. One rabbi offered to conduct a medieval Pulsa Di Nura ceremony on PM Ariel Sharon, to cause his demise by magic means. Security experts including GSS (Shabak) chiefs, warn that we are only one step away from an actual planned assassination attempt, and perhaps worse, that there are Jewish groups planning to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount in order to bring about the last messianic war and the establishment of the third temple.

The question before us is not, unfortunately, whether or not we have continued the legacy of Rabin or respected his memory. We have not. It may well be that we could not have made peace with the Palestinians through no fault of our own, but it is certainly true that we have not made an honest effort. The 100,000 settlers who have accumulated in the West Bank since the assassination of Rabin are proof that we have not chosen the path of peace. The question is not whether or not we have eradicated the pernicious core of the ideology represented by Yigal Amir. We have not Amir prospers in jail. He has a girl friend or wife, Larissa Trimbobler, bride of Frankenstein come to life, and a not inconsiderable following.

In the middle ages people fought and won battles because they had visions. Soldiers marched off to save the Holy Land from the Saracens. The Maid of Orleans fought at the command of the Lord. In some countries in the Middle East, such considerations still prevail. A word from an Iranian Mullah can start a war or build an atom bomb because God wills it. A word from a Hamas Mullah can send a suicide bomber to blow himself and thirty other people to kingdom come. The question is, whether we are building a society like Iran or the Hamas, or whether we are building a modern state. That is, whether Zionism is to remain a modern nationalist movement like those that created the USA, Italy, Germany and modern France, or lapse into a Jewish version of Islamism. That question is being tried right now in the Israeli Knesset, in the vote on Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, and it will be tried in its implementation. The problem is not to determine whether the policy is correct or not, but whether the policy of our government and the actions of our army will be based on pragmatic considerations, however mistaken, or whether they will be dictated by the word of God as interpreted by rabbis and religious fanatics.

Ami Isseroff

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