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Remembering Yitzhak Rabin
Uri Avnery Comment
A YEAR before the Oslo agreement, I had a meeting with Yasser Arafat
in Tunis. He was full of curiosity about Yitzhak Rabin, who had just
been elected prime minister. I described him as well as I could and
ended with the words: “He is as honest as a politician can be.”
Arafat broke into laughter, and all the others present, among them
Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, joined in. I always liked Rabin
as a human being. I especially liked some traits of his. First of
all his honesty. He was a decent human being. When his term as
Israeli ambassador in Washington D.C. came to an end, his wife Leah
left behind a bank account, contrary to Israeli law at the time.
When it was discovered, he protected his wife by assuming personal
responsibility. At the time, unlike today, “assuming responsibility”
was not an empty phrase. He left the prime minister’s office.
I liked even his most evident personality trait — his introversion.
He was withdrawn, with few human contacts. He had no small talk. In
every conversation, he came to the point right at the start. In a
world of pretentious, garrulous, mendacious, back-slapping
politicians, he was a refreshing rarity. More than anything else, I
respected Rabin for his dramatic change of outlook at the age of 70.
The man who had been a soldier since he was 18, who had fought Arabs
all his life, suddenly became a peace-fighter. And not just a
fighter for peace in general, but for peace with the Palestinian
people, whose very existence had always been denied by the leaders
of Israel.
From 1969 on, until after the Oslo agreement, we had a running
debate about the Palestinian issue. In 1975, after the start of my
secret contacts with the PLO, I went to brief him (in accordance
with the express wishes of the PLO). I brought him several messages
from Arafat, conveyed to me by the PLO representative in London,
Sa’id Hamami. Arafat proposed small mutual gestures. Rabin refused
all of them.
Consequently I was all the more impressed by Oslo. Later Rabin
explained to me, one Shabbat at his private apartment, how he
arrived there: King Hussein had resigned his responsibility for the
West Bank. The “village leagues”, set up by Israel as pliant
“representatives” of the Palestinians, were a dismal failure. As
minister of defense he summoned local Palestinian leaders for
individual consultations, and one after another they told him that
their political address was in Tunis. After that, at the Madrid
conference, Israel agreed to negotiate with a joint
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but then the Jordanians told them
that all Palestinian matters must be discussed with the Palestinian
members alone. But at every meeting, the Palestinian delegates asked
for a pause in order to call Tunis and get instructions from Arafat.
Rabin’s conclusion: If all decisions are made by Arafat anyhow, why
not talk with him directly? It has always been said that Rabin had
an “analytical mind”. He did not have much of an imagination, but he
viewed facts soberly, analyzed them logically and drew his
conclusions. If so, why did the Oslo agreement fail?
The practical reasons are easy to see. From the beginning, the
agreement was built on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main
thing: A clear definition of the final objective of the process. For
Arafat it was self-evident that the agreed “interim stages” would
lead to an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor exchanges of
territory. East Jerusalem, including of course the Holy Shrines, was
to become the capital of Palestine.
But Rabin’s aim was unclear, perhaps even to himself. At the time he
was not yet ready to accept a Palestinian state. Absent an agreed
destination, all the “interim phases” went awry. Every step caused
new conflicts. Arafat was conscious of the faults of the agreement.
He told his people that it was “the best possible agreement in the
worst possible circumstances”. But he believed that the dynamics of
the peace process would overcome the obstacles on the way. So did I.
We were both wrong. After the signing, Rabin began to hesitate.
Instead of rushing forward to create facts, he dithered. Deep under
the surface, powerful currents were at work. They pushed Rabin off
course and in the end they swallowed him.
Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He never rebeled
against it. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to
an insoluble inner contradiction: His analytical mind told him to
make peace with the Palestinians, to “give up” a part of the country
and to dismantle the settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage
opposed this with all its might. That manifested itself visibly at
the Oslo agreement signing ceremony: He offered his hand to Arafat
because his mind commanded it, but all his body language expressed
rejection.
It is impossible to make peace without a basic mental and emotional
commitment to peace. Impossible to change the direction of a
historic movement without reassessing its history. Impossible for a
leader to steer his people toward a total change (as Ataturk Mustafa
Kemal Pasha did in Turkey, for example) if he is not completely
devoted to the change himself. Impossible to make peace with an
enemy without understanding his truth. Rabin’s inner convictions
continued to evolve after Oslo. Between him and Arafat, mutual
respect grew. Perhaps he would have arrived, in his slow and
cautious way, at the necessary mental change. The assassin and his
handlers must have been afraid of this and decided to forestall it.
Rabin’s failure will find its expression at the memorial rally next
week at the very place where we witnessed his murder, 14 years ago.
The main speakers will be two of the gravediggers of the Oslo
agreement, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, as well as Tzipi Livni and
Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who belonged to the forces that
created the climate for the murder. Rabin, I assume, will turn in
his grave. Will I be there? Not me, thank you very much.—Arab News
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