Adonis Diaries

The Assassination in Israel That Worked

The assassination two decades ago of Yitzhak Rabin, the warrior who became Israel’s peacemaking prime minister, has proved one of the most successful in history

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by his own Hindu fanatic

Rabin was killed by one of his own, a fanatical Jew who could not abide territorial compromise for peace.

Yigal Amir, the assassin, was a religious-nationalist follower of Baruch Goldstein, the American-born killer of 29 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron in 1994.

The Assassination in Israel That Worked

nytimes.com|By Roger Cohen

Reason ebbed. Rage flowed. The center eroded.

Messianic Zionism, of the kind that claims all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as God-given real estate, supplanted secular Zionism of the kind that believes in a state of laws.

An opportunistic right-wing politician named Benjamin Netanyahu, who had compared Rabin to Chamberlain, rose to power.

He may supplant David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but his legacy looks paltry beside the founding father of Israel (who masterminded the slaughter-hood  and chasing out of the Palestinians since 1935).

A warrior-peacemaker was lost to an assassin’s bullet in 1995.

A marketer fearmonger replaced him.

Leadership, in its serious sense, disappeared. Without leadership, every problem is insurmountable. With it, no problem is unsolvable.

It will soon be a half-century since Israel took control of the West Bank and backed the settlement movement that now sees several hundred thousand Jews living east of the Green Line, enjoying Israeli citizenship and various state handouts.

Why then has Israel not asserted its sovereignty over all territory and granted the vote and other democratic rights to all inhabitants?

The answer is simple: too many Palestinians. (The Zionist movement prohibited mandated Britain to have municipal elections in Palestine on the basis that the Jews barely constituted 20% of the population)

Asserting sovereignty would have meant the end of the Jewish state. Israel chose instead the undermining of its own democracy.

As Gershom Gorenberg has put it, Israel has “behaved as if the territories were part of Israel for the purpose of settlement, and under military occupation for the purpose of ruling the Palestinians.”

This policy is corrosive. No democracy is immune to running an undemocratic system on part of the land it controls.

Across the Green Line, millions of inhabitants are noncitizens. This is the combustible “one-state reality” of which Secretary of State John Kerry spoke this month.

The noncitizens are Israel’s colonized Palestinians.

Oppression and humiliation are hewn into the topography of the West Bank.

Israel, through the settlement movement, has undermined its Zionist founders’ commitment to a democratic state of laws. (That’s just western mis-representation propaganda of embellishing Zionism purposes)

Vikram Seth, the novelist, has observed: “The great advantage of being a chosen people is that one can choose to decide who is unchosen.”

The great disadvantage of Messianic Zionism is that it makes it impossible for Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state. It makes violence inevitable.

Since October more than 20 Israelis and more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in what some are calling a third intifada. This is the status quo. Three Gaza wars since 2008 are the status quo.

Israel today is a miracle of rapid development perched on the brittle foundation of occupation. Stabbings are the status quo.

The Palestinian leadership has been hopeless. It is divided. It is corrupt. It lacks democratic legitimacy.

It has wallowed in the comforting embrace of injustice rather than making the tough decisions to end it.

It has opted for theater over substance. It incites against Jews.

Time, as the last 67 years demonstrate, is not on the Palestinian side.

None of this annuls Palestinians’ right to a state called Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, nor the long-term interest of both sides in working to that end.

Rabin hated what Palestinians had done. (And the Palestinians and Arafat didn’t hate what Israel had done?)

Still, for Israel’s security, he chose peace.

The cornerstone of Israel’s United Nations-backed legality was territorial compromise, as envisaged in Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for two states, one Jewish, one Arab, in the Holy Land. This was humankind’s decision, not God’s. (The God-like decision in this partition is giving Israel prime land constituting 57%  when its population was barely 40%)

The covenant Jews bore around the world was a covenant of ethics, not a covenant granting Jews the hills of Judea and Samaria forever.

Its core is the idea that what is hateful to yourself should not be inflicted on your fellow human being. It must apply to the strong Jew of Israel as much as to the cowed Jew of the diaspora.

As the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz has recently chronicled, various U.S. entities and non-profit organizations, for which donations are tax-deductible, provide funding for the settler movement opposed by the United States government. (It cannot be true: the US did everything to facilitate transfer of funds to the settlements)

Daniel Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, summed up why this is unacceptable: “The government — and we, the public — are subsidizing an activity which undermines government policy.”

The Obama administration has understandably tired of providing the fig leaf of a “peace process” to Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

But it can set down a marker by making public its view of a territorial compromise at or close to the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps. (Swapping is meant to delay any agreement indefinitely)

It can seek leverage in its opposition to settlement growth.

It can close American tax loopholes that benefit Israeli settlers.

It can try to make Rabin’s assassination a little less successful.