Would Rabin have stopped the 'peace process'?
Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.
Twenty years ago tonight was one of those moments that you always remember where you were when you heard about it. Twenty years ago tonight, then-Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated at the end of a 'peace rally' in Tel Aviv. (For the record, I was in our apartment on the computer and Mrs. Carl had gone with a couple of the kids to the mall - I think I had the two then-youngest kids at home).
I have written
many times before about the assassination and why I believe that the person sitting in jail for doing it
did not receive a fair trial. But perhaps the more significant question is whether Rabin would have continued the 'peace process' had he lived. Jeff Jacoby argues that Rabin would have
brought that process to an end after the 1996 elections (Hat Tip:
Martin Kramer).
Oslo was a disaster from the outset, arguably the worst
self-inflicted wound in Israel’s history. By 1995, it was widely
regarded as a failure by Israelis; polls showed public approval of Rabin
and his Labor Party sinking to record lows.
Oslo’s architects had promised that empowering Yasser Arafat and the
Palestine Liberation Organization with their own quasi-state in Gaza and
the West Bank was the best way to suppress terror attacks and improve
Israel’s security. Rabin’s government took the gamble, but the “peace
process” didn’t deliver peace. It delivered bus bombings and suicide
attacks.
More Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorists in the 24
months following the famous handshake on the White House lawn than in
any similar period in Israel’s history.
In public, Rabin professed
to be undaunted, repeatedly insisting that the engagement with Arafat
must proceed: “We have to fight terror as if there were no peace talks,
and we have to pursue peace as if there were no terror.”
But privately, Rabin was having grave doubts.
According to Efraim Inbar, head of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and the author of “Rabin and Israel’s National Security,”
Rabin was no starry-eyed peacenik. He was a pragmatic leader for whom
peace, in and of itself, was never a core value. The Oslo concessions
could be justified only to the extent that they left Israel more secure.
As it became apparent that instead of land for peace, Israel had
exchanged land for terror, incitement, and hatred, Inbar said Wednesday in a lecture at Boston University, there is good reason to believe he would have pulled the plug.
Others have said the same thing. Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter (and a former deputy defense minister), recalled in 2010
that she had been told by many of her father’s confidants “that on the
eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the
terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt
that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.” And Moshe
Ya’alon, who in 1995 was Israel’s chief of military intelligence, was
told by Rabin that he intended to “set things straight” with Oslo after
the 1996 election, since Arafat’s commitments were plainly worthless.
Would
he have done so? Of course we cannot know for sure, but as Inbar notes,
Rabin did believe that Oslo was reversible. When critics expressed
alarm at an agreement committing Israel to arm a Palestinian police
force, he replied that there was nothing to fear.
“There is no danger that these guns will be used against us,” Rabin
said. “The purpose of this ammunition for the Palestinian police is to .
. . fight against Hamas. They won’t dream of using it against us, since
they know very well that if they use these guns against us once, at
that moment the Oslo Accord will be annulled.”
But he waited too long.
Rabin was never a willing participant in Oslo. Shimon Peres sent Yossi Beilin, Ron Pundak and Uri Savir to Oslo to negotiate with the PLO behind Rabin's back. Presented with the fait accomplis, Rabin went along. I think he would have dropped it in a minute.
Labels: Ron Pundak, Shimon Peres, Yigal Amir, Yitzchak Rabin, Yossi Beilin
Summing up days 1 and 2 of the J Street conference
Ron Radosh is one of several conservatives I follow who is attending the J Street confab as media. Here's part of his
summary of day 1.
After softening up the audience with constant praise of their group, Saperstein suddenly turned and presented a tactical criticism that did not go over well with the surprised audience. How, he asked, should we apply our values? How do we decide when to make tactical decisions that do not have great support in America’s Jewish community? “When,” he asked, “do we push the envelope?” Saperstein then let the audience know he was referring to the organization’s recent decision to favor the recent UN resolution condemning Israel, which the Obama administration vetoed in the United Nations.
J Street, he told the delegates, was a group of the center-left that embodied people on various parts of that spectrum. They could not win their fight, he suggested, unless they kept the center and got more, not less, support from it. By not supporting the U.S. veto, he told them, they became “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Many centrists who had supported them have broken ranks and dropped out of J Street. “We,” he said, “made them move away from us.” J Street therefore pushed the mainstream of the Jewish community away from them, rather than towards them. This meant that when they said the right things, they would have little impact, since the Jewish community would not trust them.
Saying that he understood that J Street’s leaders made a tough call, Saperstein argued that if they had supported the veto, they would have been in a position to wage a successful call for a new movement in America to oppose Israel’s settlements. Now they were undercutting their own program to help the Obama administration advance the peace process.
Saperstein, in other words, was saying that J Street should have tactically not taken the position they believed in, simply because they lost potential allies in doing so. He said they needed to wage an effort to fight the Tea Party and those who wanted to end U.S. foreign aid and especially aid to Israel. Claiming that he was concerned with those who wanted to delegitimize the Jewish state, he said they needed a broad tent that would give credibility to their effort to be both pro-peace and pro-Israel. They had to oppose those who sought to support the BDS campaign — boycott, divestment and sanctions — favored by many of the far left in America.
The pro-Israel forces, he concluded, needed their vision of a pro-peace position. This is not, he said, “a time for retreat, since our vision will prevail.” That vision, he ended, stood for “dignity, social justice, and peace.”
...
When the young man who introduced Peter Beinart spoke, he said Beinart inspired him, because while he loves Israel, he did not love its actions during the war in Gaza. Current policies of the Israeli government, Beinart said, were a moral failure and harmed Israel and put the country at risk. One had to wonder, what policies of Israel’s enemies, if any, does he think had the same effect? Does he really believe that a change to the “peace” policies he espouses would end Arab intransigence? Israel had to create a vibrant, democratic Israel — not the kind of Israel now led by the reactionary Netanyahu government. Then and only then could the true holy mission of the Jewish people be realized, he said.
The crowd seemed to love it. As for myself, I wondered how this arrogant, so-called pundit had the nerve to tell the Jewish Israelis what was in their interest, and to tell them that he knew more than those who elected the center-right government what was in their own best interest. Beinart had not one word to say about the actual threats facing Israel from the new Middle East being created as we speak, from Iran, and from the very real threats to Israel from radical Islam.
The latter is hardly a surprise, since J Street’s own statement of principles says it opposes “efforts to demean and fan fears of Islam or of Muslims.” In their eyes, evidently, any criticism or mention of radical Islam is verboten, since it reflects the kind of understanding liberals and the left can never comprehend.
And here are some highlights of
day 2.
The Palestinian Authority, Serry said, was developing solid reforms, and they had to be met by similar actions by Israel, especially that of rolling back Israel’s settlements. Palestinian statehood, Serry argued, was not sustainable unless Israel gave up Palestinian land it held in its own hands. Hebron, he said as an example, needed more land to expand and to create viable living arrangements for its Palestinian population. In making their demands known, he told the audience, Palestinians had to make a “root-and-branch” commitment to non-violence. And supporters of the Palestinians’ goals, a group he clearly thought included J Street, had to urge that Israel end its blockade of Gaza. Israel, he said, could not punish Palestinian children because of its own dispute with Hamas.
There must be, he ended, no expansion by Israel of existing settlements.
Next to speak was Ron Pundak, who began by saying that he might be a minority of one in Israel, but he would nevertheless present his ideas, however little they might be representative of the organization to which he was now speaking.
In Israel, Pundak complained, no discussion of what was really necessary was taking place. The “right-wing government,” as he called Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu’s administration, was “obsessed with the past, and saw any criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Israel.” Bibi, he went on, “has nothing to say and uses hard words,” but the substance of what he says is virtually nothing.
Today’s Israeli regime, Pundak said, was jeopardizing the Zionist dream he and others grew up with. If Israel did not pursue a real and honest peace — which he evidently thought it was not doing — later on there would no Israeli prime minister around to accept a genuine offer of peace when it might be made. To great applause, Pundak said the millions of Palestinians living in the area had to be citizens of their own state, a policy he argued the majorities of Israelis favor. But without real leadership, he warned, there could never be such an outcome.
Turning to the vital issue of Iran, Pundak actually argued that Iran was being used as a pretext by those who did not want a Palestinian state to stop trying to attain peace. The Iranians were indeed trying to gain a nuclear capability, Pundak said, but they were not intent on annihilating Israel. Clearly, the words of Ahmadinejad meant nothing to him, nor did the worries of prominent Israelis like the historian Benny Morris. “Israel,” Pundak said, “can live with a nuclear Iran and it must not base its policies on a worst-case scenario.” Thus, it should not be looking for new enemies as an excuse not to make peace. In Pundak’s vision, clearly, Israel had no real enemies, and it was only the Netanyahu government who pronounced that they did. For example, he said that the Israeli government was now “creating Turkey as a future new enemy,” ignoring the growing Islamic orientation and new alliances of the Erdogan government. Such an Israeli government, Pundak said, could not reach a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians. It was the responsibility of Americans, therefore, to push the Obama administration to favor this course.
Pundak is one of the people who ought to burn in hell for resurrecting the PLO at a time when it was dead. Pundak was one of Shimon Peres' poodles who went to negotiate with the PLO in secret in Oslo in 1993 at a time when it was illegal for Israelis to meet with PLO representatives.
I'm not posting Radosh's summary of Mona Eltahaway's speech, because I already posted video of the entire speech.
Labels: David Saperstein, J Street, Mona Eltahaway, Peter Beinart, pro-Israel pro-peace, Robert Serry, Ron Pundak
