How did the man who declared that he would “break the bones” of the Palestinians become the Mahatma Gandhi of the Israeli Left? Like every year, the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder is an exercise in historical falsification and emotional intimidation. It is time to set the record straight.
Rabin grew up in the nationalistic Palmah movement. He was a pure sabra: a Jew from Sparta, not Athens, who was told to fight rather than to think. A talented officer, he followed the ideal career of the Ashkenazi ruling class: IDF Officer, Chief of Staff, Ambassador to the US, Labor MK, Prime Minister —a true WASP (White, Ashkenazi, Sabra Paratrooper).
In his two three-year stints as Prime Minister (1974-1977 and 1992-1995), Rabin was maneuvered into foreign policy decisions he had originally opposed, and in both cases he paved the way to the electoral victory of the Right. In 1975, Rabin was basically coerced by Gerald Ford and Henri Kissinger to withdraw from about 20% of the Sinai Peninsula in order for the US to convince Sadat that abandoning the Egyptian-Soviet alliance made sense. And when Rabin came back to power in 1992, he was not a leader who had “seen the light” as some would have us believe, but rather a man who was manipulated into signing a deal he rightly suspected to be risky.
Rabin wanted to organize elections in the territories to set up a local Palestinian leadership with which Israel would negotiate the interim status of the West Bank and Gaza, as outlined in the 1989 Israeli Peace Initiative. Rabin believed that a moderate, non-PLO Palestinian leadership could emerge in the territories. By contrast, Peres was of the opinion that Israel should establish direct contacts with the PLO and test the seriousness of the Palestinian leadership in Tunis.
Upon the presentation of his government to the Knesset in July 1992, Rabin declared Israel’s commitment to the strengthening of “strategic” settlements in the West Bank (“The Government will continue to enhance and strengthen Jewish settlement along the lines of confrontation, due to their importance for security, and in Greater Jerusalem”). Rabin also ruled out any negotiation over Jerusalem (“The Government is firm in its resolve that Jerusalem will not be open to negotiation;” “whoever believes that any Government of Israel can compromise on united Jerusalem fools himself. We, Israel, the Jewish people, will never negotiate the fate of Jerusalem. It is ours and ours forever”). And he warned that Israel would favor its security over its search for peace (“Security takes preference even over peace”).
After the June 1992 elections, Rabin reluctantly gave the Foreign Affairs portfolio to his rival Shimon Peres. It was agreed between Rabin and Peres that Rabin would be responsible for Israel’s relations with the United States and for the bilateral negotiations with the Palestinian delegation in Washington, and that Elyakim Rubinstein would remain head of the Israeli delegation in Washington. Peres’ role with regard to the peace process was to be confined to the BS “multilateral negotiations.” One month after the formation of his government, Rabin reluctantly agreed to nominate Yossi Beilin as Deputy Foreign Minister.
In September 1992, as Beilin was frustrated with his lack of control over the bilateral negotiations, his Norwegian counterpart Jan Egeland paid a visit to Israel and reminded Beilin about the idea of the secret channel on which he had agreed three months earlier with Yair Hirschfeld, Faisal Husseini and Terje Larsen. Beilin and Egeland agreed to start secret talks between Israel and the PLO in Oslo. Since Rabin had forbidden Peres himself to meet with Faisal Husseini, Beilin could not reasonably expect Peres to allow him to meet with PLO representatives in Oslo. Consequently, Beilin asked Hirschfeld to travel to Oslo and to start secret negotiations with the PLO. Rabin himself was unaware of these secret talks.
When Peres reported to Rabin about the Oslo channel, Rabin was not enthusiastic, and he warned Peres not to torpedo the Washington talks. However, Rabin apparently did not believe that the secret discussions in Oslo would bring substantial results, and so he let Peres go ahead.
During his elections campaign in 1992, Rabin had committed to sign an interim agreement with the Palestinians within nine months. In March 1993 (eight months after the elections), there was no prospect of an interim agreement with the Palestinians through the Washington talks. By contrast, Hirschfeld (together with Ron Pundak) had agreed on a declaration of principles with Mahmoud Abbas, and all they needed was Rabin’s green light.
In early May 1993, Peres managed to convince Rabin that the Oslo track was the Government’s last hope, and Rabin agreed to send the Director General of the Foreign Ministry, Uri Savir, to Oslo. However, a few days later, Rabin sent a letter to Peres, in which he denounced the Oslo process. Rabin claimed in his letter that the secret Oslo talks were actually undermining the peace process and that the PLO in Tunis was manipulating Israel in Oslo in order to torpedo the Washington talks.
Eventually, Rabin gave his green light to Oslo because he had been unable to reach an agreement with the Palestinians in Washington. But he did not initiate this process and he had serious reservations about it.
Rabin was an honest and decent man who cared about the well-being of his soldiers and the safety of his country. He was a talented army officer; as a political leader he was altogether uncharismatic, gauche, and pragmatic. He eventually endorsed and signed an agreement which others had conceived and negotiated without his knowledge and against his electoral platform. The fact that he paid with his life for the controversial Oslo Agreements is a tragedy, and nobody has a monopoly over the pain and shame that fell upon us in November 1995.
Turning Rabin into a born-again peacenik is a factual and historical fraud. The two gigantic doves that ornate the Rabin Center in Tel-Aviv are a mixture of esthetical bad taste and intellectual dishonesty. As we commemorate Rabin’s tragic death, let us honor his memory by respecting him for what he was rather for what he wasn’t.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Which Part of “Jewish State” Don’t You Understand?
The new citizenship law recently proposed by the Government once again raises the question of why Israel should define itself as a Jewish state and what this definition means in the first place.
According to the proposed law, naturalized citizens will have to pledge their allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Imagine if France would pass a law stating that France is a French state, if Japan would pass a law stating that Japan is a Japanese state, or if Sweden would pass a law stating that Sweden is a Swedish state. This would sound both silly and unnecessary. Far from being ridiculed for stating the obvious, however, Israel is being taken to task for stating the odious.
When the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended in September 1947 that the British Mandate in Palestine be divided between a Jewish state for the Jews and an Arab state for the Arabs, everyone understood that this meant each nation would have its own nation-state (though many opposed the idea). In May 1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence clearly proclaimed the establishment of a “Jewish state” and specified that this state would both be the nation-state of the Jewish people and respect the civil rights of the country’s non-Jewish minorities.
In recent years, the very legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been under attack. Sophisticated people realize that they cannot logically question the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state without doing the same for every nation-state (indeed, most countries in the world today are nation-states). Hence their claim (itself stated in the PLO charter and recently popularized by Prof. Shlomo Sand), that the Jews do not constitute a nation but only a religion, and thus that a Jewish state is not a nation-state but a religious state. Therefore, its legitimacy can be challenged without questioning the principle of self-determination.
But who are those people to decide whether or not the Jews constitute a nation? Scholars have been debating for at least a couple of centuries about what makes a nation a nation (Ernest Renan called it “a soul, a spiritual principle”). In recent years, many attempts have been made to “deconstruct” the very concept of national identity (Benedict Anderson comes to mind). But the bottom line is that if people define themselves as a nation and are ready to fight in order to preserve their national independence or identity (whether this identity is real or “imagined” as Anderson would put it), then they obviously do constitute a nation.
How people define their national identity is also their own business. Japan’s definition is ethnic, while America’s is ideological, and France’s is cultural (though this is a hotly debated issue in France). Moreover, religion is central to the national identity of many nations. Catholicism is intrinsically linked to the national identity of Poland, Ireland, and Italy. Shinto is indissociable from Japan. The Queen of England is both Head of State and Head of the Anglican Church. Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania and Pakistan, are all “Islamic Republics.” Surely, the fact that there is a religious dimension to the Jewish definition of national identity is no exception.
Instead of saying that Judaism does indeed constitute part of Jewish identity and that there is nothing wrong with that, many Israelis feel the need to be apologetic about the religious component of Jewish national identity and therefore suggest redefining this identity in purely secular terms. Such is the essence of Amnon Rubinstein’s recent article in Azure (“The Curious Case of Jewish Democracy,” Azure 41, Summer 2010). He suggests a purely “national-cultural reinterpretation” of Jewish identity.
Though a professed liberal, Rubinstein is suggesting something illiberal: that the state should choose, institutionalize and favor one specific definition of national identity despite the will of many citizens. A true liberal, however, would say that it is not the state’s business to define and impose a definition of its national identity over all its citizens.
Rubinstein, however, has the merit of addressing the core issue: can and should the Jews keep their national identity and rights while abandoning the traditional Jewish definition of nationhood? In the Biblical narrative, Jewish faith is intrinsically connected to Jewish identity and nationhood. Until Emancipation, Jews defined their identity in purely religious terms. Zionism tried to undo that link by redefining Jewish identity based on territory, language, and history. The problem is that it is the non-Jews who won’t take it.
The same way that Jews, as individuals, were not left alone in Europe after assimilating, Israel, as a state, was never left alone when it was established as a secular nation-state. No matter how hard the Jews tried to stop being Jewish in Europe, they were still perceived and reviled as such by the gentiles. And no matter how secular Israel was when it was established, it was opposed by the Vatican and by the Muslim world on religious grounds. Jewish “rationality” won’t rid the world of its irrationality. Even if Israel were to officially declare itself a purely secular nation-state and retreat to the armistice lines of 1949, it would still be reviled and hated (as it was before 1967) by a plethora of zealots –from devout Muslims to leftist Europeans.
This is a point that Rubinstein, with all his brilliance, does not seem to get.
It says in the Book of Deuteronomy: "And among those peoples, you shall not find any rest for the sole of your foot." Rabbi Yitzhak Arama writes in his book Akedat Yitzhak that this verse teaches us that the Jews will never be able to completely assimilate among the nations, and will never be able to forget who they are. No matter how hard Jews try to forget and to be forgotten, the nations will always remind them that they are Jewish. The Midrash (Bereshit Rabah) says there is a connection between the above verse and the one in Genesis describing the return of the dove to Noah's Arch ("And the dove did not find any rest for the sole of her foot, so she came back to the ark").
The Midrash teaches us that we can turn the curse of "There shall be no rest for the sole of your foot" into a blessing. For if the Jews had found a rest for the sole of their foot in Exile, they would never have come back to the Ark, both physically and spiritually.
The Jews came back to the ark physically. Only when they do so spiritually as well will they not only be left alone, but also be respected and admired.
According to the proposed law, naturalized citizens will have to pledge their allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Imagine if France would pass a law stating that France is a French state, if Japan would pass a law stating that Japan is a Japanese state, or if Sweden would pass a law stating that Sweden is a Swedish state. This would sound both silly and unnecessary. Far from being ridiculed for stating the obvious, however, Israel is being taken to task for stating the odious.
When the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended in September 1947 that the British Mandate in Palestine be divided between a Jewish state for the Jews and an Arab state for the Arabs, everyone understood that this meant each nation would have its own nation-state (though many opposed the idea). In May 1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence clearly proclaimed the establishment of a “Jewish state” and specified that this state would both be the nation-state of the Jewish people and respect the civil rights of the country’s non-Jewish minorities.
In recent years, the very legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been under attack. Sophisticated people realize that they cannot logically question the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state without doing the same for every nation-state (indeed, most countries in the world today are nation-states). Hence their claim (itself stated in the PLO charter and recently popularized by Prof. Shlomo Sand), that the Jews do not constitute a nation but only a religion, and thus that a Jewish state is not a nation-state but a religious state. Therefore, its legitimacy can be challenged without questioning the principle of self-determination.
But who are those people to decide whether or not the Jews constitute a nation? Scholars have been debating for at least a couple of centuries about what makes a nation a nation (Ernest Renan called it “a soul, a spiritual principle”). In recent years, many attempts have been made to “deconstruct” the very concept of national identity (Benedict Anderson comes to mind). But the bottom line is that if people define themselves as a nation and are ready to fight in order to preserve their national independence or identity (whether this identity is real or “imagined” as Anderson would put it), then they obviously do constitute a nation.
How people define their national identity is also their own business. Japan’s definition is ethnic, while America’s is ideological, and France’s is cultural (though this is a hotly debated issue in France). Moreover, religion is central to the national identity of many nations. Catholicism is intrinsically linked to the national identity of Poland, Ireland, and Italy. Shinto is indissociable from Japan. The Queen of England is both Head of State and Head of the Anglican Church. Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania and Pakistan, are all “Islamic Republics.” Surely, the fact that there is a religious dimension to the Jewish definition of national identity is no exception.
Instead of saying that Judaism does indeed constitute part of Jewish identity and that there is nothing wrong with that, many Israelis feel the need to be apologetic about the religious component of Jewish national identity and therefore suggest redefining this identity in purely secular terms. Such is the essence of Amnon Rubinstein’s recent article in Azure (“The Curious Case of Jewish Democracy,” Azure 41, Summer 2010). He suggests a purely “national-cultural reinterpretation” of Jewish identity.
Though a professed liberal, Rubinstein is suggesting something illiberal: that the state should choose, institutionalize and favor one specific definition of national identity despite the will of many citizens. A true liberal, however, would say that it is not the state’s business to define and impose a definition of its national identity over all its citizens.
Rubinstein, however, has the merit of addressing the core issue: can and should the Jews keep their national identity and rights while abandoning the traditional Jewish definition of nationhood? In the Biblical narrative, Jewish faith is intrinsically connected to Jewish identity and nationhood. Until Emancipation, Jews defined their identity in purely religious terms. Zionism tried to undo that link by redefining Jewish identity based on territory, language, and history. The problem is that it is the non-Jews who won’t take it.
The same way that Jews, as individuals, were not left alone in Europe after assimilating, Israel, as a state, was never left alone when it was established as a secular nation-state. No matter how hard the Jews tried to stop being Jewish in Europe, they were still perceived and reviled as such by the gentiles. And no matter how secular Israel was when it was established, it was opposed by the Vatican and by the Muslim world on religious grounds. Jewish “rationality” won’t rid the world of its irrationality. Even if Israel were to officially declare itself a purely secular nation-state and retreat to the armistice lines of 1949, it would still be reviled and hated (as it was before 1967) by a plethora of zealots –from devout Muslims to leftist Europeans.
This is a point that Rubinstein, with all his brilliance, does not seem to get.
It says in the Book of Deuteronomy: "And among those peoples, you shall not find any rest for the sole of your foot." Rabbi Yitzhak Arama writes in his book Akedat Yitzhak that this verse teaches us that the Jews will never be able to completely assimilate among the nations, and will never be able to forget who they are. No matter how hard Jews try to forget and to be forgotten, the nations will always remind them that they are Jewish. The Midrash (Bereshit Rabah) says there is a connection between the above verse and the one in Genesis describing the return of the dove to Noah's Arch ("And the dove did not find any rest for the sole of her foot, so she came back to the ark").
The Midrash teaches us that we can turn the curse of "There shall be no rest for the sole of your foot" into a blessing. For if the Jews had found a rest for the sole of their foot in Exile, they would never have come back to the Ark, both physically and spiritually.
The Jews came back to the ark physically. Only when they do so spiritually as well will they not only be left alone, but also be respected and admired.
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