Decades delayed, Rabin’s Oslo vision is coming back to life

Any death ends a single life, but a political assassination ends much more.

From Julius Caesar to Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Tsar Nicholas II, the assassinations of significant leaders have toppled regimes, started wars and enabled revolutions.

November 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

For decades since that terrible night, the prevailing view among the peace camp was that the bullets fired by Amir didn't just kill Rabin, they extinguished the flame of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

I shared that bleak assessment until recently. In the wake of October 7, amid the near-total destruction in Gaza, the relentless settler violence driving West Bank expulsions, and the weekly rocket fire from Iranian proxies, the vision of "two states for two peoples" seemed more like a ghost than a blueprint.

Yet, after two years of devastating conflict, an improbable political shift is finally breathing life back into the core ideas Rabin championed.

A recent 20-point plan, brokered by the White House and supported by an astonishing coalition including Israel, Hamas, and regional powers like Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan has achieved the remarkable. It has not only revived the pragmatic co-existence framework of the Oslo Accords, but also effectively extinguished the maximalist fantasies on both sides.